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The Future of the CD
Murdock037 writes "Nice read at the New York Times (free reg. req.) on the CD, and how it's getting crowded out of the marketplace by gaming and DVDs-- the basic conclusion is that music executives aren't rewarded for rocking the boat, and they wouldn't know how to do it if they were. (And included is a flabbergasting claim from RIAA head Hillary Rosen that only 3 percent of consumers polled are buying less music because prices are too high-- of course, you can come up with a statistic for anything, as 72.5% of all people know.)"
Why would the RIAA want to cite such a statistic even if it's true? It demonstates that price-driven piracy is not the thing killing thier profits.
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As long as people have a portable CD player, a CD player at home, and one in the car, CDs will keep selling.
The extra quality benefit of DVD-A and SACD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
If you think sound quality is important for most people, look at all the portable MP3 players that have recently come out and how well they are selling. Can anyone say iPod?
The restrictive SACD format will not be a lure to the majority of people. DVD-A on the other hand may get a foothold because of its association with DVD-Video.
People want convenience. And until the companies spearheading these formats realise that, their proposed new super-mega-hyper-ultra-quality formats will be dead before day one.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Man CDs cost less than 50c each compared to $25 plus for DVDs. Also cd-burners are less than $100, dvd-burners still cost shitloads and there is not a common std yet.
The cd will not die for a long time!
don't like the results of a poll, rephrase the questions.
I wonder how many times the RIAA did that to get the answers they wanted.
Yes, I can see your argument. Let's transpose it to the 80's marketplace:
:->
As long as people have a portable cassette deck, a cassette deck at home, and one in the car, tapes will keep selling.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
If you think sound quality is important for most people, look at all the portable tape players that have recently come out and how well they are selling. Can anyone say Sony Walkman?
People want convenience. And until the companies spearheading these formats realise that, their proposed new super-mega-hyper-ultra-quality formats will be dead before day one.
Yes, I see what you mean
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
People just don't like change! The DVD was obsolete by the time it became main-stream - it doesn't use the best compression methods nor does it have the highest capacity out of all the Compact Discs, but it is mainstream now and it'll take a while for it to budge.
:P
Do you know how much it costs to replace something? Getting rid of something to replace it with something else just isn't within human nature, no matter how much it would help in the long run! What would happen anyway if they did get rid of CDs? They would just put the same amount of songs on a DVD and sell them at a higher price
We're probably better off with them - or is that my human nature talking?
The only domain left where cds are of value is recording information for consumers. Backups, archives and kind-of-floppy disks for people who can't yet afford writeable dvds. Sales are on the down, fast, and for good reason.
For software distribution, dvd just makes more sense. More and more software requires more than one cd. A dvd is similar in price to a cd, but can hold more information. Why not switch? It's happening all the time.
For music the case is less clear. The cd is still the "best" way to distribute it. The problem is that the heaviest music consumers, the teens and college students, know all about mp3s. Among the artsy college crowd that I hang out with, there are two camps. One says that mp3s are just as good as cds, and easier to get, so they use them. The other camp says that mp3s have low quality sound (either all mp3s, or to some people just the low bitrate ones they can usually find on the internet) so they buy cds instead. Interesting this cross cuts the whole other spectrums: into music or not, rich or poor, death metal or country&western, big names or indy artists, etc..
In fact, more people among the intellectual elite download mp3s then burn them to cd to listen to than buy cds. That's a bit surprising since most mp3s stay on hard disks and flash memory. As I said, cds are dead.
The only place I see cd use increasing is for personal data storage. They are the new floppy disk, and they are back with a vengeance. Comparatively this works also. Back in 1987 my xt had a twenty meg hard disk and floppies one sixtieth that size. Now many people have a forty gig hard disk and use cds one sixtieth that size. For casual storage and backup and archives for people who are too poor to get industrial quality solutions, the cd will stick around in a while in its writeable form.
Not necessarily - maybe the other 97% are buying less music, because they download it from the internet instead ;-)
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
If you want to listen to a CD, you just pop it into the CD player. If you wish, you can skip to a favourite track by pressing a single button. You can randomize the track sequence if you get bored with the default one. Remember that when the CD was introduced, all this was new. LPs had some of these features, but jumping to a specific track required some concentration and precision, and random play was out of the question. Cassettes were just hopeless.
The supposed quality improvements in SACD and DVD-A are likely not audible by the vast majority of people. In double-blind tests, very few people can tell the difference between ~200kbps VBR mp3s and the original source CD. And the difference between SACD/DVD-A and CD is even less than that. The point being that CD is already overkill -- you can throw out 80% of the information and almost nobody will notice.
