The recording industry has seen some massive evolution since we first started seeing vinyl records being sold to the public. Gone are the days where people have to buy whole albums to just get that one must-have hit single. In fact, people don’t even have to leave the house to buy their music anymore. On top of that, shelves and cases full of CDs and other storage media are a thing of the past. Digital music is the present, and the future.
That’s not to say that CDs are totally antiquated. Many people still feel that portable music players are too expensive or too confusing. However, we’re finally reaching an era where the way that we store our music matches the ephemeral nature of the music itself. Even when we don’t buy our music online, many people opt to store their audio files on their computers by ripping the songs from CDs.
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Digital music files come in a number of different formats. The most common and familiar to many is the MP3 format. MP3’s are popular and useful because they are so much smaller than other forms of music. What essentially happens is that MP3’s eliminate parts of the music that are essentially inaudible. By doing so, MP3 can be compressed down to about one tenth of the size of other audio formats.
Other popular formats include MP4 and WMA. Microsoft has declared that their proprietary format, WMA, is of better quality than MP3 files. Results of been inconclusive, and to the average listener these two formats aren’t particularly different from MP3s in noticeable ways. Mostly they exist for the purposes of DRM, or digital rights management. Digital rights management is a technology that the recording industry uses to protect their interests from piracy.
Digital music is available from many sources. One of the most common and recognizable ways to get new music for a good price is from Apple’s iTunes music store. Originally made as a companion to Apple’s iPod portable music player, it can be tough to find a computer that doesn’t have iTunes nowadays. The iTunes music store allows users to search for and download the specific songs that they want.
There are many other digital music services out there that offer similar services. Some services, instead of allowing you to purchase the rights to individual songs, instead give you the rights to their entire library for a monthly fee. This is a great deal for people with a wide and eclectic taste in music, but unfortunately as soon as you stop subscribing the service, you can no longer listen to the music.
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