Excalibur Online

Ultimate iPod

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In a few years, you will be able to buy an IPod with all the music that has ever been recorded already pre-loaded into it. This, of course, will change everything in the music industry.

It will not be legal at first, much as it was once illegal to shop on Sundays. But when it starts happening, there will be no turning back. Once your friends own all the music there ever was and can keep it in their back pocket, you might be tempted to make yourself a copy. Like recording a baseball game on your VCR without the required express written consent from the Major Leagues, who is going to stop you? You cannot put everyone in jail. Besides, it will probably be only slightly more expensive than an empty IPod, so how could you resist buying one?

One trip to a downtown sidewalk vendor will save you countless hours of your life searching and downloading music and entering your credit card number. And it is the perfect gift: Your significant other, boss, mom or whoever is guaranteed to love the music on it. It will have every song that Nelly and the Smashing Pumpkins put out. It will have the complete works of Schubert, Tom Jones and Madonna - all there to be discovered.

So why is this inevitable? Because MP3s are very small files and only so much music has ever been made. All the while, storage space gets larger and cheaper while the media gets smaller. A 60GB IPod today can already hold about 20,000 songs. As the rate of storage is increasing, it will not be long before it can hold them all.

If the popularity of PlayStation modchips and bootleg DVDs are any indication, the every-song-ever-made-IPod will do brisk business. Once it exists, the cat's out of the bag; no amount of copy protection on CDs or ITunes downloads will matter.

Do not worry about it getting outdated either, because hackers will make sure you will be able to top it up with any new songs that have come out since you bought it by connecting it to your PC or phone or whatever they will have come up with by then.

So, what will this mean? For one thing, musicians will have to earn money the old fashioned way - by playing concerts. Perhaps they could also create movie soundtracks and video game music if these remain viable business options. Or they could be creative and come up with something entirely new. One thing is for sure, their music recordings will become like movie trailers - mere ads for "the real thing", like seeing them play live.

Now, of course, this will affect a very small percentage of artists like Metallica and Snoop Dog who actually make vast sums of money selling pre-recorded music. For the overwhelming number of artists that are not superstars under the current system, their finances will probably actually improve. Why? If you have any friends that are musicians, ask them how much money they make on downloads and CDs - the answer is usually that they lose money. The record labels' standard way of doing business is to charge the musicians for every cost, from studio time to promotion. It is very rare indeed when a band comes out ahead in this arrangement.

The big losers in the short term will be all the middle-men - the executivesand the shareholders - at least until they think of another way to make money. The musicians will have the advantage of their fans having more cash left over for their concerts. The consumers will have the advantage of being able to afford having their favourite music and being able to see their favourite bands live too.

With all the record company weasels out of a job, perhaps there will be more competition in the used car sales business as they switch careers. It's win-win situation every way you look at it.


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