Jaimie Vernon wrote:

> It's possible to ensure that all the songs from an album are kept together
> as a unit for downloading...especially if songs are linked by segues and
> cross-fading. Many acts have opted out of the iTunes program because of
the
> situation you describe...wanting entire albums to be downloaded or not at
> all. Of course, that flies in the face of the notion that people ONLY want
> individual songs these days.

Let me clarify that I don't think people should only be allowed to buy
albums. I am as frustrated as anybody by the current "all or nothing" model
when I want to buy that one great song but don't want to spent $16 on the
whole album. I am all in favor of an online model that would allow people to
pick and choose songs if they want to.

The problem I see is that the current online model *only* supports that
approach. Despite what you say, I don't see any way that a unified album can
really be distributed as such. I mean, sure, I could put a bunch of MP3s up
on my Web site and say "Download these and listen to them in this order,"
and that would work OK for a "collection of songs" album. But transitional
links and segues don't work, at least not with any playback software I've
used. As long as each song is a separate file, you always get a little
hiccup or pause or click or something in between tracks, wrecking the smooth
segue. Maybe there are players that handle this better, but I haven't
encountered one.

Plus, the CD architecture has some really nice features, including the
ability to include "pregap" content that you only hear between songs if
you're playing things straight through. There's no way to do that with MP3s,
at least no way that I'm aware of.

I'm not saying these problems are insolube. It would be relatively trivial
for somebody to develop a system that would be able to play songs
individually *or* knitted back together into a seamless program. But I don't
think there's sufficient demand out there for a format like that to succeed.
Most people only want songs, so that's what the software will support. The
minority of album lovers (like me) will just have to deal with it.

Robert R. Berry