And the things they're "better" at aren't really necessary. CDs already have ~44 KHz sample rates, enough to accurately reproduce frequencies up to ~22 KHz. Since most humans drop off hearing around 18-20 KHz, with 21-22 KHz being the absolute max, going to 96 KHz sample rate is certainly not needed (and the added frequency resolution isn't noticeable to anyone either). And as for bits per sample, 16-bit audio already provides enough dynamic range to in good quality represent far more than the vast majority of equipment can reproduce.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think the entire problem boils down to this: Compact Discs are just too expensive in terms of bang for the buck for today's consumers.
Let's face it: consumers will balk at shelling out US$18 per album-length audio CD; at these prices there is just too much economic incentive to pirate music, to say the least. Even at US$20 per disc, DVD's are usually a better deal because not only do you get a full-length movie, but often you get lots of background material on the production of the movie, deleted scenes, commentary tracks by the director/actors, and so on.
Take for example the four-disc Extended Edition DVD set of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which you can get for around US$30 at most discount retailers. You not only get superior picture quality, but two different top-quality audio tracks (Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES), FOUR audio commentary tracks, and two Supplementary discs with so much information it would take days to view them all even quickly. This is something no audio CD can hope to match, that's to be sure.
Now, if album-length CD's were priced at US$11 per disc, then the incentive for consumers for buy the disc goes way up and the incentive to pirate music goes way down.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
Actually, back in the 1980's there were a LOT of people looking forward to getting Compact Discs. You have to remember compared to LP turntables, CD's offered the following advantages:
1. It didn't require lots of finicky setup to get it working correctly.
2. Cared for properly, CD's way, way, outlasted LP discs.
3. CD's didn't suffer from wow and flutter, background hiss and low frequency turntable rumble.
4. The storage requirements for CD's was much smaller than LP's.
Sure, the early CD's did sound a bit harsh in the treble frequencies but careful mastering by recording engineers more or less overcame that issue.
It is that convenient size factor that has allowed DVD's to take off in popularity; the MCA/Philips Laserdisc and RCA Selectavision disc formats didn't become widely popular due to fairly stiff storage requirements, while in contrast DVD's same size factor as CD's made them very popular even though most DVD packaging is about 25% larger than CD's.
Apple's R&D often notes that the optical drive is the number one bottleneck in data storage speed, reliability, and size reduction. (Not just for laptops, but desktops too) DVD burners, as Apple now includes in most every model of its computers, produce a lot of heat and add about $250 to the consumer cost of the computer.
I wish manufacturers could just agree on another new standard, such as some sort of Flash based storage. With the quality of Mp4 video and audio you could have relatively small capacity "compact flash cards" - the slot should be a combo drive as already seen in the majority of industry with DVD/CDRW combo drives. Be a flash memory reader and a videoFlash reader.
Now as for cost, if manufacturers would do this, Flash RAM (or SRAM) would start to plummet. These manufacturers would make money based on volume. I could see 128MB cards $1 + 512MB $5 1 GB $9 - these may be unrealistic at first, but WOULD come. It would reduce memory of all types for all the different uses there are.
It would also reduce R&D and reduce heat and weight concerns many Video Player/Laptop/music player manufacturers have at this moment. The XD picture card is promising 3 gigs by the end of this year. If they can put that amount of memory in the size of a postage stamp; imagine what they could do with a compact flash card size?
Of course, reasons are clear why music CDs are expensive right now - RIAA litigation costs MONEY - lots of it. Litigation expenses were nearly 33 million dollars last year. The music industry was caught for overcharging. Third, they don't understand that the cost of online distribution at a reasonable price would dramitically reduce print/ink/plastic/distribution (truck/air) costs.
My question is, are blank CD media pressing companies really making a lot of money?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
only 3% have stopped buying CDs because prices are too high...
You given Rosen too much credit. *Your statistic might potentially be true*.
According to the submission, 3% buy *fewer* CDs because prices are too high.
That's absolutely ridiculous. Let's take this to the point of absurdity. If I start *giving* away CDs for free, how many people are going to take them? Granted, there might be a few who value CDs negatively (they're afraid of them or something), and a few people who have every CD that they have the remotest interest in). But most people are going to take at least *one* more CD.
If prices go down, sales will go up, and I assure you, more than 3% of the population will get at least one CD more.
