> How will the music industry business model change with high resolution downloads?

What has the resolution got to do with anything?

> make as many copies as they like to send to friends, or perhaps even sell on the black market, how
> will the music industry sustain itself?

That would normally be illegal.

> Won't artists and recording producers simply stop making new music albums if the profit margin becomes
> to small to make a fair profit?

What is a fair profit? Were the profits being made 20-30 years ago fair?

Some of us hope that a lot of mainstream commercial music does stop being manufactured.

> I also don't think they're going to spend significant sums of money producing albums only to promote
> concerts.

Have you looked at the numbers?

> And I doubt a group of musicians would expend significant effort and money to produce an album for
> direct distribution that has the potential of being copied rather than paid for?

What does significant mean? Making reasonable quality recordings and putting them on the internet can be done for very modest costs these days compared to 30 years ago. Top quality recordings are going to cost a bit more but musicians can enter the market for modest costs.

Many of the pieces of music I enjoy most are poor to modest quality recordings.

Personally I think that their business model sucks. I'm also sick and tired of always hearing that it's the illegal file sharers fault for the mess that the music business now finds itself in. Bull: so far the music industry has two formats, one analog and one digital, which have very good copy protection. For analog there is the vinyl record and for digital there is the SACD.

But what format does the music business choose to use? That's right the CD with it's laughable copy protection. And making something illegal means absolutely nothing unless there is the willingness to put teeth into the law. For example, driving while texting is illegal in many states but people still do it all the time since there is virtually no enforcement. The same is true for the "illegal" sharing of copyrighted material, only the laws against this sharing are even more unenforceable since much of the activity takes place across international borders and copyright laws differ from country to country.

If the music industry really wants to protect itself from illegal file sharing then it should only issue recordings as either vinyl LPs or single layer SACDs but that's not going to happen. If and when the music industry, as we know it today, finally dies it will have one of the most dry eyed funerals in history. Or to put it another way, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Whatever opinion you have about the credibility of the music industry, if music downloads replace physical media as most people are predicting, new music recordings will likely cease being produced without a realistic revenue stream.
I'd be willing to use any reasonable system that would ensure most high resolution music is available.
NetFlix is using "streaming" for many films which must use a similar bandwidth. I use that service but have found at times it results in re-buffering interruptions which are irritating.
Rather than "streaming" each time you wish to listen perhaps the music industry could develop a method of allowing users to buy a play back license that would accompany the high resolution download but couldn't be copied. The license file would have to accompany the music file on each client server to allow playback. There would have to be some reliable online central respository of these license files to facilitate backup and moving your music to a new server while invalidating the old license file so the music file can only reside in one place.
In the 21st century there must be someway for technology to solve this problem without corrupting the actual music file such as past copy protection systems have purportedly done.

Interesting topic and discussion. I buy recordings of artists I appreciate because I want them to stay in business. I want to hear more Barenaked Ladies, more Neil Young, more etc. So I put my money where my ear is.

Having said that, I am quite angry that all the tracks I downloaded from MusicGiants are worthless because the DRM cannot authenticate from a website that no longer exists.

So I no longer pruchase files with DRM. I purchase the object then make my own digital files thankyouverymuch.

But HDtracks gets my money because they charge a reasonable amount, have always delivered a good product (to my ears) and it is easier on me to not have to rip the source. And some of the material would be quite expensive to get a clean vinyl copy to do the ripping.

Thievery is a large part of the problem. Lying and thievery on the part of the record companies, and lying and thievery on the part of the consumers as well. Please do not read this as moralistic in that I have never traded a mp3, because I certainly have. But it is not a common occurance, and not like some of the teens and young adults I see who have never paid for any of their music. That is thievery.

As was selling me several Ben Folds, some Devo, and Paramore files then making them useless to me. Thievery.
Trey

Quote:
Whatever opinion you have about the credibility of the music industry, if music downloads replace physical media as most people are predicting, new music recordings will likely cease being produced without a realistic revenue stream.
I'd be willing to use any reasonable system that would ensure most high resolution music is available.
NetFlix is using "streaming" for many films which must use a similar bandwidth. I use that service but have found at times it results in re-buffering interruptions which are irritating.
Rather than "streaming" each time you wish to listen perhaps the music industry could develop a method of allowing users to buy a play back license that would accompany the high resolution download but couldn't be copied. The license file would have to accompany the music file on each client server to allow playback. There would have to be some reliable online central respository of these license files to facilitate backup and moving your music to a new server while invalidating the old license file so the music file can only reside in one place.
In the 21st century there must be someway for technology to solve this problem without corrupting the actual music file such as past copy protection systems have purportedly done.

These are all very valid and, more importantly, very workable proposals. However don't hold your breath waiting for the music industry to move forward on anything even remotely like them. The music industry is still stuck somewhere around 1990, remember the early 1990's - the music put out one poorly remastered recording after another on the then new CD and reaped huge, in fact insanely huge, profits as customers replaced their vinyl with CD.

Then came CD ripping, copying, mp3s and Napster. How did the music industry react to Napster? They used part of their huge profits to hire attorneys and buy politicians and effectively killed Napster (but not file sharing!). With the slight reprieve granted by the death of Napster did the music industry take their collective heads out of the sand and try to address the problem and alter their business model to deal with the newer technologies? Hell no.

So then along comes Steve Jobs with the iPod and the iTunes music store. The iTunes does not really provide "content" rather what the iTunes store is provide legal access to "content", with the "content" actually being provided by someone else, namely the music industry. Any one of the major record labels could and should have set up a service similar to iTunes but since their heads were deep down into that sand and so they missed their chance.

The upshot of the whole mess is that "content" is not really worth much anymore but access (both legal, e.g. iTunes, and illegal, e.g. Rapidshare, to name just one) to "content" is still very valuable and people spend lots of money just to get access to otherwise free "content".

What the music industry needs to do is first of all realize that the "content" is only worth something when bundled with paying access. For example, a music industry download site where the consumer pays a monthly fee based on total amount of allowable download (say 2GB per month) and each month the content of the download is changed. This type of service and fee structure solves several problems, particularly with respect to the pricing of various digital formats since mp3s are much smaller than true CD quality or high resolution files and the consumer can pick and choose what works best for their own needs.