The number one reason I refuse to buy music online (and discourage my students from the same) unless I already owned the record or cassette or know someone who does:

" Millions of young listeners are buying music that is sold without liner notes, correct recording dates and session information. Even the musicians' names are often removed from their performances... The less that contemporary players in all genres know about the past, the less likely they will be to advance the music. But jazz is perhaps at the greatest risk for two reasons: Listeners require at least a small level of explanation to approach it, and improvisation is at the core of its DNA."


Jazz hurt by downloads

For similar reasons, I think it hurts ANY genre worth anything. No thing is built from nothing. There is a clear history for the vast majority of it, coming straight from the end of U.S. slavery for blues, rock and jazz. If you take a look, most good groups have come from wide arrays of others, and so on, and you can find very good music from tracking this trail. Any music where jamming is common (rock, blues, jazz, FI), this can be pretty important. Between the RIAA wanting to control art, and others not caring enough, it is continuing downhill.

I don't like the RIAA, but there isn't a good alternaive for reasonably popular music. But I want to know who wrote things, who produced them, who is playing on various tracks, etc.; yet what we are seeing is technology stripping that away, when it could be adding to it. I'll stop before I am forced to include a 1984 reference .

Some online vendors (magnatune for one) offer full liner notes if the artist supplies them. Just about all music I bought or freeloaded from (the original) mp3.com had tag links to the artists' web pages so if the artist cares to present all that information the mechanism is there.

THe quantity/quality of liner notes generally took a dive with CD's due to smaller working area. Now with web links and/or including electronic documents with the album they *can* be better than ever.

Edit: Recording dates and other session data can be tag-stored in the music file. This enhances the ability of a student (at heart or by registration) to call up various versions of a song to compare different artists renditions, or the same artist's evolution over time.

As Cerbie said, why would it hurt Jazz more than any other genre?

The reason I do not buy music online is 1) Most of it is lossy, I would rather buy the CD then rip into FLAC 2) I'm on dialup (for about one more month)

As we move to more advanced systems where metadata takes a greater role in the way the stuff works, I think this will start to become a non-issue. There's no reason you can't store all that information with the song itself, along with URLs and/or other types of pointers to more information. The current systems don't lend themselves well to that sort of thing, but it's coming. The amount of data online is staggering, and metadata is the solution to help organize it, in the long term.