Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.

How Serious is the Problem? ... And How to Fix It?

Exactly how bad is this problem? By Young's estimation, what we hear in most files today is "only 5% of the data of the original recording". That may be a slight exaggeration, depending on how the files are encoded. Certainly, lower bit rate files (such as 128kbps MP3s) have a noticeably degraded quality to them, compared to a CD. But most sources have graduated to higher quality files now that broadband speeds allow for it. A standard track on iTunes is a 256kbps AAC file and premium Spotify subscribers can listen to many songs at 320kbps, which is about 22% of a CD track's bit rate.

When it comes to streaming audio on mobile devices, the quality buck pretty much stops at whatever the data connection can handle. On 3G networks, streaming CD-quality audio just isn't feasible. Over a good WiFi connection, things look a little more promising, but there are still limitations if the user experience is to be preserved.

Young: We Need an iPod For Audiophiles

So what does Young propose as a solution? From the sound of it, he'd like to see a sort of mega-iPod with more disk space and internal guts optimized to playback massive files. Such a device wouldn't be designed to include one's entire library, but rather only a selection of audiophile-quality albums. Presumably, it would tend to be used with superior quality earphones or speakers, which is another important factor in the quality of what we hear.

Even if a device akin to what Young describes were produced and sold, how big of a market would there be for it? The quality of the audio found on sources like iTunes, Spotify, MOG, Amazon and Google Music is apparently good enough to convince millions of people to pay for access to it. At the end of the day, most of the content on the pay music services is certainly good enough. Musicians and audiophiles can pick up on the degradations in quality, but for the average listener, it's pretty subtle. The device that Young describes would have to be marketed toward the audiophiles for whom 320kbps simply won't cut it.

Last week wasn't the first time Young has criticized the state of digital music. Some may dismiss his stance as nothing more than a grumpy, old-school perspective, as though he's just an old guy that doesn't get the new-fangled ways of the Web and digital media. This isn't the case. Young may be a veteran of the music industry, but he's well aware of what's changed about it and why. During the same interview in which he slammed MP3's, he said that "piracy is the new radio" and encouraged new artists to forgo record labels in favor of doing it themselves.

There's Nothing Wrong With Analog

As Young pointed out, Steve Jobs may have been a digital music pioneer, but "when he went home, he listened to vinyl." This is true not only of the generation that grew up on LPs, but also of a growing number of younger music fans today. Vinyl sales have been surging for the last few years, with 2011 seeing a 39% increase in sales over the previous year. Digital music sales grew last year too, but by considerably less.

For music fans with the deepest concern for audio quality, it seems analog is increasingly the way to go. That's okay. We can have our digital revolution in music and still fall back on analog formats. Just like with books, the value offered by digital music is primarily about volume, convenience and ease of production and distribution. And just like sitting down with a good, paper-bound book, putting on a vinyl record is more about quality and the overall experience.

Digital and Analog Can Coexist Peacefully

Digital and analog don't need to be at war with one another. What many labels and artists are doing now is sell records on vinyl and include a coupon for a free, high-quality digital download in the record's sleeve. That allows people to enjoy the album as it was intended and also throw it onto their iPod or smartphone for listening on the go.

It's also possible to go the high-quality route in a digital-only format. When The Beatles' catalogue was remastered and reissued in 2009, the material was released on CD and, for the first time, via iTunes. For diehard fans who wanted more than what iTunes could offer, they also sold an apple-shaped (no, not that Apple) thumb drive containing every album in superior quality, lossless FLAC format, as well as as 320kbps MP3s.

However things may evolve, it's evident that digital music has brought us great value, but it's done so at a cost, namely quality. This may not be perceived as a problem by every consumer, but for those who take the craft of creating and recording music most seriously, it's one well worth solving. Whether it's solved through a hybrid of analog and digital music consumption or through some new, high-capacity device for playing back lossless digital audio, the challenge isn't an insurmountable one.

Vinyl sales chart courtesy of Digital Music News.

My new favorite entrant into the field is an iPhone app from long-time MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. Hype Machine Radio is being sold for $2.99 (iTunes) and is worth every penny. The company says the app is "the Hype Machine evolved into a lean back, non-stop rich radio experience." It's essentially a mobile music blog browser, complete with continuos play, album covers, blog posts reviewing the songs, subscriptions, automatically personalized playlists and offline caching of the music posted by particular blogs. It's a great compliment to other music services and it's very nice looking, too.

