[Deepwaters]

Originally Posted by lefty12357

@Deep, it looks like we are just going to have to agree to disagree on the value of embodying a musical performance in a physical object.

You cannot "agree to disagree" about objective, verifiable facts. I am not talking about my taste versus yours, I am talking about the results of a marketing decision in sales and impact on the market. It is a fact -- objective and verifiable and not something that can be reasonably disagreed about -- that the chief medium of music transmission today is the digital download and no longer the CD. You may or may not LIKE that fact, but it remains a fact nonetheless.

It's just that the digital download will not have a very long life stored on magnetic media.

I have no idea what you're talking about here. Stored on hard drive, it will have as long a life as the hard drive itself, and can be copied to another drive with no loss of quality. That's the main advantage of digital over analog recording. (Of course, analog also has advantages, but there's no reason why they can't coexist on the market.)

I wonder where our ones and zeros will be even 100 years from now if they are all stored on hard drives and ipods? It's something I hope the archivists of the world are dealing with.

I imagine they are, but I'll tell you this: digital storage is a LOT more reliable than storage in print for the written word. I'm sure it is for film and music, too. With digital storage, there is no such thing as a book being "out of print," and, barring a collapse of civilization, it becomes literally impossible to lose. Except for books that have become classics, can we obtain copies of anything from the 19th century? Not with any reliability, but 21st century reading material will be available thousands of years from now in its entirety. The problem will not be preserving it but sifting through the abundance to find what you're looking for.

Movies, too. Consider the condition of old films today from the early 20th century. Film wears out and degrades over time. Analog copies made of old masters lose some of the resolution. Digital copies, though, last essentially forever. True, any one storage medium, one hard drive or DVD, will not, but the fact that perfect copies can be made makes any film immortal once it's been published. The same logic applies to music.

The only way that more primitive means of storage have a survivability advantage is if we do have a breakdown of civilization, because digital storage depends on such things as electricity. But then, so does all music production more sophisticated than the live-performance acoustic band.

As far as leaks go, time is needed to arrange all the promo, TV and radio appearances, print media, etc. to coincide with the album release.

W/r/t piracy, I don't think that's true. It's just a habit on the part of the record companies holding over from the days of the CD. Since there is no cost at all to deliver a copy of a song by download or to store it, there is no reason whatever why it can't be released as early as it is available in final form, before any promotion is done. If it sits there in storage for two or three weeks before the word gets out, what of it? That doesn't cost anything, but those who are motivated to look for it before the promo comes out will be able to do so on legitimate channels, rather than on pirate ones. (Those who don't know about it, of course, won't look for it from either legitimate OR illegitimate sources.)

The only reason why in the past it was thought that promotion had to be done before release is because the release itself cost money, and every day CDs sit unsold in warehouses or record stores also costs money. So you needed to get the sales rolling as soon as the realease happened, to minimize the cost of storage and to front-load revenues. With downloads, none of that logic applies.

I honestly don't think there is a way to avoid leaks unless you release it with most of the promo lagging behind. Even then, a significant number of people will have already had access to the music in order to ready it for release. I don't think leaks are easily preventable in any case.

But as I said, there's no reason not to release it with most of the promo lagging behind, and there is also no reason to be concerned about leaks if it is instantly available from legitimate sources for a low price. It's not a question of preventing leaks, but of undercutting any damage that leaks might do. I agree, you can't stop the leaks, but if you get the product out into the market immediately instead of waiting, you won't have to.

Good news from Amazon. I'll be adding to that myself this weekend.