Gordon Moore himself approves the extension of his law to disk storage. See this interview in U.S. News in 2000:

Other types of technology are growing even faster than chips. Do you think that, even if there's a limit to chips, other technologies will make up for it?

There have been some that have moved very rapidly. But none of them for as long a time as the complexity of chips has.

One that has amazed me is how they've been able to improve the storage density on hard disks. That has been maintained for almost a comparable period of time, from the 1960s. I was an observer from the sidelines, but I was a bit surprised at how they've been able to bring new technology in.

. . .

Has storage technology grown as fast as integrated circuits?

It's been roughly the same speed. I haven't really plotted it out. I'm sure they call it Moore's Law. I take credit for all of these things.

When President Clinton was giving his technology address at Cal Tech, where I'm chairman of the trustees, he specifically wanted me to introduce him. I couldn't figure out why, since I'm a Republican. I came to figure out that he wanted to use Moore's Law in his opening.

It's amazing: Moore's Law has been taken that broadly. Anyhow, if it's exponential, I'll take credit for it.

I'm not sure I agree. Hard Drives still have a way to go before they approach the reliability and dependability of a CD. I know the MTBF numbers for drives is pretty good, but disk drives are not permanent storage devices. Do you really think that 10 years from now you'll still be using the same drive? I got my first CD player in 1985 and the first CD I bought was Dark Side of The Moon. I still have that CD - it still works just fine. (unrelated trivia - the CD player finally died last year, 17 years after I bought it)

Chris,

Arnold has been on this theme for a long time. When I first read his fiirst essay suggesting that a hard drive shipped with thousands of songs could replace the music industry, my reaction was that the music industry is still fairly dynamic, selling new and fresh rather than stale and old. I still harbor that criticism, and don't see the hard drive becoming the next CD.

Perhaps the biggest problem in discussing music industry business models is the underlying assumption that the industry should have a single, dominant model. I.e. music should be bought on CDs from a CD store. Or, is that going to be totally replaced with people buying online from iTunes. I'll say this about Arnold's hard disk model... it would work very well for historical genres, e.g. a Woodstock era hard drive, early 90's grunge, 80's hair metal, etc. The observation is that most old music which was popular in the past has negligable market value on its own compared to new music that is popular now. Bundling it could help reach price points that make it profitable intellectual property to hold and maintain. So maybe the hard disk model does not emerge as the de facto distribution mechanism for all music, but for identifiable old genres. Kinda like the typical Southern Rock ("Freebird!") 3 CD set that's advertised on TNT late at night, except it's a 3000 song collection of all the cool bands (including JPEGs of ZZ Top's Eliminator).

As to your point about permanence of hard drives, I think "hard drive" is being used much more generally than as an assembly of rotating platters of magnetized materials. Think of Arnold's use of the phrase "hard drive" as something which fits in your hand, has a cost of less than 1 cent per megabyte and shrinking quickly and continually, and can hold thousands of high quality (to 95% of listeners) digitizations of songs. The standard CD holds 72 minutes of music. Arnold's hard drive could be the standard definition, it could be solid state, it could be a very smart cloud of gas in a small balloon, whatever. It's small, cheap, and holds a lot. The production cost of this hardware is in proportion with the licensing costs of the songs contained therein so as to yield a product price that buyers find attractive.

-Brad

The BIG problem with selling music on a hard drive is that given current pricing by the various labels you would be paying a lot of money for even just a 10gig drive filled with music (say 2,000 songs). If you assume WalMart's current low price of $0.88 per song that puts the price of such a media $1760 just for the music content. Not exactly an impulse buy.

Of course those songs will come with restrictions that current CDs don't. Oh and they are of poorer wuality than a CD and as if that isn't enough disincentive they might be in some format that you chosen computing platform or mobile music device don't support.

I'm sorry for the foreseeable future I will stick with CDs I can rip. Especially if I can buy them directly from teh srtist or on the used market.