|
The digital revolution that's rocking the music industry pushed new frontiers in 2005. Sales of digital music players soared as consumers' appetite for online music reached unprecedented heights.
"We are just at the beginning of the digital age," says Kurt
Beyer, president of Riptopia,
a service that converts CDs into digital files for consumers. "Only
4 percent of music sold today is in digital form. It may seem like
iPods are everywhere, but they've penetrated only 9 percent of the
market."
Most consumers still purchase their music at the
mall in the form of CDs, rather than downloading it from the Web.
And, of course, you can load the music from your CDs onto your computer
and then onto the digital music player of your choice.
But it gets more complicated if you decide to buy music online.
As new types of digital music players, also known
as MP3 players, are introduced and digital music services proliferate,
consumers grow increasingly perplexed about the basic issues involved
in listening to digital music: which players work with which services,
whether to buy songs or subscribe to a music service, and whether
free music should have a place on their play lists.
"It's a very similar decision to what type of cell-phone service
to sign up for," says Steve Kovsky, digital TV analyst for Current
Analysis, a technology-consulting firm. "It is a confusing scenario,
especially since some music labels have closer relationships to
some services than others, and before you sign up with a service
you want to make sure that they offer a lot of the types of music
you like."
The ABCs of digital music
Digital music is a file of sounds, just like documents are files of words. There are a number of formats that compress music into files that can be listened to on your computer, MP3 player, cell phone or other devices as tech companies battle it out for format dominance.
The most common technologies for formatting digital music are:
- MP3, or Moving Pictures Expert Group I audio layer
3: the most common form for music-sharing files that consumers
swap over the Internet.
- WMA, or Windows media audio: the most widely supported
format, which is a Microsoft technology.
- AAC, or advanced audio codec: the format supported
by Apple in its pioneering iTunes music store and used by its
iPod music players.
- ATRAC, or adaptive transform acoustic coding: a
format used solely by Sony products.
While it would make sense for all MP3 players to support all
types of file formats, that isn't the case, because the company
behind each type of technology wants to control the market and force
everyone else to march to its tune. So, while 80 percent of all
MP3 players purchased by consumers are one type of iPod or another,
you can only buy songs for your iPod at iTunes, although Apple allows
you to convert WMA files to AAC files, according to Sam Bhavnani,
principal mobile electronics and computing analyst with Current
Analysis.
The formats are basically different versions of digital rights management, he says. Digital rights management is the coding in a song that allows you to listen to it on a variety of devices.
|
