ABSTRACT

Whenever we listen to a piece of pre-recorded music today, it is, almost with certainty, a playback of a digital recording. This is not surprising, since music has been distributed in digital form since the 1980s on compact discs. Since then, we have observed major disruptions in the music sector. Today, with the advances in the context of media encoding formats, higher processing power even on small devices, and high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, many of us no longer have physical music collections anymore but carry our virtual collections with us on our smartphones.