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Is This Digital Music's Future? |
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Thursday, 02 June 2005 |
Is This Digital Music's Future?
BusinessWeek
Startup MusicGiants is offering downloads of CD quality. Industry watchers agree
there's a market -- but just how big is another question
When it comes to the red-hot online music business, a lot of the focus has been
on how we'll get our music: whether we'll buy songs from a download site such as
Apple's (APPL ) iTunes music store, or rent it from subscription services that
let you listen to almost anything so long as you keep paying the bill, a la
Napster (NAPS ) or Real Network's (RNWK ) Rhapsody service.
But there's another question that is going to become an important issue for an
increasing percentage of consumers: Namely, what will the sound quality of this
music be? Today, songs pulled off the Net are skimpy facsimiles of the ones you
get on a CD. They are highly compressed -- stripped of millions of digital bits
that leave them with about one tenth of the data found on a CD track (that's
assuming the typical "bit rate" of 128 kilobits-per-second). You can transfer
the files fast, but the sacrifice is sound quality.
CD QUALITY. That's fine for now, since most people listen to digital music on
their PCs or MP3 players -- devices normally used with cheap speakers that mask
any sound quality deficiencies. And compression has played a vital role in the
development of the market so far. It's the magic that makes iPod-mania possible,
by enabling even tiny devices with limited storage to carry thousands of songs.
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