If you’re like me, you often feel like it would be good to have a recording of a concert, but are rarely prepared enough to take the requisite equipment. According to CNN there are moves afoot to outfit clubs with booths where you’ll be able to instantly download a recording of a night’s performance onto a USB flash drive like this to take home and copy to your home computer.
Sounds pretty great, really.
That said, I doubt I’m alone in wondering what the quality will be like. The proposed price ($10) should be enough to quickly recoup the minimal costs of recording (at least where publishers are happy with the process), but 128MB isn’t really enough storage to do an hour of music much justice. It’s roughly the same as your average MP3 but is considerably short of CD quality. Given that the introduction of such techniques will likely lead to a clampdown on bootleggers, is this simply going to reduce the quality of live recordings available? And what’s the betting that the biggest names will quickly realise that they can charge a lot more than $10 a show?