Comments on: Peter Gabriel's new audiophile subscription site

Famed musician teams up with high-end speaker maker Bowers & Wilkins to start a unique download service for albums created in his lavish studio.

[kneeyogi]

Seems silly to go through all that effort for "audiophile" quality, and offer nothing better than CD quality.

[cardes]

^ I disagree. I am always happy to see people dedicated to SQ offering downloads. I think that the CD format has tremendous potential given a talented audio production team. Chesky is another good example. SACD/DVDa is nice but it is a huge hassle to convert to a portable media format or find non-home audio systems that play them.

[minimalist]

I appreciate the gesture but I would be hesitant to pay a subscription not knowing what artists I will have access to. Even at 6 bucks an album if its someone I don't care about then its not exactly a deal.

Offering high quality downloads is a great idea however and I feel it will become more common as hard drives and flash drive inevitably get bigger. Daniel Lanois offers it as an option through his online label Red Floor Records and both the 320 Kbps mp3's and the uncompressed wave files are the same price. Nine Inch Nails offered HIGHER than CD quality (24/96 wave) as an option on their new download album The Slip... and the price was even better: free.

[helroth]

Two other sites with AIFF (uncompressed) or FLAC (lossless) music downloads:
www.hdtracks.com and www.musicishere.com.
Music from independent labels (some well-known artists, especially on hdtracks). No DRM.

[v1m]

It's a neat innovation, and good luck to them. For me, though, subscription pricing is a no-no. A la carte or nothing, thank you -- that's pretty much the whole point of the download era, isn't it? It's also sad to see the Apple mafia file format being used when the hardware and software-agnostic FLAC format is free and more portable. A greater weakness is the line-up mystery, and I second Minimalist's point above. Much as Gabriel et al. might have fun doing so, I don't actually need anyone to pick my music for me. All I need is for them to deliver what I want in the format I want at the time I want and at the right price! It's 2008; how much longer must we wait?

[minimalist]

Well given the niche market these guys are going for... audiophile quality subscription music whereby you never know what you are going to get... I can totally understand why they chose a file format that worked with the a player that dominates the market. It still doesn't make it a compelling service for me but if they choose FLAC or a another format that iTunes and Ipods don't support they are just further narrowing the possibility that anybody will actually pay for their service.

I wish them well for being creative but I wonder how long before this service closes its doo

[jazzbase]

I love music, but it's over. No one cares about the quality of sound anymore ( just us )
This new site will never work, again it's over Now move on to something else to improve the delivery system. Please!

[minimalist]

Lets tone down the cynicism and try maintaining a little hope. This will all work itself out in the marketplace. When CD's first came out lots of audiophiles claimed the sky was falling and that it was the "end of musicality".... but it wasn't. Recording quality eventually got better, CD players got better. As bandwidth and hard drives grow offering higher quality tracks will be the equivalent of adding a few pennies to your operating costs. So it will be a no brainer to offer music at a higher quality if for nothing else than to differentiate your store from the pack of iTunes wannabees. I have faith that as the digital download market explodes there will be a nice niche for audiophiles.

[cardes]

Reactionist comment fueled by anecdotal evidence x2

[gopsuxDOTcom]

I don't see the point. It's a marketing gimmick. If you have the money for a HiFi system then you have the money to buy the super audio cd or vinyl version. Of course if this is just to get independent music out there are cheaper ways.