Music – the challenge of technological advances

I heard on CBC Radio yesterday that Caribou Records in Whitehorse is in deep trouble due to the popularity of downloading music. There’s no silver lining to the story – I’m sorry to see a valuable part of the vibrant Yukon music scene hurting, perhaps in a terminal way. But I admit to being part of the problem – I just don’t buy CDs anymore since getting a good load of music on my iPod (I found that it took about 2,200 songs to keep me from getting tired of hearing the same song too often while on “Shuffle”). A recent discovery for me is that the iPod makes going to the gym (Better Bodies) much more pleasant.

7-day Free trial of NapsterThere are a few choices of sites to load your MP3 player, and you need to be careful. I found eMusic to be the best deal, partly because Napster and iPod aren’t compatible. It’s not cheap, but for the best deal, eMusic Premium, I get 75 song downloads per month for $19.99 per month, so on a dollar-per-hour-of-entertainment it’s a lot cheaper than renting movies.

If you don’t have an MP3 player yet, getting started on a music collection is simple and free (free once you get the player, that is). All of the music download services offer you free trial periods or a specified number of free downloads – that will get you a few hours of listening regardless of which MP3 player you have.

Unfortunately, many record companies tried to ignore the direction the industry was headed almost a decade ago, and are now paying the price. I have no idea what the answer is, but as the American auto industry found out 30 years ago, pretending that the tide isn’t going out isn’t it – you just get left high and dry.