May we never see th
Cmon!
You can buy an old movie on DVD for under $10 dollars at WallyWorld, which blows away their cost argument. Which is cheaper to produce, a CD or a DVD? Then again theres the price fixing settlement that the major record labels are paying out on now. Their greed will be thier undoing. They should price CD's at $5 a pop, then they become impulse buys. It really galls me that if I go out and buy a CD that's been out for years or a compilation disk they charge through the eyes. As for piracy, only %20 percent of homes have high speed connections, so are the rest of us dial up users spending the hours to download some older stuff? I think not. Janis Ian pointed out that her sales went up over %300 after she posted some stuff and made it available for free!
Admittedly the only CDs I've bought recently have been 'Complete works of $ARTIST' boxed sets, but they tend to be quite good value. The CD goes into my computer, ogg files go onto my hard disk and the CD goes back into its box. The only time I take it out again is if my hard disk breaks (Yes, this has happened). To me, the CD is a back-up, nothing more.
I recently asked a non-geek (yes, they do exist!) if he would pay 10p for an audio track and legally own it if he could, rather than getting it from p2p networks. He thought for a while, then said no. This same individual regularly spends £40 or more on concert tickets. When the music industry realises that recorded music is marketing tool, not a product then they will start having a sustainable buisness model. How many people pay to listen to the radio? None. Many people simply view Kazaa and friends as radio-on-demand.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
To make people pay for something you must first have a product that is as available, as good quality and as useful as the free alternative, right?
CD's used to qualify to two of these, their allot better quality than mp3's, it's as useful as mp3's in the meaning that you could play it in any CD player, on your computer, or on portable mp3 player.
Now what does the music industry do to make people pay for music. They release copy protected CD's that wont play in all CD players, wont play on a computer, can't be ripped to a portable mp3 player. What a great idea.
I believe people are willing to pay for music, but not a useless piece of plastic that they can't do what they want with.
It definitely seems that over the last 10 or 15 years, the total selection that you run into in most stores has gone way down. Unless you live in a big city and have accessed to specialized stores, you just keep running into the same junk albums, with rarely anything more than a couple of years old. And if you do have access to a specialized music store, odds are that half of the interesting stuff is used...
It seems to me that the music store chains (esp. those in malls!) have really hurt the market. It's true: to find a lot of stuff, you actually have to go on-line.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
This is a weird thread. CDs have only gone up slightly in price over the last decade, and yet there are people moaning about how expensive they are. You don't see the same people moaning about video game prices, though, or a dozen other "overpriced" things. I don't think that there's much of a real movement in the "real world" about the price of CDs, just that there is now a precedent for complaining about the price of them, most of this complaining is coming from students or recent graduates, and not coincidentally, students get "free" high-bandwidth internet access.
I've also been seeing the argument that MP3s are easier to obtain and manage than CDs. That's only true if you have high bandwidth internet access and lots of free time.
And you think Flash storage will improve data storange speed? Give me a break. Space usage might decrease slightly, but not much. A couple PCMCIA slots will use up almost as much space as a CD drive, and those cards put off plenty of heat when in heavy use.
Uhhh, you mean CompactFlash?
With the complex electronics required for Flash memory, there is no way they could ever get near the price of CDs/DVDs.
I was hoping I could replace my MiniDiscs with CompactFlash cards and Ogg. With "-q0" 64kbps VBR Ogg files (which sound good, but 128kbps would sound perfect, so would be preferable) I could stick an album on 32MB. So, I looked around and didn't find 32MB cards (let alone 64MB cards) for less than $15, compared to $1 MiniDiscs which would hold more, are editable, can be recorded onto in realtime, and have FAR better sound quality, less power usage, have caddies so they are more durable than CompactFlsah cards, and can be erased and re-recorded more times than CompactFlash... The point is that a small piece of electronics cannot out-price a hunk of plastic and tin.
The bare material costs alone wouldn't allow the prices to go that low. Meanwhile, 700MB CDs (which can hold MP3s, or whatever your preference is) are now only $0.25, and will no doubt cost even less by the time your plan could near fruition.
It would NOT reduce the heat output by too much, and CD drives don't weigh very much anyhow. Besides, the R&D cost would not be gone or reduced, they would be shifted to CompactFlash developers, which means the on-going costs would be high, rather than the one-time machine costs being slightly higher, and media costs being lower.
