Hardware

In a move I'm calling "too little, too late, too proprietary," major labels are introducing their own file format

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uniFor years you’ve been using the well-supported, ubiquitous file format called MP3. It’s an international standard, it works just fine in every media player, and other universally-accepted formats are in place for the album artwork, lyrics, and what have you. Sounds like you’re ready for a new, unified format that no one has ever heard of and, if introduced five or six years ago, might have been revolutionary! Universal, Sony, Warner, and EMI are all throwing their weight behind the CMX format, soon to be the laughing stock of the internet. Oh, did I mention that Apple, who makes like 200% of the MP3 players in the USA, is making their own competing format, which pretty much guarantees that CMX will only be usable by things like Windows Media Player?

There’s not else much to say. The big labels brainstormed (for several years, apparently), and eventually decided that they would sell a single file, which included tracks, lyrics, album art, and music videos. What a great idea that would have been in 2003! But it is 2009, and the labels have been abusing consumers for so long that any format solely originating in them will be distrusted and ridiculed. They’re not even putting a lot of weight behind it!

We are not going out in force. What you are going to see is a couple of releases thrown out there to see what people like.

Sorry, people like what they’ve got, which was the technology that arose in the vacuum you guys created by not addressing this years ago.

While I respect the initiative being shown by our friends in the music industry (a few years late, but still), I have a question: how exactly do you see this little foray succeeding without that music device which has risen in prominence since the day of the compact disc — I think it’s called an i-Something?

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