Digital-only Releases C or D? (nuance appreciated)

The services that supply tons of stuff for a monthly fee have to get the content from somewhere. The labels will still serve a purpose there.

OTM... I think I said in another thread, I live in NY and have been paying like $1000 per month for like 20 years to house all my CDs, records and yes tapes. I am thinking about moving and NOW all the stuff isn't worth half of what it might have been if I had ebayed it just a few years ago.

My worry with regard to this thread is principally the people who will get taken advantage of by this model, not the inevitability of the process itself.

But what I am getting is that Digital-Only releases are CLASSIC, yes?

That is very interesting I think.

i agree with dan that super hi-def files will eventually be fed into our brains like air and water. but i don't weep for the world's weirdo audiophiles now, and i won't weep for them then. normal people always have, and always will, choose convenience over fidelity. this explains 8-track tapes and the walkman and the ipod and pretty much every other form of dominant listening formats ever. and getting music is in fact getting more convenient and easy every day. i cheer for this.

Merge had the best thing, sell vinyl and include a CD-r. Even better, sell vinyl and include a code for DL or something. A lot of my friend's labels are talking about doing limited edition vinyl and download only.

I agree that it will be digital-only sooner rather than later

the two things I worry about are --
1) future format incompatibility
2) hard drive crashes

I mean, I back my shit up, but still.

There is a debate that will rage regarding whether you want to have all the files yourself, or have them streamed. Being in various digital media industries, it's something that comes up. I can see a point where my entire music collection isn't even in my house, it's on several servers owned by some huge company who can afford both the security and redundancy to have my media on their hard-drives in some fire-proof, weather-proof building somewhere. Think about it, I already do it with my email. The chances of Yahoo losing my email are probably a lot less then losing it myself when my harddrive fails.

This all depends on bandwidth, of course. Untill it's good enough, the benefit of having the media in your house is the ability to use it when you want and not wait for it.

How does the digital sell for them at shows?

I know a certain artist on a certain very famous label that was the largest single distributor of their records, selling 1200 of them for the famous label in question. This particular artist was buying them for $8 each too, so the label was making a huge profit!

I find that very depressing too...

Is anyone still going to be reading this? (Is this thing on?) Is there a way to go "nu" on this thread?