Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC.
Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous. Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists.
The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label.
> Which is irrelevant. In a world where the CD didn't exist, someone would have built a phonograph with Line-Out, which later would have been connected to the Line-In of a PC.
The quality of which would have been lower than that of a CD. Incidentally: many phonograph/amplifier combinations had the option (or even a built in) cassette recorder so that part was readily available from the 70's onward.
> Assuming that MP3 wouldn't have disrupted the music industry if they'd have sticked to Vinyl and Cassette is ridiculous.
You're welcome to your opinions as well.
> Even today, Vinyl rips of music exists.
Yes, they do. But they're not close to the quality that you get when you use FLAC on a CD image, or a high quality MP3 encoding (lossy, but not quite that lossy).
In order to rip vinyl you will have to do your own A->D, you've already gone through a whole pile of analogue stuff, you will have picked up some hum, lost some high and lost a lot of low. CD audio put master tape quality in the hands of millions and then when MP3 happened suddenly all of that was instantly available. If the required steps had been reliant on someone doing all of that work it would have been a lot less quick in terms of adoption. Building the hardware to do this properly so that you'd get something equivalent to a HiFi set on subsequent output isn't all that easy, especially not if you care about modulation depth.
> The core of this disruption was not in the process of creating the MP3, it was the ease of music distribution without any involvement of a music label.
That was another required step, but the widespread availability of master tape grade digital content was an enabler as well and I really don't see why you would deny that.
FWIW I'm the guy that encoded the dutch broadcast archive for TROS so that they could easily call up tracks without running to the physical archive. Trucks with CDs would arrive and harddrives would go the other way. We did many thousands of them. Without the CDs ripping at 40 speed or so that would have absolutely never happened. Ripping a vinyl record at any level of quality will take you more than an hour, there are all kinds of environmental factors, you'll wear out needles like there is no tomorrow and you're going to be busy fiddling with tone arm pressure and all kinds of finicky bits if you want to get even close to something that's good enough for broadcasters.
FWIW, people selling copies of Vinyls and cassettes on blank cassettes were no real threat to the distribution business of a music label. Even people copying CDs didn't harm them that much, because their reach and scale was always limited.
They only got engaged when the scale increased (mass-copying of content).
But when MP3 hit, every single upload was threatening their global distribution business, because suddenly someone was distributing for free.
> The widespread availability of master tape grade digital content was an enabler as well
The Quality of content didn't matter for the disruption of the business, a huge amount of popular music on Napster/LimeWire/AudioGalaxy/... was actually recorded from Radio,.
If cassettes were the peak media and pirated digital content would have been limited to recordings from cassettes, yet still distributed globally by every kid from everywhere on the planet who gets hold of ONE tape, the wheels would have been set in motion just the same.
> FWIW, people selling copies of Vinyls and cassettes on blank cassettes were no real threat to the distribution business of a music label.
Precisely: crap quality and a medium that didn't last for very long even if you were careful with the cassettes. You usually got a year or two out of them before the tape got eaten, especially if you used them in cars. None of the tapes I had from that era survives. All of the MP3s I made in the '00s survive today.
> Even people copying CDs didn't harm them that much, because their reach and scale was always limited.
Copying CDs wasn't possible for the first two decades of the CD format because there were no writable CDs.
> They only got engaged when the scale increased (mass-copying of content).
Yes. Plextor was a factor in that, the MP3 format, the internet and a massive available catalog of high quality content without DRM.
> But when MP3 hit, every single upload was threatening their global distribution business, because suddenly someone was distributing for free.
That's because it was the last missing component. Fraunhofer didn't exactly make any friends in the music industry with that trick. But all of the other elements were just as much a requirement.
> The Quality of content didn't matter for the disruption of the business, a huge amount of popular music on Napster/LimeWire/AudioGalaxy/... was actually recorded from Radio,.
You see the same today with movie piracy: the DVD rips are the ones that really drive it, the 'cam' captures are junk.
> If cassettes were the peak media and pirated digital content would have been limited to recordings from cassettes, yet still distributed globally by every kid from everywhere on the planet who gets hold of ONE tape, the wheels would have been set in motion just the same.
It wouldn't have happened due to the generational loss between copies. And that's exactly why the availability of CD grade content matters because it effectively plugs you into the ADC at the studio instead of 3 different mastering steps in between. That's why 'virgin pressings' (the first 100 or so of the records off a new master) were so sought after, especially by fans of music with a high dynamic range.
If the music industry would have stuck to vinyl and cassettes, the digital era would have still happened.
- At some point people would have recorded their vinyls/cassettes to WAV and store offline.
- Lossy compression comes along,
- People start sharing content online
- Music industry is disrupted