So I ripped my CD of Crosby, Stills & Nash's eponymous debut album onto Rhythmbox. I only bought it recently as an audio accompaniment to Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California.
After I ripped it, I checked the default medium: OGG at 160kbs. In other words, as cruddy as an iTunes download (and only half as good as their "premier" range). That's no good - so I chose the FLAC format which was on offer and started again. FLAC is lossless and it can't hold DRM. It's the future (partly because Apple are starting to get behind it so they can sell their largest disk-size ipods) and it might even mean the end of the past.
How many times have Atlantic got the same person to buy the CSN album? Let's say you were 16 when the album came out in 1969. You bought the album and played it to death at home and at friends. You couldn't do without it even when your mum drove you around, so you bought it on compact cassette too. When you got your first car of your own it had a Stereo-8 machine in it. So you bought one in that format too.
The cassette knackered after a while from over playing, but that's okay because you'd bought a music centre with one of your first pay cheques when you graduated from college, and taped it from the (now crackly) record to play on your brand new walkman. This was your first and not last foray into the murky world of piracy.
You looked for the prerecorded MiniDisc version for your new player in 1993, but couldn't find one (glad you chose this over the Phillips Digital Compact Cassette you considered), so you plugged a phono to jack into the back of your brand new CD player and recorded your album (not the vinyl, which was now almost unlistenable, since someone told you that you could clean your vinyl with acetone, but the CD which you bought when it was re-released in 1992) onto your minidisc player.
When you got an iPod for Christmas 2001 you burned the CD onto it. But it sounded much worse than the minidisc version. Even though there was ATRAC compression on the minidisc, the combination of the low bit-rate and crappy iPod headphones thinned out Graham, Steven and David's tonsils a little. When you bought the album on iTunes in 2006 (on a whim - because you could) it didn't sound any better.
So will your FLAC version (when Apple start selling them - and when all the rest follow) be the last time you pay money for Suite: Judy Blue Eyes? And if the companies run out of old records to resell in new formats, will they have to start investing in A&R again, and signing and recording new artists?
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