U.S. Digital Music Sales Plateau in First Half of 2010

[spillproof]

You mean to tell me J Biebs has failed to keep the industry alive!?

 

[Hal Itosis]

I made the mistake of buying my one and only album off iTunes several years ago and it turned out to be a whopping 128kbps bit rate. Are you joking Apple. I paid $9.99 for that bs and without any advanced warning of it's low quality. Never again...

BS. It was well known at that time (before April 2007) that the downloads were 128 kbps... and then (in April 2007) they went to 256, which was also well publicized. If you [somehow] didn't know those basic particulars, then that's your fault. [no doubt those very specs were also the subject of much discussion/debate on the web at the time.] "Advanced warning" my Aunt Fanny. So, you didn't even listen to any of the 30-second samples huh???

Nice try.

I guess you don't party much either. The only way to tell "lossless" from m4a is to put on headphones and lock yourself in a closet and do repetitive back-and-forth A-B comparisons ad infiitum. <yawn>. Under normal listening conditions, ambient noise masks most discernible differences.

[anyway, what's most crucial is the original recording setup (microphone quality, mic placement {to avoid phase cancellations}, etc., etc.) I've heard CDs which sounded like poop... but yet some mp3s that sounded incredibly good.]

 

[cheesymogul]

Oh my God, the comeback of vinyl records is killing iTunes!

 

[rhett7660]

I only buy cds and I burn them to iTunes. Then I stick them in a binder. I use apple lossless. Sure it takes more disk space... but it also gives me more listening pleasure. Until Apple offers a lossless format instead of 256kb I'll continue to buy cds.

Fixed. I agree. This is what I do. However I do buy a song here or there either from iTunes or Amazon.com

When I was your age we had to walk up hill to the music store. Both ways!

In the snow!!!!!!

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

My sentiments exactly. Storage limitations nowadays allow most of us to store entire music collections in lossless format, why should we buy anything less? Why cripple my Apple quality with a lossy audio format?

I'm sorry, but this line of talk is just absurd. Show me ONE SINGLE DOUBLE BLIND TEST that shows that ANYONE can hear a difference between 256 AAC and lossless. Just one. I spent years around "golden ear audiophiles" and eventually I realized most of them were audiophools for buying every single snake oil product known to man that cost that made the salesmen rich and did NOTHING. I remember when painting the edges of CDs with a green pen was popular and was supposed to somehow reduce jitter. LOL. I want PROOF there's a reason to do something these days, not conjecture based on false pretenses.

FYI, I've got $2000 ribbon speakers (whose ribbons were used in $20,000 pair Genesis II speakers) and a custom crossover with 750 watts per channel of clean power in my living room and I CANNOT hear a difference between 256 AAC and Apple Lossless on some of the best recordings I own. It was after much testing that I decided I no longer wanted to use lossless in my main library. I keep my CDs backed up as lossless (in case I need an exact duplicate replacement if a CD was damaged or lost), but I use AAC and even some MP3s in my primary library since it's much easier to use with iPods, cars, etc. and I could not hear a difference in even the most detailed sections of songs that I used for speaker testing.