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Is the Physical CD Still A Viable Market?
An anonymous reader writes "With iTunes and P2P networking dominating the online music scene, does the physical CD have any place in our future? Slyck is running an article on the study conducted by the NPD Group." From the article: "Since its peak sales year in 1999, there has been a steady deterioration in the number of physical CDs sold and shipped. The most immediate blame is typically placed on piracy, however over the course of the last six years this has proven superficial to reasons of more substance."
CD? Dead. CDR? Alive and kicking! >:)
Trolling is a art,
At th thought of not owning physical media with an album. Plus I think the CD has a bonus of liner notes, art etc. I realize most people don't care about this, but I do.
Not everyone who listens to music even owns a computer!
Many people, while not Luddites, are not as tied to technology as many Slashdottes and 20-somethings.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I know this is not what the author was talking about, but there is plenty of life left in the lowly music CD in the form of short production sales. You know the types where the band sells them after performing for $10-15. Also as production costs drop, on burning speeds increase there may well be a market for all sorts of other on demand CD writing. The music store is the thing that is in danger, not the CD.
I know you can download FLAC etc, but if I'm buying music I'll order a CD from cd-wow or something rather than download 128bps and rip it myself.
There is no way that i will fork out money to have a lossy compressed DRM encumbered file, If i'm to continue to buy music it will have to be in CD format.
This is probably a more reasonable question to apply to games, especially online games. With digital distribution of games like through Steam, the need for physical media becomes obsolete. Steam has a good way of dealing with those who don't want to be online all the time as well, you just have it remember you, and you can still play a game that has been activated. But it also is becoming more and more the case for music as well. But of corse there are those who still want physical property to lie around and take up space, and to wear out in their cd players. The counterpoint to that being that could burn their digital music to cd anyway.
I encrypt all my files with Double XOR Encryption!
CDs are necessary because they offer a constant, nondegrading which is free from the compatibility and format hassles of digital distribution and which you can be fairly guaranteed will work on simple, easily acquirable, and arbitrary hardware into the reasonable future.
Of course, the people actually selling CDs are no longer offering this, now that they load up their CDs with "copy protection" technologies which circumvent security measures, often mimic viruses, and in some cases fill the error-checking bits with garbage, thus hastening degradation of the CD-- and which the consumer is giving no warning that these technologies are present.
Which is why I don't buy CDs anymore.
I know several people that want to own a phsyical piece of property (CD in this case), and would spend extra money, just to have the shiny CD. Not to mention those people that don't have enough knowlege about computers to actually figure out how to download music. Add to that, the hassle of having to burn music onto a CDR to play in your car, and I can STILL see a vibrant market for CDs. Give it several more years, and then I think the market will shrink further.
I still think of the cd as a freer media for getting music... I can own the cd, rip to whatever format I want, and no one is going to bother me... On the other hand, I still haven't looked hard at the online DL services (the legal ones, mind you), but I get the distinct impression that they're all going to restrict me somehow. Naivity says I'm going to want to have the music files i have now for the rest of my life.
Yes, but.
(Note that you can legally acquire a lossless DRM-free set of bits. Whether or not it's legal to rip those DRM-free bits, on account of your computer not automatically running the DRM/Spyware/Rootkit shipped with the CD, or on account of it not being able to run the DRM/Spyware/Rootkit shipped with the CD, has yet to be determined by the courts. But acquiring the DRM-free bits is legal.)
The most interesting case of the upcoming decade will be whether the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules apply to a DRM-laden CD - ripped to MP3 on a machine that didn't support Windows Autoplay, from a drive and/or OS that presents both the .wav "files" and the data track with the autoplaying rootkit as separate sets of files, without any intervention from the user.
Just because the media consistently talks about iPod's, etc, doesn't mean everyone is using them. CD's (or any form of physical music storage) won't be going anywhere for a while.
My journal: Clicky. Read it because it
than 128kbps DRMed $1 a track crap.
I may just be backwards, but I don't like the idea of downloading my music, I like the CD, the case and the booklet with the lyrics. Granted, I only buy 1 CD or so in any given year, and even then I won't pay the $15 they are trying to pump out of me for it. Still, when I do buy music, I want the full CD with all of the stuff which goes with it.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Although a bit of a geek (I'd not be here otherwise) I think it'd be a shame to loose CDs to virtual equivalents. Although I've an mp3 player I've not really bothered with downloads: I still prefer something physical; I prefer CD quality; it's less likely to get lost/damaged (I've lost two hard-drives over the years but only one single CD to damage); browsing in HMV is still more fun; I'd like to have the opportunity to be pwned by Sony.
The balance will probably continue to shift but as they're are still people that search out vinyl they'll still be people after disks over downloads. The more worrying aspect is the rise of ringtones - the horror - over decent quality music.
PC Games tend to come on DVDs these days, even the fastest broadband would take long enough to download 4.7GB, and that's only going to go up just as fast as higher connection speeds in future. I don't think downloading is a very viable method of online distribution. It takes up far too much bandwidth to be worth it.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
iTunes and such has reduced my need for CDs. I still buy them when I find that I want more than 2 songs from any given CD. I figure it this way, if I really like two of the songs I will probably like more of them, so get the real thing. Something about having the "physical" CD around.
Now what really has crimped my CD buying is MP3s. Not those I buy or download but those I ripped. I am going through music I haven't listened to in many years. Discovering songs I enjoyed way back when and again now.
Summary, 75% of my new music is individual tracks from iTunes. The remaining 25% only occurs when I find more than a pair of tracks I like on a CD. Of course that means soundtracks are always purchased.
Are CDs doomed? Probably, simple reason is that they have now become cumbersome. When I can cram a thousand songs in a device less than the size of a CD (width) it becomes apparent which is more convienent for taking the music with me. Its only a matter of time before that convienence influences purchasing them in the first place.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There's an installed base that will only play standard CDs, but they're also totally rippable. In other words, they can either kiss off the installed base market to bet the farm on DRM or they can keep selling standard CDs and render DRM largely pointless.
Selling non-DRM ISO images (a la MagnaTune is, of course, Not Gonna Happen. Decisions, decisions ...
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Whatever you do, don't toss the cds you do have. Sell them to an online used cd store like secondspin.com, so I can buy them all up myself. ;)
Seriously, I've amassed quite a collection of albums this way. $6 to $7 on average, great condition on average. I simply copy the music to my hard drive in flac format and put the album away for storage. Then I can convert to any lossy format I want, any time I want, as many times as I want, all the while retaining the original lossless flacs.
Digital audio sounds terrible.
So yes, there is still a viable market for CDs. At least among those who cringe at any form of digital compression coming through a good set of speakers.
