Indieish : Music Selections from the Creative Commons » CC Artist Scott Andrew dumps CD Audio Format
This post on idieish.com tells of an artistss dumping the audio CD format in favor of selling mini-CD-r’s full of mp3s, or maybe even flash drives, at his gigs. I like it when people shake the paradigm and see what falls out.
If people are just going to rip the CDs and listen on their computers or portable players anyway, why not give it to them in that format to begin with.
The first issue for me is bitrate. What do people want? I have taken to ripping stuff at 256k, and that is what I am selling at my Pepper Enterprises mp3 Store. Lots of folks are still using 128, I think.
I figure that if I am going to go to the trouble of making a physical disc I will give folks the best audio quality posssible, and let them decide how lossy they want to get.
I really want to go to an all download- no disc set up, but then what do you sell at the gigs? Especially at my level, gig sales can account for a large portion of sales.
What are your preferred ways of buying music? Would you buy a disc of mp3s? A thumb drive of mp3s?
I found a place today that sells screen printed 64mb usb drives for $12. That’s almost in the affordable category.. http://www.memorysuppliers.com/
All the pieces aren’t _quite_ there but, it’s getting very close. If those were 6-8$ each in small bulk, with the way commodity hardware prices continue to fall, it can’t be long now.