Some music services surface new music using an algorithm, but I find that all the songs then sound the same and just become background noise. Other services recommend music based on what my friends like; that's ok, but only a few of my friends have musical taste that I want to use as guidance.

Hype Machine tracks hundreds of blogs and I do wish the app helped me discover new ones better from the big list of options it offers. I also wish the app made it easier to see which blogs post something other than hipster music that so often all sounds the same.

Give me music discovery powered by people dedicated to blogging about new tunes, give their blog posts to read as well and give it all to me on my phone and I'm a happy music listener. Check it out and let me know if you have seen any better way to discover new music on the go.

So it's hard not to be quite skeptical about the claims from a new startup - ReDigi - that it plans to launch a marketplace where you can legally sell your pre-owned digital music.

Buying and Selling Used MP3s - Is It Legally or Technically Possible?

ReDigi claims it's meeting a customer demand - the desire to get rid of old music you no longer want. "The typical listener regularly uses only about 20 percent of the music in their libraries. The balance represents a lot of money and disk space being tied up on their computers and mobile devices," says John Ossenmacher, ReDigi's CEO. "With the legal issues involved in the selling and sharing of digital music, people have been stuck with their unwanted tunes, or forced to delete them in order to free space. ReDigi is the answer to that problem."

ReDigi says it has come up with a technological solution to this problem, although it hasn't released details of exactly how this transfer will work. It also claims that it's "figured out what could be done to legally ensure that consumers regain the freedom to manage their own personal music collections." Details are scarce there too.

Ownership of Digital Content - Is It Different Than the Physical Version?

Digital music files were once viewed by the record industry as illegal in and of themselves. An MP3 was presumed to be ripped and stolen from a CD. Although you can now easily purchase MP3s (and/or music in a DRM-restricted format), the rights you are granted as a customer are quite different than those when you buy a physical copy of an album. When you download an MP3 from Amazon, for example, the terms of service say that "upon your payment of our fees for Digital Content, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Digital Content for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use, subject to and in accordance with the Terms of Use."

You are free to sell your physical copy of a record, in other words. That's legal. But you cannot transfer your rights to an MP3 to another person.

According to a story in Hypebot, ReDigi says it will give record labels and artists a share of sales. And while these groups have never had a share of the used record business, I am still skeptical that this is enough to win the record industry's support.

The Future for Used (Digital) Music, Used (Digital) Books

Even if a music startup is a bad idea and a marketplace for used MP3s a suspicious one, this project is fascinating nonetheless. Are physical copies different than digital copies of content or not? The challenges that, I predict, ReDigi will face will likely be yet another demonstration of how the rules that apply to physical media - namely the ownership, transfer of ownership, and lending rights - often only apply to digital media when those rules benefit publishers and record labels. You can only lend a copy of an e-book to one person at a time, for example - just like a printed copy. You can only lend an e-book 26 times - quite unlike the shelf-life of a printed copy. You can sell a CD you don't want to another person, but you cannot sell MP3s you don't want.

But a report from CNN suggests that Apple is working to improve the quality of its music downloads.

But as digital music is quickly becoming the norm, efforts are underway to improve its sound quality - or at least give retailers some options of working from the higher grade 24-bit files. CNN reports that talks are underway between the music studios and Apple to do just that. It's not the first time that Apple has made these efforts, as back in 2009, it doubled the bit-rate of its tracks.

Of course, better quality, higher bit-rate files are just part of the solution here. Many devices don't support 24-bit files. "Paul McCartney can master The Beatles albums all he wants, (but) when you play them through a Dell computer, it sounds like you're playing them through a portable television," says music executive Jimmy Iovine.

The desire for a better quality music is evident in Radiohead's release of its latest album, which allows fans to pay a little extra for uncompressed files. But as ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus laments, that takes "so damn long to download!"

To promote sales, Amazon will offer a Free Song of the Day and a Daily Deal album, which, like Amazon MP3's online counterpart at Amazon.com/MP3, will be priced very low. How low? Today's Daily Deal album is only $3.99, to give you an idea.

