Do you buy Blu-rays for music or movies? The answer is obviously the latter, but some folks want you to say the former. Recently, I attended a very nice presentation held by the British Video Association at the London recording studio Metropolis.
The point of the event was to stress how music on Blu-ray could/should be a significant driver for the BD business in the UK. My old chum and BVA spokesman Mike Brown was bullish about the success of BD and what lies around the corner. ‘The UK’s standalone Blu-ray player population totalled 250,000 by the end of 2008,’ he declared. According to new data from the BVA, these new Blu-ray owners will join 1.4 million PlayStation 3 owners, many of which have yet to be fully turned onto Blu-ray movies. ‘We currently have 800 Blu-ray titles in the market,’ said Brown. Apparently around 100 of these are music titles.
There’s no doubt that Blu-ray is a great format for music. With Super Audio CD chasing DVD Audio into the history books of forgotten tech, it’s probably the last great hope for high-performance audio we have. As Police drummer and composer Stewart Copeland (pictured above) so eloquently put it to me: ‘When it comes to audio quality you might as well throw the CDs away. Blu-ray is absolutely the cutting edge of sound reproduction at the moment. It is the standard I’m now making music for.’
But I’ve got to say I’ve little faith in music studios communicating the benefits of lossless audio to either their consumers or the specialist AV press. Since the launch of the format, only one music label has ever press-released BD format music titles to me.