[ARSCLIST] Discography's Demise?

[Doug Henkle <henkle@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:56:51 -0800
>From: Roger and Allison Kulp <thorenstd124@xxxxxxxxx>
>Re: The "dumbing down" of Downloaded Recordings
>
>What a lot of people do not seem to realize, is I believe we are in
>the transitionary phase of a dramatic paradigm shift in the way
>recorded music is sold, and distributed. Basically the end of all
>physical formats of recorded music, as a whole. Yes there will
>still be new vinyl and CDs pressed, but they will be limited
>edition runs sold on eBay, Amazon, or label/artist websites.
>That will be it, period.The other option will be CD-Rs burned
>on demand, like Smithsonian/Folkways offers. The retail store
>selling new vinyl/CDs will go the way of Betamax in the next
>few years, "collectors" stores aside.

     This undeniable fact is exactly what I have been worrying about since 
I started in Nov. 2002 my project of tracking down every non-Pop/Rock 
1948-date Wisconsin recording in existence.  I have ignored on-line music 
from the beginning.

     There will come a day, if it hasn't already, that a musician's entire 
recorded career will have existed in electronic format only, never having 
released a single track in actual real physical format.  How do you write a 
discography for this musician so that it will be even somewhat meaningful 
75 years from today?  How do you describe an MP3 file today so that a 
collector will be able to find a copy of it in the future?  Having had a 
Web site continuously since 1995, I can personally vouch for the fact that 
EVERYTHING on the Web is temporary and ephemeral.  There are just a handful 
of sites today that existed 12 years ago.  Sites full of MP3's today, will 
no longer exist tomorrow, guaranteed. For instance, the old NOMA site at 
songs.com used to have home pages for over 200 singer/songwriters and many 
hundreds of music files.  They are all gone now as if they had never been 
recorded.

     Will the science of Discography itself go out of existence entirely 
as a direct result of this rapidly approaching zero physical product future?
________________________________________________________
Doug Henkle - mailto:henkle@xxxxxxxxx
P.O. Box 1447, Oshkosh, WI 54903-1447

http://www.folklib.net/
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