Music Industry

A Few Thoughts on Music Formats and Music Media

What’s your preferred format of music? CDs? Vinyl? Digital files? Streams? A little bit of each, maybe? And once you start drilling deeper, things get even more complicated. HD/Hi-Res audio. Neil Young’s Pono system. Are you a fan of albums or do you prefer to acquire all your music a la carte? And where are things headed in the future?

These are just some of the questions raised in this article at Marco.org.

If you’re actively using a screen, music competes with everything else that screen can do — and these days, that’s a lot. You’re lucky if people listen to music at all anymore, and the most you can usually hope for is that they have it on in the background while doing some other activity that doesn’t provide its own audio. The most important music-discovery platform in the world is YouTube.So I can see why people in the music business might think it’s important to make and sell interactive, multimedia music formats (what decade is this?) to compete, but I don’t think they stand a chance. Every trend in music is going in the opposite direction.

Continue reading. And for a better look at the history of music formats click on the image below.

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Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 39690 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

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