Social Sharing

Another feature in the new mobile music storefront is social sharing. Users can share their favorite songs via Facebook, Twitter, email, SMS, BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) or Social Feeds.

The service is integrated with the smartphone's features and functions, too, including Universal Search and Media Library.

To use the new Amazon MP3, users will need a BlackBerry smartphone running OS 5.0 or higher. If the device doesn't have internal memory, an SD card may be required. Interested users can download the app now from BlackBerry App World here.

Getting Started

To get started with MP3tunes (even if you don't have the 10GB upgrade yet), simply sign up for an account and download the company's desktop software, which is available for Mac and Windows. The desktop software will upload your music to the cloud (and watch for new music on your desktop as well). MP3tunes also offers a nifty browser plugin that allows you to send MP3 files from music blogs directly to your locker.

Once you have uploaded some music, MP3tunes biggest advantage quickly becomes clear: you can now listen to your music on virtually any device. We tested the Airband app for the iPhone, which actually feels a lot like the native iPod app. Unless you are offline, it's easy to forget that all your music is actually streaming over the network. We tested Airband on a slow Edge connection, as well as over 3G and WiFi connections and didn't run into any issues.

MP3tunes also offers a nifty web interface that is somewhat reminiscent of iTunes and MP3tune's competitor Lala. Just like iTunes Genius mixes, MP3tunes also organizes automatic playlists for you.

Competition

MP3tunes closest competitor is currently Lala, which was bought by Apple in December 2009 (we actually called Lala the reincarnation of Robertson's early my.mp3.com music locker when we first reviewed it). Currently, it is not clear what Apple's plans for Lala are, but the service remains online and doesn't have an upload limit for its music locker, which makes it a nice alternative if you just want to stream your music over the Web. Unlike MP3tunes, however, Lala doesn't offer any mobile clients.

Invites

MP3tunes will give the first 150 ReadWriteWeb readers who use the invite code 'RWW' access to the expanded lockers today. You can sign up here. The next 150 people who use the code will be in the first batch of additional invites that MP3tunes will send out soon.

Given its reliance on HTML5, Bitspace currently only works with Webkit-based browsers like Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome (Internet Explorer users can, of course, use Google's Chrome Frame plugin). Firefox's implementation of the HTML5 audio tag currently only works with Ogg Vorbis files and does not support playing MP3 files yet.

Uploading and Playing Your Music

Uploading files to Bitspace is fairly straightforward. You can either pick and choose files through the service's web interface, or, if you are a Mac user, you can also use the company's OSX client. Bitspace uses Amazon's storage services for saving your files. The service can import and play most common audio file formats, including MP3, MP4, OGG, WMA and FLAC.

What's currently missing, however, is an easy way to upload larger batches of files. While you can upload multiple MP3 files simultaneously, you can't pick multiple directories, which slows the upload process down quite a bit.

The central focus of Bitspace is obviously the music player. Here, you can organize your tracks by artist, album name, label and year. In addition, you can also manage your playlists here. The minimalist design of the app is one of the highlights of the service The design puts a lot of emphasis on album artwork and makes very good use of HTML5 and the new features it affords developers. Bitspace also integrates with Last.fm and allows you to sync your scrobbles from Bitspace.

Paid Accounts (No Free Accounts for Now)

Bitspace currently offers three different types of paid accounts: basic (limited to 10GB, or the equivalent of 200 albums and 2,000 tracks for €3.99/month), standard (limited to 25GB for €3.99/month) and premium (limited to 50GB for €14.99/month). Sadly, the free accounts (with a limit of 500 MB) are currently invite-only and you will have to sign up for the service and whip out your credit card (though with a free 30 day trial) if you want to test Bitspace.

Update: we originally reported that Bitspace limited users to a certain number of tracks and albums. This is not the case. Bitspace only enforces the limit on disk space.

Verdict

Other services, including Lala, also offer similar streaming music services that allow you to upload your music to the cloud. Lala's big advantage over Bitspace is that it's offering its service for free and doesn't cap its users' uploads. Given that Lala has been acquired by Apple, though, the service's future remains unclear.

