A certain Keith G, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Digital music has been around for well over 20 years now.

Yup and will be around forever - there's never any going back in this world.
It just won't exist as CDs (or any other 'disk' form) for very much longer.

What form do you have in mind ? Don't say "memory chips". You can't
produce high-density (to the density of a modern dual-layer DVD) memory
chips containing music in bulk for a few pence, and that won't be
possible for many, many years.

The success of DVD (for any function) seems to suggest that disc media
are still going strong.

Apart from anything else, there ain't the profits in the hardware there used
to be.

Which hardware ?

The industry itself, with it's bizarre ideas on copyright control, is
doing the damage here. Inserting watermarks or other signals is
perfectly possible to do on vinyl or analogue tape - it's just a recent
phenomenon.

Yes, as a result of 'digitising' music.

Is road rage the result of people owning cars ?

Yes, amongst other things far to abstruse to go into here.

So a person who owns a car is likely to become road-enraged ?

Are domestic stabbings
the result of people owning kitchen knives ?

Same answer as before.

So a couple who own kitchen knives are likely to stab each other ?

Also: More people wear spectacles these days for a number of reasons
including the fact that there are more Opticians....

You'll find there are more hospitals and doctors as well. We're better
at diagnosing medical problems than we were 50 years ago, and we're also
better at curing them. Cause and effect.

How does vinyl (a medium upon which little if any music is distributed
on exclusively) avoid this problem ?

I'm a bit lost here - are you referring to the 'copyright control' issue? If
so the problem isn't in the medium, it's in the industry.

Yes.

Price a twinkly new CD (complete with a nice artwork, lyrics etc) at no more
than, say, 4.99 (absolute tops for the very latest releases) and the same
lazy old Joe Ordinaire will buy it instead of trying to rip it off and Car
Boot, Pub and Street sellers of bootlegs will jack it in because it won't be
worth the bother. Back catalogue at 2.99 will sell all day long, sprinkle a
bit of 'you know it makes sense' on in an intelligent way and bootlegging
will halve overnight.

We agree on something at least, although I do not think the bootlegging
problem is anywhere near as serious as the music biz says it is. People
have been copying and taping music since recording devices became
available.

--

"Jokes mentioning ducks were considered particularly funny." - cnn.com