Monday, October 22, 2007

is iPod killing music sales?

The Inquirer has an interesting article about iPod killing industry. Although I did own a Walkman back in a day I can not agree with with writers opinion that Walkmans were so much better devices, even though he raises some good points.
One of which is:
"Sure, you could store a zillion albums on it, but you never will. Firstly you only possess a copy of Queen's Greatest Hits, The Best of Steps and James Blunt's Bluntastic! What are you going to store on the remaining 39.5GB of space?
Well. It's going to be stolen music, isn't it?"
Even though it has nothing to do with Walkman around which most of the article is based - this I believe is the best point he makes. Going by the estimates of my music collection an average album takes 75MB on my hard drive. so on an 80GB iPod or Zune you will be able to store round 1000 albums! That is very big number and if you bought 1 album a week it would take almost 20 years to get that kind of collection... legally at least.
Yes you might argue that large storage space can now be used for movies which have even less of a legal presence in digital market, or general storage or file transfers.
And even if you plan to use it as storage, what will you store on it? Sure it will be more media of some kind.
So in the end we have large amounts of storage on these devices with an urge to fill it up as soon as possible and for most people only way to do so is by illegal downloads that are easily available that legal options will have hard time catching up and competing with price.
On a little side note, iTunes Plus songs now going at same rate as normal ones should have come long time ago, not so much for DRM - free media but for being better quality and larger file sizes to help fill up those iPods with legal music and leave less room for P2P stuff...

1 comment:

Van Mardian said...

Hard drives aren't exclusive to iPods. I do most of my listening at home, or in the car (on CD).