6 Votes
High Capacity MP3 Players Prove P2P Popularity
A little mathematics analysis at ArsTechnica reveals that it should be "too" expensive to fill a standard iPod with retail music. Thus, while it is well known that P2P applications dominate the Internet’s bandwidth, the extent to which the general population utilizes P2P has never been fully conceived. With the widespread ubiquity of iPods, Zunes and other portable MP3 players sporting enormous capacities, it becomes a trivial exercise to question the legitimacy of the player’s files and whether or not the owner makes use of a P2P download application.
Current iPod offerings from Apple include the Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch – sporting maximum capacities of 1GB, 8GB, 160GB and 16GB, respectively. Assuming an MP3 is recorded at roughly 192kbps with VBR, a four and a half minute song will encode at approximately 5MB. Using a 99-cent download fee as the benchmark price for a "legitimate" single track, filling each iPod should cost approximately:
- iPod Shuffle – $200
- iPod Nano – $1,600
- iPod Classic – $32,000
- iPod Touch – $3,200
So, before getting nabbed in an RIAA lawsuit, remember to practice safe P2P downloading.
Similarly tagged OmniNerd content:
- Music Industry's $75 Trillion Lawsuit, by VnutZ about 2 years ago
- Music Purchase Log: December 2008, by Brandon over 4 years ago
- Keeping Up with Music, by Brandon about 5 years ago
- Vinyl vs Digital Debate Resurfaces, by VnutZ over 5 years ago
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Cheaper legal options by Brandon
Interesting, but I think some important considerations were missed.
The content capacities of mp3 players are not equal to their advertised size. For example, my 80GB iPod has a content capacity of 74GB. Assuming the same percentage loss across all iPods results in new sizes of 925Mb, 7.4GB, 148GB, and 14.8GB for the Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch.
Also, there are cheaper legal music options. Take, for example, emusic.com. I pay $10 a month for 40 songs, but consider the following subscription options:
Using your 5MB/song estimate and the reduced capacities I listed above, the cheaper option results in the following (much more reasonable) costs of filling the various players:
We also must consider the time over which this expense is spread. I began gathering my music collection when I was in middle school and joined two different CD clubs. By the time I got my first mp3 player about ten years later, I had accumulated over 500 (legitimate, not burned) CDs – and that’s on a minor/student budget and taking two years off for a foreign mission. Again using your 5MB/song approximation, just the albums I already had were enough to fill 25GB of my 30GB (uh, I mean 27.75GB) player. If I had signed up for eMusic’s largest service then I would have accumulated 72GB of music over the past four years – totaling nearly 100GB. Up until recently, there hasn’t been an iPod that could handle a (completely legitimate) library of that size.
Looking at just music is too conservative, too, as many of the mp3 players, particularly the larger ones, hold much more than music. I have my contacts, calendars and many photos on mine, but the data type with the largest hard drive requirement is movies. If I put my (very small) DVD collection on there, it would cut my room for music (at least) in half – and I don’t even use the video encoding resolution. Oh, and there are audiobooks and podcasts to consider, as well.
Beyond the larger media options, however, there is also the fact that iPods can be formatted to serve as external hard drives, holding all sorts of data. And we all know how easy it is to fill up a 160GB hard drive…
P2P and MP3 player cost analysis. by Anonymous
That was simple yet very insightful analysis. No wonder apple stock shot up 138% this year!!
listen_to_omninerd
questions by milhous
As always, there are lawsuits in the news about digital media. I was reading one today in which part of the charge is that even ripping your own CDs you’ve purchased and putting them into the MP3 format is grounds for illegal copying since the original format had been changed. I think it is ludicrous….or Ludacris, depending on your genre.
My argument/question is this: It is legal to take one "illegal", "haji" copy back from Iraq and get through customs. This is according to our own Government Customs Inspectors. So the question becomes what is the statute of liability/limitations for illegal copies and pirated music, movies, etc? It seems to me that if I wanted to, so long as I got my music in Mexico or Canada, I should be good to go….and to take it further, if I downloaded the music from a site that was hosted in India or Japan, I should still be ok.
Bare in mind, I don’t collect music from sites or overseas, I just think it is interesting that there are lawsuits out there that don’t jive with what our Federal Government allows our military/civilians overseas to practice.