I think it's time for the industry to get creative. With the advent of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, you should be able go out and buy a "boxed set" of the complete recordings of The Beatles, complete with album art, videos, extras, and features, all on one disk. Throw in a nice little booklet, and you can bet that there's going to be a market for it, and it will be very cheap to produce.
I do think that physical media like CDs are on the way out, but I think there are plenty of people who will cling to it for years and years down the road.
This story is just baiting people, but anyway....
Of course there will always be a market for CDs (or any physical sound carrying medium) because:
-Digital music is DRM encumbered--you can't really control what you own. And if you're on the ridiculous Napster-type plans, you're really on a music rental plan and all your music stops functioning after your membership expires. This may apply to the physical media one day to, but for now, this the rule for digital store downloads, and the exception for the physical media.
-Digital music is degraded. Perhaps this isn't essential to the casual user, and maybe storage/bandwidth gains will obviate the need for lossy compression one day, but in the meanwhile, some people (like me) are willing to pay a premium for higher fidelity.
-Digital music is virtual. There is something to be said, to the fan or collector, anyway, for owning the physical medium. You get the whole "package" as the artist intended for his/her work to presented. Cover art, booklet, sometimes creative packaging, physical medium, sense of ownership. (But if they DRM the medium, that sense of ownership gets tarnished badly)
CD sales might be taking a big "adjustment" due to online music, but there will always be a market for them. The good ones, anyway.
A CD acts as an obvious physical token for the owner to show that they have a licence for the contents.
Downloaded music relies either on licencing servers or on a licence file on the client computer, which seems a much more fragile model.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
The last music CD I bought had a visible defect causing severe skipping on every single track. Rather than drive 20 miles back to the store I purchased it from to exchange it for another CD (probably from the same defective batch), I just found a torrent of the album and downloaded it.
It is if you want to hack into a company's network using social engineering.
I have about 100 cds, and my collection is still growing. I like being able to have the music in any file format I care to rip it to, having album art, a physical object I can hold, pass around and lend to people etc etc etc.
MP3s are just files. Just data. You can't hand around an MP3. MP3s can't be packaged, and they are forever MP3s. Worth the extra money. That and my local record place are really good, and I prefer the actual service I get from them rather than the click click done of Amazon or iTunes.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
10 years from now we'll all be talking about how good we had it with CDs when all the current 14-30 year-olds grow older and have discretionary income then realize how utterly duped they were when they fire up their 128kbps downloads on their new $5,000 audio systems. The RIAA is laughing all the way to the bank over low bitrate downloading and DRM because they know you'll have to buy it over again one day - dont feed the pig! I'll keep ripping my CDs into VBR0-highest mp3 for the time being and hang onto the source CD; not like it takes up that much closet space.
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
People are transitioning over to mp3/ogg/wma files because of those formats are more convenient to use. One sign that these formats are becoming really commonplace is that car makers such as Toyota are starting to make mp3 files a playable option on most, if not all of their models, not just the high end ones. This fact, combined with the convenience of more music (and customized to individual tastes), makes it pretty clear that the prices are too high for the current demand.
I mean real, pukka honest to gods CD's with the CD logo on them, rather than silver disks that (sometimes) work in your CD player but come with non CD standard copy protection..
I've sent back so many non-CD's for refunds to online shops that fail to mention there not technicaly CD's, as a consumer I [b]will not[/b] be persecuted for buying music, if I buy it I'm not a criminal , eh..
Until I start seeing a Linux-compatible site anywhere near as comprehensive (and inexpensive!) as mininova, I'd say I have no interest in downloading music! (Well, just kidding with mininova though – most of the stuff I download is Linux software ;-) The nice thing about CD's, other than being conveniently portable and not to mention available absolutely everywhere, is that there's no DRM... well, there may be software like Sony puts on the things but the music tracks themselves are unencrypted and easily accessible to CD-ripping programs like cdparanoia.
Kind of a bit off-topic, but I'd say it's also true with software stuff, too – while downloading can be convenient, it's also a real pain in the ass unless you have a really high speed connection, a CD/DVD burner... and it's even worse if you're on the server side. With my Linux distribution, I've actually been mailing out physical CD's to some of the mirror sites, because BitTorrent's just a bit tricky, and my server's located on my home connection, so FTP isn't really an option...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
There are two things the CD still has going for it:
1) It is cheap as dirt to buy and
2) The data is hardcoded, so it cannot be changed once written and "sealed".
But it seems hardcoding data is not even that desirable anymore for most storage needs. Flash Drives are also becoming cheaper, plus they have features a CD could never have, like data compression/decompression. However ,as I still see floppies sitting around here and there, I do not think the CD will die out completely, but it will probably fade into obscurity within the next generation or so.
I find that although many people are liberal in beliefs, they are conservative in actions.
Study discusses:
//T
- That the number of sold CDs has decreased from 1999 to 2003
- That piracy has increased due to P2P
and conveniently fails to mention how CD retail prices has varied during those years. So if CD prices was to be bumped up to $200, they could scream even more at how piracy eats their profits, and how the number of sold units has decreased!
Audio CDs will still have a place for all of us that despise the mud you get from compressed audio.
people have finished replacing all their tapes with cd's. The only way to save the sales is another format change.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I had pretty much given up buying CDs for a while but after I bought a 1st gen iPod and especially after the iTMS store opened I did much more browsing of music. It revived my interest, got me listening to my old stuff and trying new stuff. However, I'm not thrilled with the low bit rate and DRM of the songs from iTMS.
I'm willing to pay more for songs on CD just for the comfort of knowing that I've got full bit rate versions and can rip to any format I need, play them on any device, etc. etc. So while I do buy songs from iTMS, if I'm going to buy more than a couple of songs from an album, I'll usually buy the CD.
Anti-piracy ad from the early 90s
http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/1672870/
I've actually noticed, at least via amazon's history (which is somewhat scary how long they have kept my purchasing habits) that I've bought more cd's since 2000 and the napster revolution then before (that includes a general knowledge of second hand cd purchases as well). In the last 2 years I will tend to buy multiple albums at a time when I order. Course the thing is that the labels I'm buying from arn't part of the RIAA.
The last RIAA album that I actually bought was ~2003 and that was a Evanescence CD. I've not been trying to avoid buying from them, it just so happens that the music I enjoy is on Metropolis and projekt's labels. Its just like the MPAA I haven't gone to the movies a lot because the vast majority of stuff is crap. I'd rather just wait and rent it for one third of the price.
