Thank You for the Music

Today, CDs are obsolete.. CD Walkman is regarded as one of the stupidest tech of all time. 

Vinyl, despite its high fidelity, is near extinct. SACD or DVD-Audio which are aimed for audiophile, are dead too. Not to mention the low quality of radio, and the vulnerable cassettes. Blu-Ray is one of the top candidate set to be doomed in near future.

Today, online stores took over. iTunes Store is the number one highest music seller, Amazon.com comes second, and all shop retailer are suffering worse than ever before. For people who don't buy music, digital downloads or online streaming has become part and parcel of their life. Music has become a free industry, compared to "reserved-for-high-end-consumer-with hi-fi-players" of older times. iTunes Store is today the best online entertainment store, offering billions of Musics, Movies, TV Shows, Podcast, Lecture Notes, Apps, Games, Books. In terms of accessibility, productivity, usability, simplicity, longevity, affordability, exclusivity, Apple utterly nailed it.

When Apple launched iPod 9 years back, digital music players had been blooming, with products from Sony, Creative, Microsoft etc competing with the Apple's de-facto product. Today, Apple has won the music industry HANDS DOWN, the war is over. The ecosystem is simply too amazing it works under iTunes and with other Apple products are too user friendly. Somemore, what can beat the coolness, user-friendliness, functions, fun, capacity, battery life of an iPod Touch? An iPod, coupled with a good pair of earphone, is utterly unbeatable. iPod has become so important that whoever that do not own it, is totally considered not a music lover on-the-go.

my 4th gen iPod Touch 64GB

my Klipsch S4i earphone

Ppl who still buy CDs think that CD quality is still very much higher than MP3s etc, and you get to collect the nice booklet containing rare beautiful photos and lyrics. 

In 2009, Apple launched iTunes LP, an interactive digital booklet for albums.. In the beginning, every one thought it is just another fancy by-product of Apple, but after more than a year or so, more and more albums are getting exclusive LP contents, mainly containing bonus tracks and rare videos and beautiful photos and liner notes and lyrics. The music file of iTunes are right now at 256kbps AAC format, which is very near to CD quality (and that only if the listener listen through very high end speakers and have a very highly sensitive ears, can make out that very bit of difference). 

Yes, with iTunes LP, CDs have become TOTALLY obsolete. 

Here is the beautiful showcase of my personal collection of iTunes LP:

"thank you for the music
the songs I'm singing
thanks for all the joy they're bringing
who can live without it
I ask in all honesty
what would life be
without a song or a dance what are we
so I say thank you for the music
for giving it to me"