With the advent of the internet and sophisticated digital audio and video codecs, classic hard mediums became less and less popular. People prefer to listen to their music on their PCs. However, it was just a few years ago, when people would insist on having high quality encodings of their favorite music or movies. I observed an interesting change in this trend.
Web services like streaming music or video are of rather low quality, compared to their non-networked counterparts. But somehow more and more people tend to happily accept that. Instead of getting a high quality copy of their favorite song, they just listen to it on YouTube, silently acquiescing the horrible quality.
I think, this comes partly from laziness or unawareness, but often even simply from ignorance. People abandon quality in favor of ease of use and less management overhead. I have even seen people download music clips from YouTube and extract the MP3 track of them. Honestly, I’ve done this myself a few times, when I was too impatient to get a song through other means.
The current state of things worries me, but at least I will do my part and go back to good old high quality files. Unfortunately many things aren’t as easy to find in the music store as they are on YouTube, so I’m afraid, I might be stuck with it for now.