Apple, through iTunes, has become the top music retailer. However, as Chris Foresman at Arstechnica reports, the music files bought by millions of consumers are of extremely low quality. Some of the highlights of his article include:

• All music bought from iTunes is compressed so that the resulting music file takes up less space on your computer’s hard drive. The compression is done by removing various sounds from the music file.
• This means that some of the ‘good’ part of the song is lost. Even the highest quality song files bought on iTunes contain just 3% of the data in the original music file.
• Attempts to change this are unlikely to be successful, because higher quality song files require more memory capacity, and as long as relatively low capacity iPods are the most popular music devices, people will be wary of music files that don’t fit on their iPods.
• Artists have begun to alter their songs to accommodate individuals who purchase their songs from iTunes. One common trick is to boost the amount of bass to make up for the “tinny sound” produced by the low quality headphones that ship with iDevices.

To read about some of the other things that artists have begun to do to try to enhance the quality of their music for users of iTunes, other forms of media that are compressed, and the steps that Apple could take to ameliorate the problem, click here.

Source: Arstechncia