The year the music died?

摘要

The year 2009 will surely go down in history as the one when music officially became a free lunch. And I'm talking about something rather more significant than hackers stealing Leona Lewis songs from Simon Cowell's computer. First we saw the sale of unprotected MP3 downloads which, once sold, are free for anyone to copy. Then we saw the launch of Nokia Comes with Music, which offers owners of selected Nokia phones the chance to download virtually any CD album to play on the phone or a PC.rnThen came Spotify, an online service that anyone with a PC can subscribe to from the UK for free. As with the Nokia service there is a far wider choice of music than any bricks and mortar record shop can hope to stock. The music is 'streamed' to the PC, rather than stored. So Spotify is behaving like a radio station that plays instantrncan pay a premium of a tenner a month to get a higher quality stream without any adverts. Music from the free service uses the Ogg Vorbis q5 coding system and streams at approximately 160kbps. Premium subscribers get better quality from 320kbps.