While the digital era has compromised the music labels’ ability to resell their catalogs in new physical formats, there is the opportunity for at least one such iteration going forward.

It might seem that once you’ve bought a song digitally, that’s it—why would anyone buy it again? But most people don’t really understand what they are getting when they buy an MP3 or its rough equivalent, like the AAC format you get on iTunes.

At some point, the labels will make the judgment that they have reached a critical mass in unloading those catalogs once again as MP3s. Then, I am sure, will come a new PR campaign.

We’ll be told that MP3s are an inferior audio product!

But the labels will have a solution for us: It is called “Lossless.”

Boilerplate background:

• The genius of the MP3 was that it could compress a large audio file down to a fraction of its normal size.
• It did this partly by losing some—not a great deal, but some—audio quality.
• In very crude terms, an MP3 is about a tenth the size of a CD-quality audio file, coming out to about one MB per minute.
• It’s pretty easy to compress a song down to half its digital size and lose no audio quality; that’s what Apple’s “Apple Lossless” codec claims to do.
• The size of iPod storage, leaving aside computer hard drives, has grown exponentially
• A casual music fan can now store a very large collection of music on her 160-gig classic—nearly 1000 albums in lossless format.

I think the labels themselves aren’t ready to embark on this stategy yet, because the digital sales market isn’t close to tapping out. (The trick, remember, is not sales, but re-sales!) But some artists are already looking at the future, among them T-Bone Burnett and Neil Young, who has been talking about bringing his long-delayed Archive project out on Blu-ray discs, which are large enough to contain an enormous quantity of CD-quality sound.

Anyway, there’s an interesting post here detailing some of the treats in store. Blu-rays hold 80 gigs of data, it says:

But Hollywood has seen the light and is putting lossless audio formats on Blu-ray. The HD video contained on a Blu-ray Disc is still massively compressed (in a lossy kind of way). How massively? It would take about 21 Blu-ray discs to store an uncompressed two-hour film. The soundtracks are actually getting a pretty good deal, since their compression is at least lossless. DTS-HD Master Audio is a lossless format that’s a bit-for-bit match of the original audio track, and Dolby TrueHD is also a 100% lossless coding technology. Of course, these formats are still compressed — they save space compared to WAV files — but the compression doesn’t affect audio quality.

But a column on Wired News is moving to debunk lossless fetishism before it even gets started! Writes Eliot Van Buskirk about the above commentary:

According to the article, lossless codecs will “destroy” the MP3 format because hard drive and media capacities are on the rise, Blu-Ray movie soundtracks are encoded losslessly, iPod docks are showing up in high-end home stereos and Apple could flick a switch and have iTunes start encoding into Apple Lossless by default. Balderdash, I say!

He’s got five reasons, Nos. one and five have some validity, I think, but he’s still far too ahead of the game. You can’t start debunking lossless unil it gets a seat at the table, and it’s not there yet.