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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 2000 Goodnight Vienna as MP3 flowers UNTIL very recently the predominant search subjects on the net have been sex and health. Well, now there is a new leader - music. Not just any kind of music - it is compressed MP3 format at about a minute a megabyte - or about 10 per cent of the megabytes for a CD. At trade shows across the planet MP3 players abound: in the pocket, on the belt, in the hand, in your bag, on your PC, integrated into your mobile phone, almost every permutation is heading your way. The first MP3 car radio is on sale in America, with enough capacity for more than 7,000 tracks, and much more is to come. The next generation, MP4, will realise even greater storage capacity and solid state memory is about to take a hike up in capacity and down in price and power consumption. Searching for MP3 sites is now a real challenge, there are so many and they are so transient because most seem to be illegal and get closed down. It is now hard not to be able to find the music you are looking for - it is out there somewhere, believe me. Despite the best efforts of the music industry and copyright lawyers worldwide, music bytes have found freedom. They might as well try to stop a tidal wave with a feather. So far the impact on sales of CDs doesn't seem to be too deep, but no doubt they have always undersold because of piracy, and it is only a matter of time before MP3 starts to make a serious dent in sales. Unfortunately for this old industry there is far worse to come. Imagine the impact of a small MP3 player with a 10mbit/s infrared port. Two people standing hip to hip, or a group sitting across a cafe table having coffee will be able to exchange hours of free listening in less than a minute. So who will be buying CDs and tapes, and who will be making money? Perhaps a few collectors will continue to covet tapes and CDs in the same way some people still collect vinyl records today, but it is clearly a market just waiting to be toppled. The people who are going to make money will be the artists and recording studios who put their material online. And those who sell music along with fashion items as a package with other goods and experiences look set to make the most of all. It will be a market limited by imagination rather than copyright and restrictive practices. What chance encryption will protect an old industry that delighted in tripling the price of music when it made the transition from vinyl disc to CD? Not a lot! Every attempt to encrypt or limit the copying-on of music has so far failed with a software or hardware fix on the net within days of a system being announced. So this looks like pay back time in a big way - and more especially as the production costs for CDs was an order of magnitude less than that for vinyl records. You and I, the consumers, can look forward to a far greater diversity of music at a lower cost than any of us can imagine right now. We will all be able to afford to make our own tracks, put them online, and perhaps even sell them. For the old industry it looks like "Good night Vienna". Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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