Compared to Lala, Bitspace is definitely the prettier service and it's reliance on open web-standards is commendable. Even though the service offers a 30-day trial, the fact that you do have to enter your credit card information or PayPal credentials when signing up will surely keep quite a few potential users from giving it a try (though the prices for the paid accounts are quite fair).

It's important to remember that these are still the early days for Bitspace and the company's co-founder Niklas Holmgren tells us that Bitspace is also working on mobile apps and integrating more social networks into the service.

As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can't get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you'd like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose "Buy", which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song.

Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you've discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like.

When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going.

What's even more, ExtensionFM will let you "scrobble" to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account.

We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they're looking into.

Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we've put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page. Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you're so inclined, we'd love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well!

Just a Wrapper

It's important to note that MusicDNA doesn't propose a new format for encoding the music itself. Instead, MusicDNA is simply an XML-wrapper for music files. In theory, this should make it easier for music labels and artists to adopt this new format as the actual music file will be compatible with virtually every MP3 player on the market. These devices will just play the MP3 track and ignore the rest of the data. To get access to the additional information, though, you currently have to use MusicDNA's own player. The company plans to release plugins for iTunes and Windows Media Player later this year.

Is MusicDNA Doomed?

We have to wonder, though, if anybody is really interested in yet another proprietary file format for distributing music. While the iTunesLP format hasn't exactly caught fire yet (though the mythical Apple tablet could change that), Apple isn't likely to license this technology from Bach. It's also important to note that Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI have developed their own file format for bundling music files with additional content.

At this point, it seems rather unlikely that MusicDNA will be a major success. While the developers claim to have 10 partners on board for the launch, none of these are major labels. Unless MusicDNA can get the major labels to give up their own format and to drop support for iTunes and the iTunesLP format, this venture isn't very likely to succeed.

According to analyst firm Forrester's latest report, 2009 was "a lousy end to an even lousier decade" for the music industry and we shouldn't expect much different until at least 2013. Last year, as a matter of fact, was one of the worst years yet, with a 13% decline from the year before.

Of course the economy can't be helping these numbers, but Forrester sees this as a trend that is going to continue until it gradually starts to even out in 2013. By 2014, the company predicts music industry revenue to level off at around $5.5 billion with digital sales taking up most, but not all, of the slack.

The report also has one interesting event to note for 2012 and, no, it isn't the destruction of the world at the hands of a Mayan death clock - digital music sales will finally surpass sales of physical media like CDs and vinyl.

While it goes on to say that 2010 will be a better year than 2009 for the growth rate of spending on digital music, the overall numbers will likely trend downwards after that, as shown in the graph above.

Weezer released its latest album today, with a Snuggie. See the video below.

Fans interested in the music alone can purchase the album sans blanket-with-arms for a mere $9 on Amazon. (Update: $4 today - sale!)

It's pretty funny, really. People do seem more willing to buy these ridiculous blankets with arms than they are to pay for music these days. I think that's the point.

Thanks to Yahoo's Christian Heilmann for bringing this to our attention.

Greenwood's biggest complaint about MP3s was not quality or sound compression, but rather abundance. He suggests that MP3s make it far too easy for fans to hoard music without "giving it their full attention". In a recent Pitchfork article Eric Harvey suggests the opposite. Says Harvey, "The mp3 may have atomized music into millions of little pieces, but each piece, it seems, found a publicist. The average music fan now has the built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor in an ever-expanding arena that's making and eliminating rules every minute."

Whether you see them as hoarders or promoters, one thing is certain, the iPod generation is changing how music is consumed. But if they can't depend on tiered pricing for audio quality, how can companies monetize the new music fan? While a Stanford study suggests that the iPod generation prefers the flat sound of an MP3, it doesn't mean today's listeners aren't willing to pay for their music. According to an NPD Group report purchasers of digital music downloads increased by 29% last year with iTunes controlling a quarter of all music sold. Some of the ways fans still generate revenue for bands include streaming music subscriptions, track and album purchases, concerts tickets, merchandise and paid application downloads.

Update, Ed: there can be a big difference in audio quality of MP3s promoted on the Web. For example the quality varied greatly between Radiohead's In Rainbows album and Saul Williams' album (promoted by Trent Reznor). See Kim Gaskins' post on the new Latitude Research blog Life Connected for further analysis.

