The Digitalization of Music

Yeah,

Phil Sherburne had an interesting line on that with a reading from 'The Language of New Media'.

Here's a quick thought:

Vinyl offers a spiritual connection inherent to the listening process; CDs, disc changers, and other "mass" mediums dilute the overall impact.

I agree roughly with the way you differentiate the listening experience, but not the negative characterization.

a) all the work is done for you; sometimes I don't want to choose my own track order, or figure out which tracks to skip; I just want to be immersed in someone's aesthetic vision

b) it has the same virtues of though-out sequencing as a good mixtape; one song is supposed to follow the next in a certain order because they work that way

c) it's concise; really, how many people can sustain for 70 straight minutes? Not nearly as many as can manage 35 or so (or to reference the reason for CD running times, not everything is Beethoven's Ninth)

What is the narrow question/hypothesis of your thesis?

Is it just the medium itself..or the way that medium gives an opportunity to be distributed more easily..

There will always be audiophiles and purists with their vinyl collection.

Will there be blipheads digging through bins and crates of "obselete" CD's in the next decades?

Will "sampling" be open game with the proliferation of inexpensive digital reproduction? Will the intellectual property lawyers have too much to handle?

Are you talking here about domestic hi-fi or guitar amps? Part of the context of this discussion is home audio, but the word 'played' threw me. Just wondering.

Run away: it's a trap!

Hell, I'm doing it now!

in terms of the first two issues, i don't see them particularly well defined as seperate entities. culturally, i think you will find the most interesting area to be the social interfaces that are developed among people in order to facilitate and describe file-exchanges. something like napster, in itself, is uninteresting because there's no social interaction. what's interesting is that after say, a middle school child downloads something that they couldn't get through normal mass media (the radio or television) what does he do with it, how does he share it with the children around him? does it give him a social status, is there a social impetus to continue exploring, or do children who explore varied realms of music do so entirely from a personal love of sound?

(an interesting correlation is Henry Jenkin's favorite example of the social function of single player video games: that children gain social status by their purported abilities, and that they bring common experiences from their solitary gaming into a multi-person context through surprisingly mundane means)

maybe i'm wandering off on some tangents now, i can't think very well with such a small box of text.

not sure what your point is here... imax is expensive as fuck to shoot and has very few venues for distribution. digitalization (film or music) is precisely the reverse.