It's nice to have a solid representation of something you own. With the digital age I don't fully trust or "feel" the whole situation. It's nice to have something solid.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
There may be millions of GenXrs listening to Blink182 through iPod earbuds, but that's crap audio for people who buy Telarc or Deutsche Grammophon CDs and listen through serious electronics. Sure it's nice to rip a CD and have music to listen to at work. Even so, I prefer to rip to AAC at 320. All that pop stuff on iTunes is candy - lightweight content at lightweight digital density, and serious music listeners can tell the difference. I find it amazing that people who wouldn't think twice about spending 200 bucks on a double overkill graphics card for gaming listen to such lo-fi music through noisy electronics.
fault-tolerant
Personally, I find it to be too much of a hassle to maintain a music collection in digital form. It's less work for me to stick a CD on the shelf.
Find free books.
I really like my CDs when it comes to hearing "all the sound." A well-recorded CD is only a bit shy of the original format AIFFs from my recordings.
I honestly think that there will have to be some changes in the electronic-downloaded-music world before CDs become obsolete.
Are other mediums likely to take over? Yes. I wouldn't bet on anything that says a given (physical or electronic) format is the "be all and end all" for a given media. Technology and smart people will improve things over time. However, I don't think that CDs will go away for quite some time. I still enjoy my vinyl...
A Passionate Independent Musician
Yes. CDs still make sense even in the iPod age because they provide a durable backup medium even when the content is transfered to a digital device.
I will keep buying CDs. I don't listen to the actual CD anymore: I just rip it, put the files on my RAID server and listen to the digital version via my computer or my iPod and keep the CD safe in storage. If anything happens to my music (or if, God forbid, i need to re-rip it because a new/better format comes along), I still have the original CD (which I paid for).
Personally, I hate iTunes and most online digital services: they will end up killing physical media, and that's a bad thing. CDs are (mostly/theoretically) DRM free and you can listen to them on a variety of devices. Digital media is often encumbered by lossy compression and/or DRM.
It's the economy, stupid!
For me, CD is still viable, and so is vinyl! I see my friend buying individual songs off iTunes for the price of a sandwich and I laugh at him. If you're going to get digital rips of music (and play them on awful tinny laptop speakers), you may as well just download it for free. When I pay for music I want to be able to touch it. If you've never experienced the joy of owning a 12" picture disc and sleeve, you've never loved music.
I download 100s of MP3s every year. If I find bands that aren't one-hit-wonders or produce utter garbage, I buy their CDs. Just 15 minutes ago, I put in an order for seven CDs for groups that I've found by downloading "illegal" MP3s. Okay, I know that not everyone do this, but I know quite a few of my friends who does.
...with the MP3 version right on the CD itself. That way you can transfer the songs onto MP3 if you are using a computer, or you can listen to the CD if you don't have an MP3 player. I had been doing this when I was still burning regular music CDs using CD-Extra, and I think it's quite a pleasant idea. If you include DRMed MP3s even, this would probably deter people from ripping it themselves. I'd love to just have the MP3s totally, but I think that's a nice compromise at least.
Now as far as whether CDs will last or not, I think a lot of people only have a CD player and not much else still. I do believe there should be more in the MP3 CD player market. Such as "Get all of Eminem's albums on 1 CD" and such in stores, because a lot of people have MP3 CD players (some don't even know that they do). You could charge a little less for this type of album maybe.
Another thing I think would be nice is if MP3 players could maybe have an input port for media of some kind. Then offer some type of downloadable cartridge or something (I guess like they did with those song things you can buy at the toy store), and allow the user to copy it to the device and still retain a physical backup, so that you don't have to worry about losing the information if the player stops working
I definitely am not in the market for a copy of a song in downgrade quality with no physical backup and without real convenience over other types of online downloading. Simply put, in most cases it's easier to bittorrent than itune an album, and also cost effective. Until the industry provides attractive options that in some way enhance the end user's quality, CDs will continue to drop in sales, Itunes (being as it is the only alternative, or just about the only alternative) will continue to rise, and a lot of people will continue to download illegally. Now you can punish all the people, or give them what they want. Pass the savings on, it doesn't cost as much to do digital distribution, so don't charge as much... Either way, I hope CDs hang around at least a little while longer.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
At least today, you can still rip most CDs (if I had one I couldn't rip, it would go back as defective, period). I prefer higher bit rates (192 Kbps AAC).
;-)
I would never pay Tower prices ($18.99 for a new CD, who the hey are they kidding!) but if I can find an album (er... CD) where I like 5 or 6 songs, I'll pay $11 at Amazon or Target for it. I really do use the CD as the "rip from this" medium, though. I've heard of people that check out CDs from the local library and rip them at high bit rates -- perish that thought
Not so much a fan of DRM on the iTunes songs though I do use iTunes every day.
Finally... I'm pretty anal about tagging on my songs, because it makes them a lot easier to sort/adjust/whatever. Legal issues of MP3/AAC downloads aside, last I looked tagging was a MESS on stuff on the P2P networks, and the bit rates were all over the map... my desire for order prefers something I have ripped myself.
The problem with a lot of CDs is that very often you get the CD and an often-crap set of liner notes that increasingly doesn't even give you the lyrics to the songs or any other form of added value.
When U2 released their last album, they promoted the hell out of the iTunes version, and released a CD version complete with a snazzy cardboard case, bonus DVD and 48-page hard-bound book. A plain vanilla CD version with just the lyrics was also sent to stores (if you didn't want to pay the reasonable markup on the mini-boxed set). Everyone I know - even fellow iTunes store addicts - ended up hunting down the deluxe version. Even people that don't particularly like the band were transfixed by the whole package when they saw it. (Pics here and here. )
The band went into it knowing people would be tempted to download it for free, but never whined about it. Instead they offered a wide variety of choices and actually did something to make fans want to go out of their way to get the physical product - and the most expensive version of the release, at that.
- Signing my handle in the vinyl appreciation post.
as soon as Chuck decides he bought his last... it's all over.
Many people, while not Luddites, are not as tied to technology as many Slashdottes and 20-somethings.
Your logic is flawed. You only took a snapshot of our current day, but fail to see the trends.
Remember the times when the Walkman was an expensive gadget? It wasn't long until it took off. MP3-CD players are inexpensive to get, computers are pretty popular right now (remember you don't need a Pentium 3200 to burn / rip a CD), and cybercafes are available to anyone at $1 / hr.
Also remember that today's 20-somethings grow up and technology comes cheaper. The iPod (and its clones) are here to stay.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think all the on-line music stores using DRM, including iTunes, are a big rip-off; and the few on-line music stores that don't use DRM don't have the music I want.
Physical CDs give me content I want without DRM, they provide proof that I own the music, and they provide a physical backup. If that weren't a music distribution model already, someone would have to invent it.
For free music, I use podcasts; they deliver interesting and new stuff onto my machine every day.
I wonder what effect the used market has on CD sales.
