joegratz.net

I’m sure this has been going on for a long time, but it’s recently become clearer and clearer that the utility gap between noncommercial copies of music and commercial copies of music is closing. Some evidence:

• The availability of big scans of album art on the web. If you’re making a CD-R copy of a commercially released album, you’re a few clicks away from high-resolution image files of the album art. A few more clicks, and your printer spits out pretty good color reproductions of the CD tray insert and album cover. There are specific sites for this sort of thing, but the Google image search works just fine, both for popular and back-catalog discs. You can even find scans of the CD itself, for convenient label printing.
• The availability of lossless compressed audio files on P2P networks. As hard drive and bandwidth limitations decrease, the necessity of the 10:1 compression provided by 128kbps MP3s lessens. New formats, like APE and FLAC, give about 2:1 compression with no loss of sound quality at all; the audio data that comes out of the decoder is bit-for-bit the same as the audio data that went in. This means that albums take up about 250MB instead of 50MB, but when hard drives are as dirt cheap as they are now, it hardly matters. ZIP files containing FLACs of entire albums, along with high-res scans of the album art and CD label, are pretty widely available on eMule and via BitTorrent, though the mainstream P2P networks have yet to catch on. For these downloads, the loss of utility when one downloads instead of purchasing is much smaller.

The Strumpf-Oberholzer analysis will only hold so long as the difference between noncommercial and commercial copies is large, as it has been in the past. As gamma decreases — as noncommercial copies become more and more perfect substitutes for commercial copies — the number of lost sales due to downloading will increase. The fact that the cognoscenti can do this now suggests that, globally, gamma is likely to decrease in the future. This may not happen for a long time, since right now it takes a lot of know-how to find perfect copies and scans, download them, burn a CD, and print album art and label.

But I would have said the same thing about P2P in general in 1997.