DISQUS

Seems to me most people favor convenience over quality. Cassette tapes were more convenient then big old rolls of tape and a walkman was more portable then a Revox. But quality suffered. MP3's or any other compressed format is generally worse then a CD but an iPod is so much more convenient then lugging around 1,000 CDs and given some effort/caution it can sound pretty ok. As much as I like the convenience, I agree with Neil that quality has been neglected but I also understand that I'm part of a minority.

Regarding not hearing a difference between a CD and highly compressed audio, I think people in general tend to listen to the song, not the sound. That's totally fine but the individual instruments and voices all have a story to tell too. It's like reading between the lines. Looking at a picture instead of the words. If you redirect your focus for a moment and really listen to what is (or should be) available, it can get pretty hard to hear the song again. Maybe ignorance really is bliss? Some manufactures sure bet on it!

Ddonat, you are definitely right about the quality of current meta data services (and I have looked most of them indetail). However, the fact that most labels or content aggregators push their tracks to digital outlets provides some relief since their "feeds" tends to be (or at least gravitate towards) quite similar (iTunes) and not too hard to handle. There are not that many providers making up the majority of (and most popular) tracks either. A set ID and all other things we wish for would obviously be great but you'd still have plenty of issues with name collisions (given the size of the long tail) and classification (subjective for sure and iTunes has too few). Tagging, rating, recommendations, various tools, etc helps in terms of exploration/navigation but I expect this to be more or less messy. A service that gives the originator (being an artist/label/aggregator or whatever) the opportunity to control their meta data would be great. But depending on the product/service, some repackaging is likely needed anyhow to provide a decent user experience.

Not a bad idea Fred. I've actually worked on it for almost 3 years and have a decent infrastructure and applications to do it but the problem is, none of the VCs I've met so far (including many big names) fully get this or dare to go there. With DRM mostly off the table things are looking brighter but the major labels are still not playing unless you pay them up front, hand over a generous amount of equity, pay per stream fees and accept all kinds of insane usage restrictions. I could go on and on about this but I'll spare you the details. Technically it can be done for a few million dollars but it takes very deep pockets to "prime" the system with the content the users want. You can get all the independent content you want but that doesn't work particularly well neither for subscription nor ad-supported models. If you already have the audience and enough cash, this is definitely doable, but for a small startup it's just too big. Especially if you are not willing to break the law to get the audience.

Chris, based on your posts I suspect you are a much better problem solver then you give yourself credit for. Like Glenda, I think it's about perspective and to do anything worthwhile, even to decide what to go for in the first place, you have to change perspective many times throughout the process. And, personally I think there are a lot more perspectives then two.

Personally, I'm pretty upset by this (and similar efforts) and it goes on and on and on. Here's one of many posts from a friend that have followed this closely for over 10 years: http://www.mediafuturist.com/2008/02/welcome-to...

A pdf would be great! Thanks.