Can Neil Young help Sun and Sony reinvent music media?

Stan Beer
Sunday, 11 May 2008 10:48

Opinion and Analysis

This is why the Neil Young Blu-ray packaging "experiment" for want of a better description is interesting. There could well be a ready made market of nostalgic Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, who would love to be able to relive the glory days of their favourite artists in a neatly packaged high definition, high quality, interactive anthology such as the Neil Young archive. What better way to rediscover and remember what it was like?

However, whether the use of Blu-ray is the appropriate medium is another question. The 1963-1972 Neil Young archive installment is going to be a 10 disc set. That's a lot of Blu-ray discs and price hasn't been mentioned yet. With each disc able to store 50GB of data, one wonders why so many discs are needed and how much extra material besides music they will contain?

The ultimate question, however, is whether Neil Young fans at the end of day will simply end up ripping the music from their newly acquired Blu-ray anthology to an MP3 player. After all, that's the way most people listen to music these days not sitting on a couch in front of a Blu-ray player and high definition TV screen. Then again, maybe as we get older we may prefer to vege out and occasionally watch and listen to a Neil Young anthology on our 50 inch LCD with surround sound rather than watch the latest Blu-ray movie release.