Mark Cuban takes on an issue close to my heart - the music industry. More specifically, Mark Cuban thinks that MP3s have the potential to replace CDs. And whilst I do not profess to be anywhere near as business savvy or as rich as he is, I do think he is wrong on this issue.
And I'm not just saying that because the Spurs lost to the Mavericks by nearly 40 points last night...
Allow me to quote at length:
"So I'm on the Mavs latest roadtrip. I'm walking through a mall with my Ipod cranking away. I had already decided that I wanted to pick up the soundtrack to KillBill to get the Woohoo song from the 5678s. Then I realized, I didnt have a way to deal with a CD.
My laptop I carry doesn't need a dvd or cd player because I carry everything important on an external hard drive that I just connect to my desktop or laptop.[...]
I realize that I could have gone to Itunes and just gotten that 1 song, but it doesn't sit right with me to be limited on how and where I can use music I download. I realize I could go online and download the song for free, but I won't do that. That's stealing. It's wrong.[...]
We carry our library in our MP3 players. We don't listen to CDs. We listen to playlists that we adjust all the time. We don't burn CDs anymore, it's too time consuming. We copy all our music to our MP3 players so it's all available at our fingertips."
(Emphasis mine.)
A lot of what Cuban says makes a lot of sense on the surface, but the lynchpin to his argument is - to my mind, at least - flawed. And from what I can tell it is this - MP3s are convenient, the overhead costs are non-existent and that with the backlash against the ludicrous overpricing of CDs, they are the future of the industry.
The moral question of whether downloading music is really "stealing" aside, the only reason MP3s and MP3 players have taken off the way they have is because the medium already has hundreds, if not thousands, of albums and songs floating around the Internets for free. The only reason the market is there for MP3 players - especially the achingly-trendy iPod - is because of Napster, Kazaa, Soulseek, Grokster etc. etc. etc. That fact is undeniable.
Cuban says he wanted to have a copy of a record for his MP3 player and that, because he is the only person in the world I have ever heard of who does not have a CD-ROM drive in his laptop and instead carries a detachable hard-drive around (how fucking ridiculous does that sound? Why does he have to go back to his desktop to utilise CDs? What if he wants to burn something from his laptop? The mind boggles) and that he is morally opposed to stealing music he is inconvenienced by this. That's a fair enough argument.
However, I don't believe that pure digital mediums of storage are going to become the future for these reasons:
-Stuff crashes, batteries die, iPods get dropped. Things break. Storing stuff on hard drives is risky. And if everything you bought is on that medium, you are fucked. The hassle of validating claims of "lost" or "accidentally deleted" downloads for the company offering them is a logistical nightmare. With CDs, you just show the damaged disc and your receipt and you get a new copy. Imagine that instead of returning a damaged album you have to go back to the store with 10,000 receipts and 10,000 individual songs on CD. Yeah, I think so too.
-People aren't bright. Owning records is easy. It requires no technological know-how. My grandparents can operate a CD player. If I asked them to transfer songs from my iPod and burn them to a CD their faces would resemble a deer stuck in the oncoming lights of a freight train. Hell, even I'm still figuring out the technology.
-This is a minor point but still important to an indie kid like myself, and why many bands will resist such a transition - the conceptual artwork is as much a part of the product as the music itself. For a lot of major label pop acts (think Ashlee Simpson or any boy band) their record sleeves just have pictures of them on it. The packaging for these artists is superfluous at best and these kinds of things would probably make the transition to the sterile world of MP3 downloads easily because their real "packaging" is all the promo crap they do. "Real" bands (I use the term ironically, chill out) put as much thought into their artwork and presentation as they do their music. Having a printable copy won't cut it for them. Have you seen what printed digital photos look like? Crap, mostly. Even "professionally" printed ones look washed out in comparison (well, the ones from the Walmart and CostCo kiosks - which is in itself an important point) compared to transfer from negatives. MP3s are a promotional tool to buy the record, not a substitute.
-The main reason that I can think of that CDs replaced vinyl and DVDs are replacing VHS as the favourite mediums for their respective industries is this: sound quality. CDs - to most people at least - arguably sound better than vinyl. DVDs sounds and look better than VHS. MP3 offers no significant advancement in this field.
He closes with this:
"If I'm an indie record store, I'm making sure that all music from the labels you support is available for direct to player. I'm offering every song as Ipod or MP3 player ready to anyone who walks in the door with their Ipod and wants to leave listening to the music."
But where is the convenience here? You could easily walk in with a CD player and do much the same thing! That said, if I want a great gimmick, why not offer BOTH? Include the download to the iPod in the cost of the CD (overheads = nil and, as Cuban admits, the RIAA has already said that copying CDs you own to MP3 for personl use is not illegal). That would be badass. Admittedly, it would be kind of redundant and there's no incentive to expend the capital to set something like that up.
But he does have one really great idea:
"Until then, if Im a band selling on my own, I'm carrying a laptop to every show, and charging 5 bucks to drop a show on an IPod. Call it concertpodding."
That seems like the best solution to me - make MP3s of stuff you CAN'T get on CD. The kind of stuff die-hard music fans would love to get but won't get released for one reason or another. A lot of bands already authorise taping of their shows and the sharing of these files, but imagine how cool it would be to not have to wait an indefinite period of time for a recording of unknown quality.
In my opnion, MP3s make a great companion to the CD. But I can't see them making the format obsolete.