It seems most stores now have a "used" section. I know I buy many more cds used now than I did a few years ago -- especially online where I can find stuff I'd never find in stock at the local store.
As for the CD format being dead - I hope not. While I subscribe to emusic and have bought some stuff off iTunes they are certainly not a replacement to physical media.
there will probably be a place for physcial media for a long time; but it is the technology that is out of date. The 44.1khz sample rate is simply not good enough for modern recording and playback technology. Anyone who spends over 1k on a system will be able to hear the weakness of the signal - harsh, cold etc. In fact even from inception it has been inadequate - many people kept their record players and still use them.
I think it is time to move on to 96k 24 bit technology. In the market i am talking about there is no real space for compression technology in the audiophile market.
count me in as well
Frontline did a cool piece about 2 years ago. They hit upon a number of things, one of which was CD sales.
i c/view/
WatchOnline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mus
The music industry has never really been a giant money maker. However, massive corporations bought into the industry during a weird peek time. Hip Hop and Rap were becoming popular and something completely new was being marketed. Moreover, many people were replacing their vinyl and cassettes.
Now that has leveled off, and they're bitching and complaining. We haven't seen anything remarkably "new" in a long long time, and many of us don't need to repurchase our old albums in order to fill our iPods.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Isn't everything in decline since 1999? Did piracy take down the .com boom as well? Can we blame piracy then for hanging chad elections and greenhouse gases? Terrorism?
not everyone wants or has a computer and an internet connection. the portability of cd's is very nice for the average internet challenged consumer.
Cheap, plentiful players for a format that consumers are familiar with.
If some label gets smart before CDs become totally supplanted by downloads, they can easily sell $5 CDs *without* any DRM crap. Then hype the convenience of a source of known quality you can rip and use any way you want.
It makes me think of satellite vs cable. Cable sucks, but not having it drop out in heavy rain is a read convenience.
The CD would come roaring back to life if there was a "best of" version of each CD that contained the best 5 - 7 songs and the CD cost no more than $8.00. The problem is quantity versus quality. If a CD costs $10 - $17 bucks, 25% of the tracks are good, 25% are ok and the rest is crap it's just not worth it. I'd rather cherry pick the good stuff off of iTunes. I'd prefer to own a hard copy on a pressed CD for backup purposes, but I'm not just not willing to pay the difference if 50% of the music on the CD is filler. Remove the filler, sell the good stuff at a reasonable price and you'll have plenty of buyers.
You can easily burn any of your iTunes purchases to a CD, which you can then use in exactly the same way as a store bought CD.
Some people claim this results in noticably worse sound quality, but I've never seen any evidence for that.
I do accept that keeping analogue music sound in an analogue storage format (vinyl) means that no sound quality is lost in conversion. But to *really* bring hear that difference, you need to spend a huge amount on a decent turntable, amp & speaker setup - plus, every time you play that album, it will degrade slightly anyway, both in terms of wear on the vinyl and on the stylus. Not to mention the extra caution you need to take storing vinyl albums so they don't get scratched and don't warp due to excessive temperatures.
To get excellent sound quality from CDs, you don't need to spend anywhere near as much on hifi and, providing you take reasonable care of the CD, it will sound just as good on the 100th play as it did on the 1st one.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think the retail-CD is dead in the long run if the price stays where it's at or climbs. But I don't think they have to be that expensive. See:
http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingdata/cost.asp
From the RIAA link above:
Duh! promotion _is_ expensive when you buy a Porsche for a DJ so he'll play your crap!
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
What ever happened to "albums"? I mean actual pieces of work which as a WHOLE are something more then the individual songs? When was the last time there was something like that?
Let me put it this way, I am probably the quintesential, ideal, perfect market that the Music Industry is looking for. I have lots of disposible income, I have invested tens of thousands of dollars in high quality speakers, pre-processors, amplifiers, tuners, and CD transports (including DVD audio and SACD transports). But there is one big problem here. Just about everything produced now is crap. Even if the songs themselves are good songs, the post production that occurs completely destroys the music. Songs are all "compressed" and "boosted" (in other words, they remove all the dynamics of the music by "compressing" the amplitude of instruments/sounds/effects to make the overall "loudness" of the song higher, because heaven forbid the song that plays after mine have be 3-4db louder on the radio, people will think that it is because the music is worse...).
The music has been removed from the song. Go listen to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and listen to the dynamics within the songs. Listen to how the album itself is an entire work in itself. Focus on the quality of the post production work. This is the problem with having good systems, you hear ALL the flaws in the CD itself. A high quality piece of music will sound unbelievably realistic and immerse you into the music. But a poorly done CD will sould like garbage with all the audio artifacts caused by compressing the sound amplitude or loss of signal detail caused by using poor analog to digital converters or conversion dropoff being displayed for everyone to hear in all its ugliness.
P.S. yes, I own an iPod, but prefer to use WAV files on it when possible. It doesn't make a huge difference on the cheap headphones I use with it on the go, but it if very noticible when connected to my car, or home stereo...
Again, produce QUALITY work and a lot of people will buy it. Make crap, well, don't expect me to even take a sniff, let alone think of purchasing.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I always buy an album on CD. Not only because of album art etc. but because if you need to theres always the option of being able to get a higher bitrate rather than being locked into 128 kbps. Also, if your computer dies you can always just re-rip from the uncompromised, unconverted bought copy rather than having to use a self-burnt backup. I think physical media discs will be around for some time to come, at least until 2020.
Give us this day our garlic bread and lead us not into vegetarianism but deliver us some pizza.
That is, I'll buy a physical copy of a lossless recording of an album without DRM (won't touch the DRMed ones with a 10' pole) which I will promptly rip w/ LAME to mp3. When encoding improves I'll repeat the process. Of course I only listen to the non-DRMed mp3's I rip.
If they don't rip, they are useless to me. (sorry Sony artists)
Actually a large proportion of my DVD's go the same way. Rip to MP4 watch on GameBoy or PSP while traveling. Once again, if they don't rip, they are useless.
I'm not into buying DRMed files which won't back up, won't stream, won't transcode and can be revoked by the **AA and their co-conspirators at any time.
I buy more music now a days, although none of it from labels the RIAA ever made a dime from. I just got back from a music festival in Northern California and picked up a dozen albums on physical CDs. Many musicians now have their own web site and market on CDBaby. Despite free downloads and live taping allowed, sales were brisk. I'm one the minority who believes MP3 sound is inadequate, so if I like it, I'll buy it. More so from an artist who runs his own label and will see something from the sale.
