Nowadays, CD shops are rapidly declining on the street because music downloading is getting more popular than ever. Actually, there are no Tower Record shops in the US now. In this essay, I will argue that the decline of CD sales along with the rapid growth of music downloads signals a new era of innovation of popular music. Since we can download music song by song, people have begun to stop buying whole albums. I think this phenomenon is causing a huge impact on pop music, which developed an album-based release style for more than 30 years. If I go to the mp3 market or iTunes store, not only the album songs but also a lot of remixed versions of songs are available for the new type of music fans who are familiar with downloading music. However, the current trend of downloading music has a problem: the sound quality of MP3 files is worse than CD’s WAV files. MP3s are okay for listening with cheap earphones, but if you play the music on a good stereo, its sound quality is not good enough. I heard a musician complain in an interview, “Even though we produce music in the best quality sound in a studio, many listeners cannot hear that sound quality on their downloaded files.” In this essay, I discussed the popularity of music downloading, its impact on music innovation, and the problems related to that. Talking about sound quality problems, high-resolution mode files have begun to be available on some sites. Even though, it is downloaded music, the sound quality is better than CD. Thus, music is changing innovatively as the technology develops.
