One of the reasons I stopped buying CDS, etc, years ago was because most of the tracks are dross. For me, nothing has changed in that respect, at least where 99% of current pop releases are concerned.

Cheers!

Agreed. Since I discovered Shareaza, and then BT, I have downloaded my music as albums 99% of the time, and I’ve been showing friends how to do it too. So it’s definately catching on, which is, of course, a good thing.

Although all P2P networks since Napster allow for resuming interrupted downloads, and most support the sharing of all filetypes, the pattern of downloading primarily MP3 singles largely held over on these post-Napster networks.

However, there were 2 other trends in P2P:

1. Edonkey2000 and BitTorrent allow widespread broadcasts of files, with file checksums posted on websites so that each unique file is typically downloaded by many people simultaneously. Since both networks were designed for broadcasting large files to many people, it was primarily albums – not MP3 singles – that were always the method of choice on these swarming P2P networks. Most of the audio files that are released are zipped or rar’d albums containing not only the MP3s, but often playlists and scanned CD covers.

2. Audio Galaxy allowed collections of files to be shared, so an album download could be easily compiled. Soulseek, Piolet, and other P2Ps followed this trend.

There is a primary difference between the MP3s shared as singles and in the form of albums. Singles are often created by novice computer users, ripped from their own CD collections. Using consumer-friendly software such as MusicMatch Jukebox – with its once-awful Xing encoder – these files are then quietly shared, and as a result, many different encodes of the same song – most of poor quality – are available throughout the network. In its early days, Kazaa only allowed the sharing of 128 kbs-encoded mp3s, a decision presumably made in an attempt to placate the record industry during their pre-lawsuit days.

By contrast, the music available on eDonkey and Bittorrent is usually high quality rips and encodes, typically using EAC and Lame – applications not designed for novice users. It was only more recently, due to the multi-network clients such as the new Morpheus, that MP3 singles even began appear on the ED2K network.

Although most casual music downloaders patronize singles – many people, after all, still use Kazaa – members of the more ‘elite’ P2P crowd tend to get their music in the form of albums. Unfortunately for the music industry, more and more P2P users continue to graduate into the latter category.

-tm

With the Net, we’re back to ’singles,’ so to speak.

Cheers!