I am usually an early adapter and sometimes even an innovator in regards to new products surfacing in the market. However, when it comes to music I have sometimes made the format transitions a bit later, falling into the majority, early and late. The reason being is quite simple: I don’t want to have to repurchase my music collection. Now here we are today with the lovely, transferable, duplicable, and much cheaper mp3. With cloud and streaming services shooting to the music industry as a new and more efficient solution like boiling water to dry, stiff pasta, the mp3 is getting a second life. We can still purchase and do whatever we (legally) desire with mp3s but now we have different means to access them. I, being the sometimes stubborn guy that I am, will be waiting to see how this one pans out.
One of the first things that occurred to me with the unfortunate destruction of the Sony distribution center and it's physical stock was that digital cannot easily be destroyed. Sure one can lose their laptop or music player. And one could also say that copies of CD’s could be lost in a similar fashion but you will never hear of a warehouse of mp3’s going up in flames. Digital cannot only be transferred easily now between devices but can apparently float high above the reaches of evil in some almighty cloud. The real question is how long with this cloud stay afloat. Am I pessimist? Not hardly. I am simply finding reasons to cling to my old fashion ways. And besides, services like streaming and cloud computing certainly have a way to go before being perfected.