Don't get me wrong, CompactFlash is a very good media for a great many things, and I'd like to see desktops available with PCMCIA slots so that CF can finally replace floppies (CDs still aren't natively BIOS writable, so they're no good for holding an OS, or ANYTHING that needs to change frequently, which is why USB hard drives are popular). However, for bulk, hi-capacity storage such as movies, music, and system backups, nothing can beat optical discs for the price and capacity.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The problem is, when CDs first came out (1980 for you whippersnappers), the technology to produce them was in its infancy. As a result, the discs produced were absurdly expensive. However, as enough people had been willing to buy them, the music industry decided to continue charging not by what the CD cost to produce, but what they could get away with charging. Back in 1980, CDs cost approximately $30 to produce. In 1985, it cost approximately $20, and by 1990 it cost $5 per CD. Fast forward to modern times, and you can get an idea of what the price per disc should be.
Onto the second point: Besides the above, the secondary reason why most games cost as much as they do, is that unlike a month of bubblegum pop production paid at scale, software companies have up to 100 people or more working on any given title. As anyone with experience in the field can attest, a LOT more talent goes into a good game design than a Backstreet Boys album. In fact, most games out there take upwards of 3 years to produce, while top ten bands churn out music more times in a year than Gene Hackman stars in movies.
Additionally, as games continue their lifespans, their prices drop. As operating systems add new features and make others obsolete, the games are nearly unplayable, and join the "2 for $9.95" bargain bin. CDs on the other hand, are playable indefinately (well, except for that little nasty deal with Palladium), so there's not only a good chance you can find an album released on CD 10 years ago, but you can rest assured that it'll probably still cost $14.95-$19.95.
Now on the other hand, lets look at some numbers, 10 years prior:
Video game prices for CD based games (ROM based cartridges don't quite count, as chip prices contributed the most to the overall retail price) usually ran $59-$79. Production time usually ran 1-2 years for games.
CD prices usually ran $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually ran 1-2 years.
And now:
Video game prices for CD based games usually run $29-$49. Production time runs 2-4 years.
CD prices still run $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually runs 6 months to 1 year.
Note the discrepencies in price cuts VS. production costs, the music industry is ripping us off, while game manufacturers are technically working for sweatshop pay.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
What I won't pay is a new format that can only be played in one particular program, can't be copied or burned to CD etc etc etc. If I pay for a song, I want to listen to it in iTunes, burn it to a CD, or download it to an iPod. Period.
If the music companies did this, would some people then immediiately upload that song to Kazaa? Sure, but they will anyway. At least this way, the companies would make some money from the initial download. That's a risk they need to take.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
The record industry wonders how they can compete with "free". Evian seems to do it quite well. They do it by providing a product with more percieved value, convienence and quality than the product you can get for free at home.
The record industry does not seem to grasp this. If bottled water was harder to use -- say, if you had to have a licenesed opener that would only open certain bottles in certain places and times, they would have a hard time selling the product. Likewise, if consumers didn't think that the water was better (percieved value) than the stuff they got out of their tap, they would have a hard time convincing people to buy it. If they actually put poison in one out of every 100 bottles, they wouldn't be able to sell it at all.
The record companies are poisoning their product, making it harder to use, and the perceived value isn't much higher than mp3s and lower than comparably priced DVDs -- and they wonder why sales are declining. Please tell me these guys somehow missed Marketing 101 in college.
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That's exactly what I've been saying. Give me a cheap, reliable download source for every song in the catalog -- at say 25 cents per 128kbit MP3 (maybe more for high kbit), and a known-good, unencumbered file. Given that, why the hell would I scrounge thru FTPs and newsgroups if I could *more conveniently* get it, at a reasonable price, from a recording industry server??
They're missing a huge opportunity, because they're so afraid this would make it too easy to pirate songs. Like it's hard now??!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
They're missing a huge opportunity, because they're so afraid this would make it too easy to pirate songs. Like it's hard now??!
I agree. For some unknown reason, this reminds me of the joke virus that was running around years ago that said "This virus is being sent to you on the honor system. Please forward copies to everyone in your address book and then delete your hard drive. Thank you." Honor alone isn't going to stop piracy, its a better business model. We used to buy meat at the butcher, veggies at the market, bread at the baker and precooked food only at sit down restaurants. Then someone found a better way to distribute all these goods, saving everyone money.
Its a minor pain in the ass to find songs now, but only minor. A good service that charged a reasonable fee (maybe based upon quality of mp3) would clean up if it had a good interface and library. If nothing else, for older stuff not in print anymore. I would sign up. $9.99 a month for 40 songs and a fee per song after that. I wouldn't even bitch about the pop up ads.
