Keeping up with the Joneses is one of the major motivators in most marketing campaigns (envy is a part of every human psyche not just enthusiasts) the other primary motivator being practicality. IMO you have the markets reversed in that people like us, enthusiasts (this forum in particular), value the practicality of getting “the most bang for the buck.” none of us are immune to the psychological factors you note but with education we often overcome envy for practicality. Well the ones with weak egos don’t. OTOH more people buy Bose than probably all ID brands combined because they see Bose being touted as great and know that everyone else also sees those adds (envy). Come on, how good can Axiom really be if they can’t even manage and ad during a football game?

Most people don’t want to go to the local Best Buy or order a CD from Amazon when they can push a few buttons on their cell phone and have the album downloaded from the mp3 store in minutes. I understand your argument that with storage capacity (I would add internet and mobile bandwidth as another requirement) not being factors then compression isn’t necessary. I just don’t see everyday people demanding the change to lossless because of this, especially since most people can’t tell a 320 mp3 from lossless anyway. There just isn’t any practical advantage for the average person to switch to lossless from mp3 so the only thing I can see motivating them is “lossless envy.”

From the manufacturers standpoint the only advantage to drive losses that I can see is to get people to pay to replace their existing mp3 collections for new lossless ones. If anything at all will drive the conversion it’s going to be this. And the only way I see music companies convincing people to upgrade is to simply stop offering mp3 versions and/or convince people that they need to have the latest and greatest format to be cool like that other guy. However, are the music companies going to put everything on lossless w/o some sort of heavy handed DRM?

A while ago there was a discussion of standard DVDs being bundled with BD movies. I argued that except for niche markets and some big titles it’s not going to happen extensively. Almost if not everyone else in the discussion said yes it’s going to happen as it costs the manufacture virtually nothing to do it. It hasn’t happened because there is no market for it since there is no practical reason for most people to own both formats and no envy driving the inclusion of a DVD with a BD copy. Everyone arguing on the side of DVDs being included with most all BD movies were thinking logically. Marketing (i.e. human nature) is emotional not logical, (note that practicality for most people is also driven by emotion). There is simply no logical reason for people to upgrade from mp3 to lossless music which leaves only emotional, like keeping up with the Joneses, reasons for doing it.

Like I said it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out. I do agree with you that lossless will likely replace lossy eventually but I think envy not SQ will be the driving factor.

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