VIRB

On the subject of technology and music with no packaging, no artwork, no liner notes -- a total digital revolution.

Not only the artwork and the feel of a recording in your hand, MP3's are like paying for a great book and having faxed to you.

There is something lost in the copy.

The people who claim not to hear the difference are people who never listened to music except on their computer or an iPod.

And MP3 sounds good considering the amount of compression -- it is a very clever algorithm that makes a lot of sense if you consider the history of digital media and the need to store and archive data that would otherwise totally be lost (like old television and film).

I worked for a very well respected production company that had to take old television shows and old master recordings off magnetic tape for long term storage -- technology was our friend -- we were able to save sound and images that would have been lost forever.

On the other hand, I really fear the market forces when all of 4 companies control 85% of the recorded music in the world and the people who decide these things are singularly focused on dividend yields and quarterly profits. Music has become a commodity about as interesting as plastic bottle labeling machines or dry cleaning pants hangers to these greedy idiots .. it's just cost per unit, profit per unit and total profit to them. And, through the deceitful marketing wings of Viacom (aka Empty V), Apple and Sony the market will be dictated by the worst possible technology that makes them the most money.

I predict, in the very near future, there will be no more musicians in the Billboard charts. A clever algorithm will read the reaction of suburban teens through an embedded neural chip their parents bought them at enormous expense for gps location, drug testing and music/gaming/Internetworking use. This chip will tell the marketing managers moment to moment changes in pupil dilation, sweat glad activity and genital stimulation. This information will be warehoused at the Pentagon and at a large company on Madison avenue run by an international "infotainment" conglomerate. The output of clever computer programs being run using this data as input will be sounds, images and games that are chosen by artificial neural networks to be 99% guaranteed to generate profit for the international infotainment conglomerate and keep the Pentagon "plugged in". No artist will be payed, no recording studio will be used, no guitar will be strummed or drum be beaten -- this will all be a virtual experience produced at the least possible cost.

Prototypes of this system are already in place ... iPods and cellphones are the clumsy first attempts that will be streamlined.

Madison avenue workers do not have sex .. they masturbate to mission statements.

Wall Street workers exist only to fill the machines that run everything with the proper amount of greed and randomness to keep self-propelled illusion alive.