I used to keep original copies of CDs in a case inside my car, but after a period of 6-8 months, they would inevitably become scratched beyond recoverable usage. So I started ripping them, keeping the originals on the shelf, and burning throwaway copies as I needed them. Now that I have a sound in port on my stereo, I just plug in the mp3 player and don't even bother with CDs anymore.
Easy answer: NO!
.... I don't knwo how long. When music CDs became insane expensive I simpyl stopepd buying (and did not use Napster etc. becasue I was not interested). TBH I bought a few cDs at Amazone ...
... that sucks) I only buy iTunes music (as I'm a Mac owner and either listen on the way via ear phones on my Mac or via Air Port Extreme at Home)
/. say: music industrie does not introduce blockbusters (or what they think could be one) at iTunes to force ppl to buy the CD. And for some records it seems it has worked. So THOSE customers definitely don't think: the CD is dead.
;D
Reason: I did not buy a CD since
Later since when iTunes started in germany (you know, with a german billing address you can't buy in iTunes USA
And software I buy is 90% Java software that I buy via download (e.g. Atlassian Jira or Omnicore CodeGuide).
So from my point of view: no, the CD is dead, completely dead.
OTOH, if you ask the question you have to ask yourself: "Who is my customer?"
Latest posts on
So if your customers are like the latter the answer is: yES
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Jack ass...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
that the disks are marginal when they're new, and that there is no way they will last as long as vinyl (contrary to all the hype about durability and tolerance for scratches), I don't think it's a viable market at all. On the other hand, they are quite viable as long as you can convince people to buy them. It's the PR that will keep them afloat. It's certainly not the tech. The whole thing is just too dependant on too many different technologies that have to come together exactly in the right way. I can listen to record on a potter's wheel and a straight pin with a paper cone. In fact, I don't see any of the "new" tech as durable in any way. Virtually all of society's infrastructure runs on century old technology (phones, internal combustion, in fact the consumption of petroleum in general). The new stuff by itself can't handle it. All this applies to DVDs as well. Talk about marginal quality...P.T. Barnum (not really) comes to mind.
What?
Full CDs will stay until there is an online alternative just as expensive.
The record industry has itself to blame for us, the audience, beeing more and more geared towards individual songs rather than albums* and thus making music into just one of those small commodities like a mobile phone call or a pack of chewing gum. Some people argue that that all started with "guest producers" versions, remixes and putting cheap-to-make singles versions of songs on the CDs instead of complete albums written as a whole.
Removing the physical CDs would be the final signal to the customers saying "If you don't want our album (that we've infact stopped making anyway) atleast buy one measly song, we even charge you just one dollar".
If artists stopped or are incapable of thinking in terms of albums why do we still have full CDs at all? And why will we still have them for awhile, at least until the industry finds a way to sell us something we are prepaired to pay $20 for.
Since:
A) making a physical CD costs almost the same if your putting on one song or twenty.
B) you need a certain turnaround from each CD sale to finance your boat... eh, business. A full CD that sells for $15-$20 is much better economy than making a CD-single that only flogs $3-5 from a customer.
So again; Full CDs will stay until there's an online - read 'cheaper for the industry' - alternative just as expensive for the buyers.
*Yes we've had a song based music scene before the 60's and 70's arrival of albums but that was so far back that most people in the industry have forgotten all about it. They simply do not know how to stay alive in that kind of a eco(nomical)system.
Bikers.....The only people that understand why a dog hangs his head out a car window.
I can just imagine this being posted to "alt.slashdot" circa 1986... CDs are probably not going to go away for quite some time.
While I haven't bought more than a few CDs in the past 5 or so years probably, the ones I did buy I got because I wanted a physical tangible item. I wanted liner notes to read, something to stack in the corner, something to leave in my car and warp from the sun. Besides, CDs are still the measuring stick for digital media - where do the P2P originals come from? If all of our songs were only available through digital downloads, what would our source mesasurement be? ITune's lossy compressed files?? And I don't forsee being able to download exact digital uncompressed versions of any album in the distant future. Until something gets hashed out so that online digital media is as convenient as current CDs (taking them to a friends house, copying them for backups, etc.), compact discs are here for awhile.
For a majority of the music I listen to (indie, neo-folk, college, etc...) Vinyl is by far a very viable and popular media. When I buy an LP I feel like I actually own something. The album art is in large format, record labels throw in extra tacks, bonus 7", etc... Most indie labels make great Vinyl releases as they realize this is a product for those who truly love the music embeded in that wax.
A few labels (MERGE) are even beginning to allow you to download MP3s of the LP tracks the second you order-- allowing me to have both a high quality digital recording and the warm wax for my turntable.
In the realm of these independent record labels and their fans, Vinyl is quickly becoming a dominant media-- many fans fighting tooth and nail for limited vinyl pressings and other special releases. Out of print Death Cab for Cutie lps, Sunny Day Realestate lps, and early original Modest Mouse pressing go for over $100 on ebay.
transmission_err
In order to do without retail media for audio CDs, you must possess all of the following:
a) A computer
b) A CD burner
c) A reliable broadband internet connection
d) Interest in dealing with:
i) a limited number of online audio outlets, which will require a credit card.
ii) downloading from illegitimate sources
e) The ability, time and desire to compile the downloaded audio tracks to CDR
f) Satisfaction with the audio quality of downloaded audio tracks.
If any of the things above is lacking, retail CD media for audio is required. Besides this, there are still audio CD players out there that do not play burned CDs. I'm thinking most specifically of the one in my 1998 Grand Cherokee.
Think of this, too. The music industry mostly markets to kids. Kids don't have credit cards. In order for the target market of the music industry to acquire the product they're trying to sell, the kids need to either get a credit card number from parents, or download illegally. With retail CD media, they can take their allowance to the record store and buy the product themselves.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I want CDs that, instead of Red Book audio, contain 24bit 96kHz FLAC tracks. And what about CD-Text? That could have been cool, but I don't know since I've never seen anybody actually use CD-Text. Keep me from having to use CDDB or key in all the track data. Then maybe they could include PNGs of the cover art...
That would be way too good for customers, though. It'd probably never work. I mean, can you just think of the poor recording artists!
This is more pronounced than many of the younger among you realize, for instance I'm a geek, I read slashdot every day, I am technologically literate, but I'm old, I still buy CDs when I want music I don't really see me buying an IPOD any time soon, I don't download music and while I was briefly interested in the idea of a media center PC I haven't really planned or budgeted for one at any point in the near future. Worse I have a lot of friends who think like I do, we're just old. Not so much luddites. (I have 3 PCs sitting on the desk while I type this, two dinosaurs, and two of have multiple boot, so I'm hardly a technophobe.
For what it's worth:
See the CD Baby sales chart.
