The majority of Sony SACDs have not been hybrid until very recently, and are unplayable on standard CD players. Since compatibility of the SACD format was one of its main selling points, this was impossible to understand. Sony seems to be following the same bizarre practice with their new Blu-ray DVD format – none of either new format are playable on a standard DVD player, although Warner Bros. supposedly has a multi-format disc in the works. And none of the Blu-ray players announced thus far play SACDs. Sony/BMG has reduced their SACD new releases to a trickle – mostly the Living Stereo three-channel series. But Sony products has announced a new SACD player: the SCD-XA1200, part of their high end ES series.
Online Digital Music in Demand – Between Christmas of 2005 and New Years, 20 million digital tracks were downloaded in the U.S. and a million in Britain. This shows the tremendous growth of iPods and other portable digital devices, the majority of users having broadband connections, and that users are consuming their music on a track by track basis nowadays vs. purchase of entire albums. Digital music online has had huge growth, but still accounts for only 6% of total music sales in 2005 – though that was a 194% increase over the previous year. The demand for digital is moving beyond the teenagers. An example of the change was the announcement from Universal Music that over the next four years they would digitize for the Internet 100,000 tracks from their vaults. The downloading of classical tracks in the U.S. increased almost 100% last year.
But there are some serious problems to be solved on the way to digital Nirvana. Chris Nickson says, in Digital Trends, “The whole concept of DRM is going to have to be rethought.” [See Editorial this month.] Privacy and security are other considerations. The latest update to iTunes sends data back to Apple containing not only details about the music, but also the unique identifiers for the particular computer and your iTunes account. Free file-sharing services continue and will probably never disappear. There are always those wanting stuff free or seeking the really obscure they can’t locate elsewhere. If users can download music securely from a site with a huge selection and at a reasonable cost, it will go smoothly. But pricing varies greatly. People in the UK pay more than the rest of Europe for an iTunes track, and both rates are higher than they are for U.S. consumers. Digital music kiosks in stores are an entirely new approach – even McDonald’s and Starbucks are experimenting with them. Digital music downloading is definitely growing and experiencing growing pains.
