Apple's Music Store - The Future of Music

The question touches on a lot of important issues (OS platforms, formats/standards, the role of p2p clients,...) some of which were discussed in a similar thread. If something like Moore's Law applied to bandwidth and storage to a degree comparable to computing power, then we might expect future formats with less compression than ones ubiquitous today, assuming there is/will be widespread consumer demand for greater quality. Even given that (dubious) assumption, the economics of hardware dictate that (relatively) cheap storage/playback devices geared to compressed formats will always be pretty pervasive. All things considered, it does not look like the pressure on the high-end/audiophile market will abate in the forseeable future, especially since formats are in flux and predominantly determined by mass-market players. We have BoD (books-on-demand), FoD ([legal]files-on-demand), Fz-o-D (filez-on-demand[via p2p]). It's a pity we don't have VoD (vinyl-on-demand) - and I don't mean ebay.

(BTW, I thought the G&M was THE cdn nat'l paper.)

The exhortation to get big quickly should apply even post dot com bust. If Apple wants to see their model grow and expand, they would do well to heed their own company story (great initial innovations, but lack of widespread licensing), or to look to players such as Adobe with regard to pdf (adobe reader is everywhere on all platforms). Even so a freely distributed device independent music player or box is no guarantee of success when OS platforms with majority share are constant moving targets as e.g. Sun has learned regarding Java (Java virtual machine: write once, debug everywhere). Given low OS market share, proprietary compression creates a quandry in which it is difficult to achieve customer lock-in while inducing mass format adoption.