An interesting 2004-to-2005 summary comparison:
2004 CD sales : $7.5M
2005 CD sales: $10.3M
2004 digital sales: $0.76M
2005 digital sales: $3.1M
new CDs added in 2004: 28,285
new CDs added in 2005: 37,798
And you can always see our current numbers halfway down the page at cdbaby.com/about.
Considering you can still buy many new albums as a LP Vinyl album the CDDA format has a very long way to go before it dies. Plus, even though I own several computers ( three in my college dorm alone, and I'm bringing up more next year). I am pretty much diametrically opposed to paying for something without recieving a physical mark of ownership. Plus CDs play in my hi-fi with far less noise than any of my computers produce on their osund system. Put simply, programs like iTunes do nothing to replace physical media, the lessening of audio quality is noticeable to anyone with better headphones than iPod earbuds. Not everyone likes to do everything on a computer, not even I do, and I spend most of my time on PCs, but PCs don't just work, a stereo does.
So yes, there is still a market for CDs, if it is becoming more niche, then so be it, but audio lovers will always buy physical copies (be they Vinyl, CDDA, DVD-Audio, or SACD). Sure less people who just want the music casually have less of a reason to buy a CD, but there are a lot of music lovers in this country!
The sound quality of all online music stores that I know of is still questionable. I don't mind purchasing a normal album off of iTunes, but for something like a classical piece with a lot of dynamic range, I prefer the sound quality of a cd.
Beyond that, if I have the cd, I am *free* (as in bird) to use it in a variety of ways.
Personally, I could care less about the album inserts. The only nice thing to have in an online music service would be some standard downloadable way to get lyrics, album information, band information, and other interesting stuff along with the album. I know they have those PDF things, but please, if that were enough, would there be a zillion lyrics sites along with a zillion os x widgets that get lyrics for the current track? I would think it would be very cool to have that information structured with the actual album so you could leaf through it in a nice way in iTunes or whatever instead of the software vomitting some "printable" document onto the screen. I just looked at my U2 album pdf and it's pretty sad - a cd insert scanned in to pdf form. Hooray, I can zoom in to read the lyrics. That's not elegant. Honestly, that's just unlike Apple.
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Hundreds of millions of consumers will be buying audio CD albums and singles for some decades to come, for no other reason than the inertia of the playback devices that consumers own. The market will shrink as alternatives come on to the market. Real alternatives will have to be price/value comparable to CDs. However at the moment the Digital Audio Player + Internet connection + credit card + personal computer combo represents a high entry cost to the downloadable music world. Looking at the market for vinyl records, the CD market should have an incredibly long end phase (i.e. low profitability for vendors).
My interest is this is not the viability of the CD market so much as the viability of the new wave of music services and products.
How satisfied will consumers be with music that is tied to their Digital Audio Player?
How can music suppliers compete with free downloads?
What value can they supply that p2p services do not? Looking at the posts made on this topic, it seems that many consumers value 'collectibility', 'durablity', 'tangibility', 'browsability' and accompanying artwork and lyrics as well as (the more obvious) price and sound quality.
What will be the impact of current 'bleeding edge' technologies, such as new wide area wireless networking standards, on this market? Surely, soon enough, HDDs will seem as clunky and limiting as CD players.
The Market will have it's way!!
I just visit yoour side, but I don't get it ....
a) its your own music, yes?
b) you sell it via a web site?
c) you sell it as CD but not as download able (buyable) mp3?
The main problem with your site is very simple: no instant satisfaction.
The buyer is there and he wants it now not at some undefined time in the future (after mail delievery). Instead of buying your product delayed he is going to buy something else instantly some minutes later.
The second thing is: the prices are not compdetitive (but they are ok if you bear in mind your manufacturing costs in that small volumes, how ever the ordinary customer does not know that, nor is he willing to pay the price).
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
... there were several billion dollars of CDs sold last year, and there will be several billion dollars of CDs sold next year. Even VHS, a format which is inferior in every possible way to DVD (a player for which can be had for less than the price of the media that plays on it), is still a multi-billion a year business. The wave of the future it ain't, but CDs will be a *viable, profitable business* for decades.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Yeah... I guess that is true. But I guess there is some cash to be collected through live performances.
Well,
...
now I realized the "external" mp3 link.
This makes from a business point of view even less sense. You offer the mp3s completely for free, and wan't ppl to buy the album, which is with $17 rather expdensive
Why don't you offer the mp3s for $0.50 per track instead?
aangel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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What a complete load of shit. You assert that there's no music being produced now that's worth buying? Bullshit.
Top 40 is crap and always has been crap. Nothing about that has changed in the last several decades.
Dig a little deeper and you'll find plenty of incredible, CURRENT music out there. And I'm not even talking about indie labels. Quite frankly, I hate those fucking indie snobs. You know, the people who always pop up on stories like this to loudly proclaim that they only buy music from indie labels. Well, whoop-de-fucking-doodah! Have a cookie. Those snobs annoy me almost as much as idiots like you.
No, there's a huge amount of awe-inpiring music released on RIAA-affiliated labels. You just have to know where to look. Don't look at the crap that the big 5 are pushing in your face on eMpTy-V or at the front of the store. Find the real musicians, the ones who have genuine talent and really care about what they're doing. Guess what? The vast majority who have a record contract are on RIAA labels. There's a few hundred labels in the RIAA if I recall correctly, so don't judge them based on the product and actions of the big 5.
Like guitar music? Check out Steve Vai's Favored Nations label. Awesome stuff. Hell, check out Joe Satriani's new release, just out yesterday. I bought and it's great. Crap my ass. If that's not your cup of tea, try any of the thousands of albums that have come out in the last few years. You're not looking hard enough!
I own an iPod, but prefer to use WAV files on it when possible. It doesn't make a huge difference on the cheap headphones I use with it on the go, but it if very noticible when connected to my car, or home stereo.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Now I KNOW you're full of shit, Mr. self-proclaimed golden ears. Or maybe you're just a fucking retard who doesn't know a damn thing about encoders and bitrates.
Cheers!
Sure there is a market for CD's, with their covers, artwork fold out images, lyric sheets.. oh wait. that was vinyl.. nah, cds are worthless.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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It'd also be the day that you sell something a lot of people want to buy, so...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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It seems like the general consensus around here is that people like the idea of having something in their hands. I mean sure it might seem nice to have a few hundred CDs lined up on a shelf to display to impress friends and neighbors but not very practical. With the advent of hard drives becoming larger and cheaper it is only a matter of time before lossless (or lossy undetectable to human ears) formats begin to catch on. And yes I know the superman hearers among us will complain about how the quality of a CD is far superior, just like the vinyl audiophiles before them. Open your mind, the CD isn't relevant anymore. Archaic... The same arguments can be made for photography as well. Sure one can make the argument that color density and tone of Fuji Velvia is far superior of any digicam. Does the general public give a shit? They want ease of use, they want portability, and they want instant gratification.
