Jazz Odyssey

When it comes to music, consumers are increasingly trading quality for quantity. Many would rather have the ability to store thousands of songs on portable devices — and have a constant soundtrack to their lives — than own stacks of CDs and listen to high-quality sound tethered to an expensive living-room system. The shift is causing big reverberations in the audio industry.

So says Ethan Smith in today’s Wall Street Journal in an article that discusses how and where consumers are listening to music, and how electronics manufacturers are dealing with these changes in listening behavior. Just a few short years ago, we were far away from a personal computer acting as the hub of a home entertainment center. But ease-of-use has improved (particularly iTunes, which is simple enough even for computer novices) and wireless broadband is both cost effective and robust enough to seriously consider a computer as a media center for music, television and movies. DRM and interoperability issues continue to be the barriers that prevent this sector from really exploding…will an aftermarket for “mod chips” like those that allow Xbox and Playstation systems to play restricted games/movies develop to circumvent these barriers? Or will hardware manufacturers and content owners finally realize that a universal (and nearly invisible) DRM is key to the growth of the business? Or will we have to live with a next generation series of hardware that has a bewildering array of audio/video inputs to accomodate piles of incompatible hardware?