RSSFinally a compelling reason to buy music digitally
Aug 18
I’m old-school in that I still like purchasing a physical CD rather than downloading music. Here’s an interesting new take on the decision: The Carbon Case for Downloading Music
I don’t know if this will sway me by itself, but it’s an additional reason to switch.
Aug 25, 2009 @ 08:24:08
Well, obviously anything you transport 1000 km by diesel truck is going to produce carbon. The same applies to apples, aspirin and pretty much anything you find in stores. You can buy locally grown apples. It’s not as easy to buy locally made jewel cases. They could switch to cardboard sleeves instead of plastic cases, but they’d still have all the other overhead mentioned in the article.
I’m sorry, Neil, but the real factor that will force you to switch to digital music is how long physical media will even be an option!
Having to build a single disc drive bay, much less a multi-disc turn-table, into a device is unnecessarily bulky, expensive and failure prone compared to a stick of flash memory and a USB port.
Your physical media may last a long time (some optimistic estimates say 200 years) but there won’t be any devices to play them in. You’ll end up buying the same albums again in some newer format. Digital media is a lot more vulnerable to failures and corruption, but it can also be re-encoded over and over into newer formats.
If only there were some micro-payment system whereby you could support artists and buy digital music online… Oh wait, there is! iTunes!
Face your tech-phobia, Neil. The fact that there hasn’t been a new physical audio format since the CD, while Bluray and HDDVD were waging war to replace the DVD for video, should be a tip-off. There isn’t going to be one. It’s all digital from here on out.