Lets be honest here, the cd is on the way out, and any other CDesque replacement. The world is changing to a completely computer storage based system. It's a changing of the guard, and its happening all around us. From corporal to ethereal, business records, photos, television, books. It's only a matter of time. Just look at the up and coming generations, the 6-15 demographic, and see if they give a shit about having CDs in their hands. Hell no, give them something they can put on their phones, transfer to their friends. And this scares the hell out of any company that makes a profit from distributing information. You don't think book publishers shit themselves when Google decided to put an entire library on line. That's just the first crack in the dam they are trying to patch it. The cracks are getting bigger and technology is the catalysis. Who needs books, what we need is a digital book replacement, give it time... Bradbury had it right; books are going to be extinct. Give me a datapad connected to every work produced... Music, books, tv, movies, give me it all! This just isn't about CDs it's about all corporal information exchange.
-Laike
I've never seen this mentioned on Slashdot, but I think of it every time I see the 'CD sales are declining because of copyright infringement' meme repeated. CD sales are affected by a lot more than a few copyright infringers.
When they first appeared we saw people rushing out and buying replacements for their old vinyl and tape albums. Then we saw the collectors boxsets, and now we get the desperate 'best-of' rehashes. Consumers have consumed and having replaced their old collections are mainly interested in buying new releases, and so the CD market has slowed down. What would be more interesting would be to see what has happened to sales of genuinely new releases(and a new Eagles compilation doesn't count).
Year CD sales0 06-01-04-music-sales-main_x.htm)
2005 598.9
2004 651.1
2003 635.8
2002 649.5
2001 712.0
2000 730.0
(Source:http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2
Music CD's (by artists) are certainly on a dependable decline, and this is quite understandable for obvious reasons; but these same reasons are leading to increased sales of blank cd's (as mentioned above). But the cost of a 700 mb CD vs. the cost of a 4.7 gig conventional DVD already favors the DVD as a media storage device. On top of that, dvd-rw drives are becoming increasingly standard on new PC's. The CD's days are numbered.
I think that the market for physical CD's will always be a lot stronger than the market for the metaphysical CDs that only exist in your head.
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Right. You're not selling songs or art or lyrics. You're selling little plastic cylindrical disks. That's your business model and you're sticking to it.
Really, why tie yourself to one delivery medium?
Why is it that every fag on slashdot thinks that everyone has 500 to throw down on an ipod? there are 6+ billion people in this world, just because you and three other geeks you play d&d with are all into napster or whatever doesn't mean that the rest of the music listening public is...
Nor are they into linux for that matter...
Nor the sony "boycott"
Nor do they care about GPL, what Dvorfuck has to say or why you think you're smarter than real engineers who actually hold jobs in the industry instead of being 2600-reading fuckheads who flip burgers and think they are all cool.
BTW: mod this down, you know it's true... and for those out there really in the know... you're probably laughing right now because you know how true it is.
My experience is that in 1997 it was a whole lot easier to move 1000 CDs than it was in 2005.
Perhaps drug use is down since 1997, because you'd have to be messed up on something to listen to the stuff you put out there.
There are waaay more songs available through CDs than MP3s. For example, when I saw this article I went looking for the CD right in front of me: Chicago - The Musical (not the soundtrack). It ain't on iTunes, or on the Sony equivalent (which sucks, BTW; scripting bugs render it basically useless).
My point is that CDs will be driven by their sheer, established catalogue for a long time to come yet, as well as all the other reasons that have already been pointed out.
and then just ignore the fact that people still press LPs in large quantities, the store that sells LPs three blocks from my house and does a booming business, ...
face it, CDs will be around for a while.
except they flake under exposure to sunlight, magnetism, and temperature variations after about 3-5 years.
but the form will exist.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Hardly. Nowadays I often even buy vinyl. Hah!
.m4a files, much less DRMed ones . . . but my DAP plays ogg just fine, so I can take that anywhere with me no problem, and while it's too small of a flash drive to really hold FLAC comfortably it's a snap to drag-drop convert FLAC to ogg-vorbis for the run).
No, seriously now. For one, services like iTunes don't offer things losslessly; for two, they restrict my use of them too much for me to even bother (hell, I don't even have many convenient ways to play fuckin'
Thirdly, packaging. I mean, let's be honest now, it's been possible forever now to transmit text electronically quite well, but books are far from gone. It's just extra nice, convenient and so forth to have an actual physical copy in posession. Which is actually why I often buy albums I like in Vinyl now; I can usually just download lossless versions for digital use on the side (which is often how I came to like the album enough to buy it), and if you're going to go for the physical packaging, why not go for the gusto? Now, vinyl isn't exactly the easiest to get albums or singles in, so it's not always an option and many people would rather have a CD instead, but the fact that even now there are stores that sell a large volume of actual records speaks to the desire people have to actually own a physical copy of something (and what's more physical than analog?).
So no, I certainly don't think CDs are going away anytime soon. Yeah yeah, they'll decrease in prominence and sales, they might not even stay at the top of the food chain . . . but there's a long ways from that to complete oblivion as the title suggests (not that I'm sure the article claims such; in true slashdottian spirit I've avoided reading TFA).
Furthermore, if you expand the definition of CDs a bit and go into other forms of physically sold disks, there's alot of room for the medium to evolve from here. As noted, there aren't any major services offering lossless audio (unless I've been misinformed?), meanwhile we have emerging media types like DVDA and the growing practice of either two-sided disks or just a CD and a DVD to give extra content like videos along with albums, so even in the mere digital product the physical disks retain certain advantages over the online services.
Besides, if anything is going to fall to the power of the internet, I think that print newspapers will go before CDs. So maybe once/if that happens we can start thinking about perfoming the final rites for Compact Disks.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
At our bands site http://www.myspace.com/timflanaryband we market an idea, not just music. We feel that people want to buy something that they can hold in their hands. I believe our marketing techniques are working. Sure there are plenty out for instant gratification. Whenever I'm really into a band I want their CD.
...exactly parallels the huge increase in consumers having their own burners, then buying blanks by the small quantity. Then they hit the pre recorded rack and look at the titles and prices. Hmmmm. It ain't rocket surgery then.
nConsumers found out how much they were being ripped off/gouged by a quarters worth of plastic and 10 cents worth of paper and revolted. Napster came about because people got *tired* of shelling out big bucks for music CDs.
