While I am not a huge fan of the ipod, I must give kudos to Steve Jobs for breathing life into the digital music sales industry. But I have to wonder if Jobs will become the Nolan Bushnell of our decade.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has some interesting commentary on the digital music age.
I think Glenn’s got a valid point. Since when have record companies ever had to compete amongst each other for contracts with artists? And why shouldn’t they have to? Isn’t that the point of capitalism? In the economic world, it is very much a game of survival of the fittest. If you give the consumer what they want, they buy your stuff and you make money. If you give them stuff they don’t want, you should not be shocked when they refuse to buy it. Record companies have never had to compete for their survival before, and they are kicking and screaming about it.
I think the days where an artist needed a recording industry association to protect their interests are coming to a close. Who needs a middleman to sell your music for you when you can sell it on your website and get paid for all your hard work via paypal?
In a final tidbit of news from the random, I am the proud owner of a PSP. I love this thing. With a bit of compression, you can slap two or three albums worth of mp3’s on a 256 meg memory stick, and memory sticks are available with ridiculous amounts of storage capacity. The topper for me with this device though was yesterday. Yesterday I got on campus early to pick up some stuff at the bookstore and found myself with half an hour to kill. I spent that half an hour watching anime on my PSP. Yes, I said anime. No, it was not on a UMD. I took an episode of anime off my dvd, converted it to an avi file, which I then rendered into a video file that the PSP could read. It took a little bit of doing, but the fact that I could port things from DVD to my PSP without too much pain or tooth pulling really made the device worth every penny I spent on it. My anime addiction has now gone portable. What could be more perfect in my world?
After I asked myself that question, I figured out what it was. Sony is rumored to have several add-ons coming for the PSP in the near future, including a keyboard, a camera and other neat gadgety type toys.
Oh.. and I forgot to mention that I can use my PSP to surf the web anywhere there is a wireless hotspot. Yeah, I get the mobile versions of webpages, but the fact that I can do all of this with one gadget and eliminate three gadgets that I carried around in my backpack with the use of one.. makes it well worth the money spent on the toy.
