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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1315
iPod: "Grand Theft Audio"?
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
November 29th 2002
Death of Napster makes sneakernet the music-swapping trend du jour.
December's issue of Wired Magazine takes a look at the ever-growing numbers of CDRWs,
blank CDR sales and the decline of on-line file swapping. And MP3 devices like the
iPod are to blame.
For Paul Boutin at Wired, sneakernet - CDs traded on the playground or the street - is
now the dominant orthodoxy of music swapping, not the internet. With Napster's death,
says Boutin, people turn to their CDRWs - and they're "not using them for backups", in
the words of one Gartner analyst quoted in the article.
For the music industry, the statistics must be daunting: 140 million CDRWs; burners
bundled with almost every desktop PC and a growing number of notebooks; an estimated 6
billion blank CDRs sold worldwide in 2002; and 40x burners have become commonplace,
allowing a full CD copy in around 3 minutes on today's fast hardware.
iPod � Go-Go
No longer do people have to burn piles of CDs. In an hour, says Boutin, he could dump
his friend's entire CD collection onto an iPod [This would make it a fairly small
music collection from where I'm coming from; but we've all got to start somewhere -
Ed.].
As Boutin says, "With an iPod in my pocket, I don�t bother asking for CD
recommendations anymore. I drag and drop my friends� entire jukeboxes. Rip �em now,
decide what to play later."
Yes, iTunes does have built-in copy protection, but Boutin goes on: "A free utility
called iPod2iTunes makes cloning my friends� iPods a plug-and-play operation."
Analysis: There isn't anything the iPod does that couldn't be done on a portable or
3.5" FireWire drive - which are available in much greater capacities than iPods and
for a lot less. In this respect, it's unfair to make iPod the scapegoar, as this can
be done with any FireWire/USB 2.0 hard drive. In fact, iTunes' limitations (I assume
that similar restrictions are built into MusicMatch's iPod Windows software) stop at
least the less-than-technically-savvy user from instantly sharing MP3 collections.
And backups? I'd make more CDR backups per week than audio CDs by a country mile.
Maybe that's odd. But DVD-R is my next storage option and it won't be (primarily) to
burn audio CDs.
And, despite the RIAA's claim that burnt CDRs account for the steep decline in audio
CD sales, I recall similar arguments were made about audio cassettes in the 1980s. Are
CDRs really that much more proliferate? Who couldn't tape a record or CD over the
last, say, 15 years?
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