hypocrisy
In what concerns the music distribution, we are living in an age of hypocrisy: people only take seriously labels that release albums in cd format, yet a large amount of people only want to listen to such cds in their computer, and buys the cds of their favorite artists only to arrive home and rip them to iTunes.
Releasing in cd format brings respectability, because, specially for the indies, it means effort, commitment and seriousness. Any loser in the net can upload some mp3 to some stupid web 2.0 website, but shelling out a couple of hundred euros to make a pressing, that’s a different business altogether. There is risk involved. Well, I don’t disagree with this, but wether people like it or not, we are moving to the web, and cds will be something of the past, so online-only labels need to start finding ways to increase confidence in the consumer, namely by taking it as seriously to release something online has they did to release something physically. Each single release has to have quality.
And the current indie labels that release only cds, they should start releasing in lossless with high quality pdfs of the artwork, that would go a long way to making people spend money online.
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Apparently it’s not only me that’s saying it, MC Hammer agrees:
”The CD is now the wax album and so it is a collector’s item for people who collect music and love to look at the liner notes and feel paper. I don’t know what would turn them on about having to go through that terrible exercise of trying to open the packaging - it’s unbelievable when you’re trying to open a CD, right? You need a box cutter … it’s a tough deal to get it open. And once you get it open … you go and upload it to your computer,” he says with a hearty laugh.
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