I think no one doubts that higher bit depth and higher sampling rates are useful when recording and editing, the interesting question is whether you can get away with a lower bit rate and sampling rate when selling the music.
I would say that 16/44 is definitely enough if you don’t plan on editing the music in any way.
What MP3 has shown is that size matters – even today. Flash memory is still expensive, storage is still not unlimited, broadband access is still not available everywhere. Why should we be needlessly wasteful in that last step from producer to consumer?
(I’m a bit uncomfortable with that statement. Ideally, it would be possible for us to just buy the raw, not yet re-coded output and a plethora of other formats. Consumers can then just re-encode themselves as needed. 24/96 truly is better – humans can’t hear the difference but if our ears were better we would – there is really no harm done in selling it. But any claims that consumers really need 24/96 audio seem simply wrong to me.)
And what happens when music goes into public domain and you want to remix / enhance that music?
That's why I still prefer to buy audio-CDs: I turn songs into ringtones all the time. To create a good ringtone, you have to cut, normalize the amplitude / compress the dynamic range (to avoid clipping) and then increase the volume. And then compress as MP3.
Doing that on an MP3 that's already low-quality, uploading to a phone with an obviously subpar loudspeaker, produces awful results.
And disregarding the people that would go through pain for doing the above, there is still a market out there for people wanting to get the best sound possible, even if they couldn't tell the difference.
I would say that 16/44 is definitely enough if you don’t plan on editing the music in any way.
What MP3 has shown is that size matters – even today. Flash memory is still expensive, storage is still not unlimited, broadband access is still not available everywhere. Why should we be needlessly wasteful in that last step from producer to consumer?
(I’m a bit uncomfortable with that statement. Ideally, it would be possible for us to just buy the raw, not yet re-coded output and a plethora of other formats. Consumers can then just re-encode themselves as needed. 24/96 truly is better – humans can’t hear the difference but if our ears were better we would – there is really no harm done in selling it. But any claims that consumers really need 24/96 audio seem simply wrong to me.)