I started reading a what looks like an interesting blog post from Jack Schofield, but frustratingly I can’t get the “read more” bit to work. (I’m on 3G at the moment, and Orange have a rotten habit of fiddling with the HTML documents to insert their own “helpful” Javascript which inevitably breaks all sorts of things). Maybe you’ll have more luck than me?
What drew my eye was the opening statement : “From portable MP3 players and DAB radio to mobile phones, selling a higher-quality audio format to consumers who don’t seem to care was never going to be easy.”
Well, that’s a truth. Individually, we might not appreciate it. Personally, I might to choose to rip my own audio using FLAC and OGG at very high bitrates. But I’m in the minority. A very small minority. I don’t impose my views on others, in the same way that I don’t appreciate religious evangelists telling me that I’m going to hell unless I change my ways.
If the majority of consumers appreciated high quality audio, MP3 would not exist, there would be no file-sharing, iTunes and iPod would be dead in the water. If they appreciated decent quality video, Freeview would not have sold millions and millions of receivers. But the reality of the world tells us otherwise.
(Update @ 21:02 – have now been able to read the post, and it ends by conceding that “we have become the audio version of a fast food nation, consuming low-quality music on the run”. It feels a bit like a gourmet bemoaning the existence of McDonalds).