Photos taken from Dead Air Space

And in a way that process is a very conducive way to listen to music that you haven't heard before. Just tune in and get on with your life. Soon you will hear a track you really like and think, I have to have this! On a site like Pandora or Last.FM, usually that means going out and buying the track. But since everything on Fresh Hot Radio is born on the Internet, free to download, you simply click on the link provided and get it. Mission accomplished.

We think Fresh Hot Radio hits its design goals perfectly. We've been listening to it for over an hour and the music has been great. If we want to keep a copy of the music, it's just a click away, and the site even has a URL and embed code for each track. We'd say it's the perfect accompaniment to our work day.

• After submitting our registration, the page refreshed to a new, blank registration form. Nowhere did it mention that our information had been submitted, and as far as we could tell, we weren't automatically logged in.
• The getting started page recommends either adding an MP3 URL (no uploading directly to the service allowed) or dragging the ffffoundtape bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. We didn't have a bunch of MP3 URLs sitting around so it was off to the Obscure Sound indie music blog to find some tracks.
• Invoking the bookmarklet on any page that has links to MP3 files exposes a little arrow that can be clicked to listen to the MP3. After that, another click is necessary to actually bookmark the MP3.
• The bookmark page is identical to the page to submit an MP3 URL, and no information is auto-populated.
• Once back on the ffffoundtape page, we were able to view the songs we bookmarked, and optionally remove them. That's it.
• We could create a playlist using a separate page. Once created, we were still unable to add bookmarks to that playlist.
• Eventually we went back to our profile page, and found the songs we had bookmarked. Only on profile and public all-tracks pages could we add music to a playlist. If we remembered to create a playlist first.
• Finally, we were able to view, enjoy, and share our playlist page.

Unless this service really takes a hard look at streamlining this process, it is probably not worth investing too much time in it. Besides the multiple steps required to bookmark and organize tracks, it appears the service may not even store the MP3s, preferring to play them from the original source web pages. We understand this may be an issue of liability, but it also means that ffffoundtape may eventually be rife with broken links. Also, there's no way of exposing the source page of the tracks unless you remember to cut and paste the page URL when creating the bookmark. Finally, there's no export option, hence no way of storing your carefully found list of tracks offline.

The upside is, if you just want to browse and add other ffffoundtape bookmarks to your own playlists, it's relatively simple. Even there, though, once a track is added you get redirected to your playlist page and must navigate back to where you were. However, you can add a cover art image to each playlist.

Our recommendation? Stick with last.fm, iMeem, blip.fm, song.ly, or even Tumblr. If you want a second opinion, check out SheGeek's post on ffffoundtape.

There are more than 650 stores currently, with over 250,000 songs in the catalogue - most appear to be available at $0.99 per song or $8.99 per album. The site claims to be "working with" 4,500 labels, including 4AD, XL, Rough Trade, Matador, Dominio, and Ged Day's own Warp.

Other than the lack of major label music, there is another minor annoyance for those of us who don't live in the U.S. - international users will frequently run into a "we're sorry, but this release is not available in your country" message. However on the plus side, all the music available for download is DRM-free and at high quality 320Kbps.

Founder Ged Day set up People's Music Store because he felt that no one company, including his own Bleep.com, can manage music expertise at a large scale. People's Music Store is hoping to tap into the Long Tail and enable music fans to create thousands of unique music stores. In a way it's like 'MySpace meets Etsy'.

On some of the more popular stores, for example one called walpod, we can see plenty of evidence of social media:

• Profiles
• Storekeeper comments - basically a form of blog post
• Shoutbox - like Facebook's Wall
• RSS feeds
• Favoriting stores (kind of like the 'friending' concept in social networks)
• Ability to add items from other peoples stores to your own, with one click
  

However there's work to be done with the social elements on the service - for example it's not intuitive where and how to add content such as 'news' and other multimedia into one's storefront.

Overall I found the concept of setting up my own online record store to be a compelling one, despite the limited range of music currently available and the relatively minor quibbles with social media elements. And in terms of music discovery, People's Music Store does a great job of enabling music fans to find new music. In the 'alternative' music stores I browsed, I discovered several interesting new acts I hadn't heard before. So if you're a music fan, People's Music Store is worth checking out. Let us know what you think in the comments.