Bob Kanefsky interview cont'd

MP3

Digital recording, the cheapness of gigabytes of storage, and compressed formats that computers are now fast enough to decompress in realtime, could really revolutionize the way music is distributed. Hopefully someone will come up with a way for people to painlessly pay a few cents for the music they're using. It's too bad that Napster currently doesn't make it as easy to pay for a song, or even locate the CD it came from, as it makes it to distribute hundreds of bootleg copies. People do need to understand that even if there's no physical medium to buy, a lot of work goes into making a good-quality recording of a song: the songwriter, the singer and musicians, and the sound engineer may not be able to afford to put in a lot of time without being paid a cent. I happen to love my mundane day job (which is neither) and wouldn't do songwriting fulltime even if it supported me, but it ought to be possible for people who love making music and are good at it to make a living doing it.

I've imported all my CD's into Apple's iTunes, so I can play any song instantly without looking for the CD, working all the secret pressure points to get it out of the jewel case, and so on.

I look forward to the day when computers can model a singer's voice well enough to be coaxed into producing a recording of them singing a parody just the way I imagine them doing it, and closer to the original than they could manage themselves. That will be fun to spring on them. Publishing them will raise a whole new set of legal issues, of course.