A good system like this would reduce piracy somewhat because it would take away much of the incentive.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Why does the RIAA not get it that entertainment is something that the general public does not NEED, just WANTS. The US, home of the RIAA, is dead smack in the middle of the largest recession in recent years; why will they not finally admit that the items that bring home their bread are simply frivolous, inessential goods? We don't have money to buy $20 cds, and frankly most of us are fed up with their incessant marketing ploys, and release after release of cacophonous trash. Segway knows that their recreational product won't fare well in this market, why can't the RIAA own up to the same fate?
--- What
Another thing they clearly haven't noticed is that when you make something really cheap (ie. a good value) and easy to acquire, and you're reasonable about "fair use", the goodwill that engenders will itself reduce piracy.
An old example: the DOOM community. Between the shareware version, the encouraged extensibility of the game, and the fact that idSoftware didn't get their shorts in a knot about the roughly 4-to-1 "shared with friends" ratio, they created a huge pool of goodwill. So while folks would share their copy of DOOM with their immediate friends, if anyone asked for a "free" copy in the newsgroups, NO ONE would provide it. Fair treatment by the seller led to customers sticking to fair use of their own free will (as best you can expect, anyway).
I think they'd find it's much the same with music. "It's only a dime or a quarter, hardly worth my time to burn you a CD. Just pay the few cents and go download it yourself."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Now if only artists who embrace the internet (cheers! that's the only way I'll ever hear of most of 'em!!) would remember that not everyone has nor *wants* javascript enabled ... matthewgood.net is completely inaccessable without js, which is enough to make me shrug and go away. :(
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Bootleg CDs may not be a big deal in other cities, but they're on almost every corner here in NYC. They even have standardized pricing: one for $5, three for $12. They sell like hotcakes because I think that's the price point buyers are comfortable with.
I think of bootlegs as preview CDs. If I like something a lot I'll buy the real CD in a store. A case in point is the Pink CD. I was pleasantly surprised, since it was so long since I bought a CD in a store, at the elaborate pink-themed packaging (bootlegs are blank with color xeroxed cover inserts). I think I'd buy more CDs in stores just for the packaging, if they were cheaper.
What about DVDs, then? At $15-25, they're priced just right for what you get. And from a $ per MB standpoint they make sence, too. At $4 for 700 MB of music on a bootleg CD, a DVD with about 4200 MB of music and video should cost about $24. And they do.
There's many precedents, most notably CDs. CDs are 10x 'better' than vinyl (sound quality, production cost, resistance to scratching, size, etc) and easily replaced vinyl once the price of recorders came down. DVDs are 10 times better than pre-recorded video cassettes (production costs, quality, access time, size, etc).
Personally, I think Minidiscs are 10x better than tape (which they were intended to replace), but they haven't taken off so well.
However, are DVD-A/SACD 10 times 'better' than CDs? Audiophiles might think so, but I doubt regular joes will consider it worth the investment. Does it sound significantly better than CD? Does it offer many new features over CD? Then regular people won't buy SACD/DVD-A players.
What will happen is that the cost of add SACD/DVD-A to a regular CD player will come down, and it won't be such a big deal to buy a SACD/DVD-A equipped CD player. It may take a long time, but eventually CD will be phased out, and it'll be there in backwards compatibility mode only.
Similarly with music. How can a store possibly compete on variety with ebay, amazon...?
Even tho the audiophile are gonna scream when I say this...
They could compete using the kiosk model, with several hard drives with very high quality mp3s, 256k or better, and an internet connection to their main office. If you want to HEAR a sample not in the current local library, it streams a 64k mp3 for listening. If you choose to burn that song, it downloads the 256k version to be converted to Red Book on your custom disk. It should cache songs, so if someone else wants that song in the next few days, there will be a copy in the cache. If you can actually fill up a cd with 74 minutes of music (instead of the typical 30 to 40 minutes) and choose the songs, then it would be worth a premium. I can EASILY see people paying 20 bucks for that, maybe more. They can still sell regular CD's like they do now, side by side with this new technology. Some will want the full CD with fancy jacket and information about that artist. Some wont.
The problem is: This model is not as profitable as the current business model USED TO BE. Thus, they are not likely to embrace it, insisting on staying with the current business model, which is losing them money ($132 million last year for Sony alone).
This is going down with the ship instead of jumping in a lifeboat, just because the ship is bigger.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!