One of my favourite blogs is Teledyn by the inimitable Mr G. Most of what Gary Murphy writes is sensational but out of all the stuff written about the new music model and the RIAA this is a winner.
Snip:
The RIAA controls the only economical means of distribution of the 10-track CD. They are entrenched with all the big Vegas acts, and when people are pulling that sort of BMW-reaching income, you can't talk to them about turning back. I say we let them have it. Back when we created the Information Highway exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre, we installed a bank of CDROM jukebox machines for playing the latest digital games; this was Patrick Tevlin's idea, and his reasoning was "the CD is the biggest bandwidth pipe we have today" -- the CD is a broadband simulator containing a dead snapshot of 700MB worth of living distribution.Instead of reaching for the CD, we need to recognize the true listening requirements of our audience: People like diversity. My proof is this whole issue of CDRs and DRM. Give someone twenty CDs, they will mix and match, ripping tracks to produce 'samplers' -- we've been doing this since the invention of reel-to-reel home-recorders. The real listening habit of people is to create landscapes of sounds that cross the lines between performers, they re-purpose our material to tell their own stories, to create their own mood environments, and to do that, their basic building block is the song.
Johnny Cash said, "The song is everything"
Why persist in the 10-track compilation? I've seen so many bands with 5 good songs that they pad with 5 not-so-good tracks just so the whole process of the CD production is efficient, which is important given the cost of that process.
Having asked I think a good question Gary goes on to provide a coherent answer
