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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
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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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?
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?