“Soon your CD collection will be obsolete.” – Kevin Greening
Inside tracks examines the potential of the new MP3 music format. Is the future of music going to be online, or will there always be a place for physical media?
Originally broadcast 27 September, 1998.
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I love all the comments about the wonders of physical media whilst they're streaming this, and not watching it on VHS 🤣
Then came along the dreaded Napster , Morpheus , limewire, Kazaa 😎
The day you can't buy music on physical format is the day I will stop buying music. I can't see myself spending real money for music as an MP3. I always buy music on cd as I like to feel I have something for my money. I have over 6000 original CDs and I like how they are on display on my shelves. Also there are a lot of CDs in my collection that are rare and quite valuable.
Times when a website was designed by a 10 year old with Microsoft FrontPage
In 2022 it's as easy as "okay Google play…."
And now a lot of people are going back to cds as streaming just sucks now
At about the same time this video was made I was streaming ShoutCast music in WinAmp, ripping it with StreamRipper and saving to files. 96 Kbps was the norm, better streams used 128 Kbps. It was about the music, not audiophile quality. It still is for me.
Time to listen to the song The Replacements by Art Brut again.
compact discs remain the best way to consume music at home: great audio quality even on inexpensive equipment, compatible with seventy years of both analogue and digital equipment, and most importantly artists actually get paid for their work (at least on indie labels), unlike streaming which has decimated the economy for working musicians (only superstars earn money from streaming, everyone else gets pennies or nothing). CDs can be ripped to a hard drive to enjoy all the benfits of digital files while maintaining the CD as a long-term backup solution (do you really think that digital file on your hard disc will be readable in twenty years ?). finally, streaming services have terrible audio quality and often only the bad-sounding (re: loudness war) remastered versions of albums
And I rarely have a need for MP3s these days. Usually, I just find the song I want on YouTube (of all places, YouTube!) – but then again, I'm not really interested in 'hot new releases'. It's usually video game music or me asking Google about that one song from that one movie that I don't even remember the artist but a single lyric line can get me exactly where I need to go.
Vinyl and CD are still alive though. Even some electronic tracks are still exclusive to wax.
When you made a copy of the original so you always had a backup at home (no hard drive needed)
With 56 kbps modems, when one song used to take from 30 min to one night to download. In some ways my heart miss those days, but my brain doesn't.
I'd never pay for a lossy format. Lossless or I'm pirating it.
With streaming, where you don't own a copy of the song, vinyl is the best way to own it in terms of quality of sound and product. CDs have a shelf life, as does digital. Hurrah for the return of Vinyl.
I still prefer having a compact disc collection and a Spotify subscription for the things I can’t yet buy 😊
Physical LIVES have become obsolete.
Streaming took over
30 odd minutes to download one song if things went well. Also you had a choice of about 10 songs and only what ever was there not what you actually wanted. That’s why MIDI files was better at the time
The irony of watching this on YouTube
I want to support artists (and do however I can) but I don't miss paying Our Price £15.99 for a CD album
No.
You will own nothing and you will be happy
So as early as 1998 the writing was already on the wall, but instead of coming to grips with the new situation, the music industry was fast asleep and stolidly holding on to the physical medium as if nothing would ever change. The guy from the Fraunhofer institute who developed the mp3 codec had warned the RIAA that this would happen, but they just couldn't be arsed. Fast forward a few years later, and Napster and filesharing networks were eating away their profits, and not just that, but lo and behold, hard drives increased their sizes, computers increased their performance and the Internet accelerated so much that by then, you weren't just able to download entire albums, but even entire films within a few minutes. Aw shucks, who'd think that would ever happen?! But instead of blaming themselves, they responded by showering people with lawsuits, exploiting back catalogues, breeding one instant talent show superstar after another with the shelf life of a raw egg and dropping bands as soon as their first record didn't shift enough units instead of giving them time to develop. The repercussions of that are still being felt today and the industry never really recovered from that.
I love tech videos especially from the 80s and 90s, that's when things got exciting
I find it baffling as to how the CD is still a thing. Why do people buy music CD's nowadays? I got online in 2007, and I haven't bought so much as one CD ever since. I listen to all my music on YouTube. It's free, it's on demand. And converting it to a downloadable MP3 is a doddle. Maybe unethical, but I don't remember morality stopping people from copying tapes back in the day.
5:40 "I'm not sure people are going to want to have a list as their record collection"
This guy could not have been more wrong lol, playlists are how new music gets discovered these days
“Soon your CD collection will be obsolete. And your video game cartridges. And your paper game manuals. And all your paper books. Vinyl record style, however, will have you ironically punching yourself for getting rid of them in 1990. Along with your VCRs 10 years later so that you can no longer watch your home movies, dance recitals, and wedding ceremony.”
We got the spice girls on channel 3
Yes. It will. Until a load of troglodytes decided that vinyl is actually AMAZING (man).
2:20 we can only hope this “dude” realised he was named after toilet cleaner and rectified this.
SOME PEOPLE WHO LOVE THUMBS DOWN BELIEVE THUMBS DOWN IS GOOD IDEA. SOME PEOPLE WHO HATE THUMBS DOWN BELIEVE THUMBS DOWN IS BAD IDEA.
SOME PEOPLE WHO LOVE BEING OBSESSED WITH FEMALES BELIEVE BEING OBSESSED WITH FEMALES IS GOOD IDEA. SOME PEOPLE WHO HATE PEOPLE BEING OBSESSED WITH FEMALES BELIEVE PEOPLE BEING OBSESSED WITH FEMALES IS BAD IDEA.
SOME PEOPLE WHO LOVE PERSON STEALING GOLD BELIEVE PERSON STEALING GOLD IS GOOD IDEA. SOME PEOPLE WHO HATE PERSON STEALING GOLD BELIEVE PERSON STEALING GOLD IS BAD IDEA.
When this was being broadcast I thought I was seriously ahead of the times buying a Minidisc player, just ten years later it was as quaint and obsolete as betamax.
This is pretty on the button. Hard to disagree with any of the predictions…love the last line 🤣
What is the song playing from 2:09 to 2:20, played again at 3:23 to 3:34?
Will never catch on
Alice hasn't been outside of London has she? There is London, and then there is outside it, like rural areas, which aren't likely to have a big record shop, but are expected to have high-speed Internet. In 1998? Broadband in the UK didn't start appearing until 2000-2001, and many rural areas still don't have it some 20+ years later.
Surprise! No.
i think i had a 550 mb harddrive on the pc i bought in 1997. Most of my harddrive was full of mp3s but i liked i could access loads of my music without hunting down the individual cds.
Funny how the record companies are still exploiting artists via streaming giving pennies
The record industry was just too slow to monetise it properly and make it accessible. It wasn't until iTunes came out that there was really a central place to go get whatever song yu wanted. They were beaten by things such as napster. Having the music on your computer at the time to me was no different to recording it off the radio. The mp3 file alone seemed to have no value. If you really liked it, you'd still go and get the album / cd for your collection and for a few years I still did that. Most MP3s I had I wouldn't have bought the CD anyway.
In a paralell world if say iTunes or similar was launched earlier than free downloads. It would have been like, "OMG i can get any song I want for £1 and I don't have to get the bus into town to get a CD!". Then I think my generation would have grown up feeling there was a value to digital media.
well, they weren't wrong
I like that he was concerned about the new millennium coming. Just wait for 2020 when things really go down hill.
The great Kev Greening. Still sadly missed.
I’m begging you, stop blowing this up to widescreen. Preserve the original image.
Back when the Internet was called the "worldwide web" 😂
those old websites are crazy, won't see anything like that these days. i miss the old internet