And to this day, the millionaires who have no coneption of what a dollar is worth to joe working stiff and who make the decisions on pricing for discs at the RIAA vendors are STILL clueless to this. To them, 10 to 20 bucks is like a nickle or a dime to regular people, they think it's cheap! They simply *don't* get it. They are incapable of relating because they are millionaires. They can intellectualize it all day long, they just won't understand it was the pricing that lead to "piracy" way more than just the ability to do so. In fact, the "ability to do so" has been driven precisely by outrageous pricing on music and movies.
Those over priced bit sellers are their own worst enemies.
And I don't want to hear it can't be done, you can walk into any walmart and see older movies on DVD for two dollars.
And that's all bits on a disk are worth. Bit sellers need to get a clue back to the "volume sales" concept. At two bucks, they would sell a lot more disks, and make more money, even if the net per disk was lower.
I think CDs will stick around for a while in PC games, because it gives publishers the chance to release a "Director's Edition" on DVD with a few tiny extra bells and whistles and charge more money for it.
I'd rather one DVD than five or six CDROMs, but I'm not prepared to pay extra for it. They'd sure earn my respect by putting both in the box.
http://zenapolae.com/My Experience is that I no longer care for the CD.
u ture Here is my plan for the future.
http://zenapolae.com/zenapolae_bitphitz_and_the_f
What do you have against selling mp3s? Would you be okay selling wavs? Or wavs plus PDFs (of the liner notes and album art)? It's a little odd to refuse to accept money unless you get to ship some metal, glass, plastic, and paper somewhere.
I'll agree with your assessment about requiring payment to provide an mp3, but that doesn't mean you can't also sell people the same thing you've already given them for free. It seems dumb, but it's a mechanism for letting people show appreciation for what you already gave them that credit card companies like better than accepting donations.
Of course, the physical CDs as artwork are another matter; but the site doesn't really give much of an impression of what the manufactured item is like (as opposed to the sound which may be produced by playing it in a CD player, among other ways). If that is your particular artistic expression, you should have images of the item for sale; the mp3s don't really speak to that, since the buyer would have to rip the CD (or download all the mp3s) to simultaneously listen to the audio and look at the CD. And, of course, you're not offering anything for people who like the music but not the visual art, so it's not too surprising that a segment of people listen to the music and then don't buy anything.
I sure hope so!
:-(. I and many others can hear the difference, whether it be rock or classical music, jazz or flamenco.
One of the true pleasures of life is well written, well arranged, well produced (recorded) and well pressed music. If you think that your "typical" MP3 tune (usually at 128 bits) sounds good you've been listening to your iPod too loud and too long. A good CD recording on a decent stereo is *MUCH* richer sounding than any MP3, and better than ogg vorbis also.
It would be a travesty to only be able to buy music that has been sterilized by lossy compression (MP3 & others), reducing it to a shallow facsimile of real music
Please don't leave us at the mercy of hearing-impaired iPodniks! Beautiful music is just too much to lose. It would be like the extinction of an exotic species.
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The point is that lately I've been buying more music again (maybe ten albums in the past year)... but none of it's been on CD; it's all been online. Now, I'm a technological adept, but I'm also an old fart who learned to dance from a black Michael Jackson and still has 5 shelf-feet of LPs, which I kept buying after CDs came out because I liked the big covers. If I've given up on physical CDs now, I can't imagine the next generation of teenagers buying them at all. As surely as the wax cylinder, the 78, the reel-to-reel, the 8-track, the LP, and the cassette before them, CDs are heading for the scrap heap of history.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You'll have to pry the 44 khz stream from my cold dead hands. Until I can be assured of DRM free master quality recordings, I'll never stop buying CDs.
To your post before: I don't know how the Canadian $ rates versus the US $ ... however I buy a full CD at iTuens for $9.99 (US) so $17 seems expensive.
Now your actual post: thats your freedom. You asked (in my opinion) why sales are low. If I understood correctly you have lots of visitors and only a few buyers.
I tried to give an answer. For me as "angel'o'sphere" it makes no sense to visit a web site to buy a good physical which I just could buy with a few clicks and download right away at that web site. It looks like poor web site design or brain dead business model (outdated) or a "questioinable" personal descission of the business owner (as you admitted).
The fact that you can downlaod your mp3s for free via a different site torps your business even more.
So, I hope my point about instant satisfaction was helpfull. The iTunes business modell is exactly that: listen, click buy, have it.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, I will not work for your startup
Try substituting "my music" for "MP3" in that sentence.
It's your choice, of course, what you want to sell: products or content. But it sounds like you're suffering from the age-old problem of not selling what your (potential) customers want.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This story grabbed my eye in part because last week I bought CDs (well, a 3-CD set) for the first time in a year or two. "Walk the Line" made me curious about Johnny Cash, so I picked up for $17 this triple set of CDs with about 50 tracks from his years at Sun Records.
I like CDs. They're not perfect, but of the various media for recorded music that have been around during my lifetime, they're my favorite by a good margin.
1) If well treated, they're durable. Yes; LPs are, too, and for the true preservationist, perhaps more so. I'm not a preservationist, and like (I suspect) most people, my vinyl was never cleaned and has been subject to some unconscionable treatment. (I try to forgive myself, though.) I won't argue about the edge cases -- but I think for most people, given what I perceive to be typical storage and handling, CDs win on that count.
2) They don't unravel in a player like tapes can (and for me, have).
3) They're a decent size. Sure, a bit smaller with the same data capacity would be nice -- there are certainly some things I wish would fit on a CD uninterrupted that just won't fit there uncompressed, but it's longer than one side of a recorded / recordable cassette at least. But, now that CD players are so widespread, I'm happy enough with the length to accept it cheerfully. It's pretty easy to stuff a few CDs in a bag / briefcase / knapsack -- harder with LPs. (Yeah, I know -- I should be comparing to iPods, flash drives, etc. Except I'm not.)
4) They sound good, to my lead ears. Perfect? No; I've certainly encountered some badly mastered (or perhaps badly manufactured) CDs, but a well-recorded CD can sound great. My ears aren't the best, but I sense a lot of twaddle in some critiques of CDs' sound in which people seem to think they necessarily sound awful, or at best mediocre. That seems like quite a stretch! However, I don't want to fight with anyone who prefers wax cylinders, 256-bit-per-sample digital recordings played through a tube amplifier feeding convoluted-horn single-driver speakers, or anything else. But I'm sticking with "good" as a conservative description of typical CD sound.
5) Liner notes. Now *some* vinyl has great liner notes -- especially when they come with fold-out jackets etc. The size of an LP results in some really neat album cover art. But I'll take extensive liner notes (lyrics, little essays, whatever) over album art most days of the week.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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i still need to slide them down the crack of my ass.
Actually, given the quality of a lot of the music these days, that is probably better than sticking them in a player and suffering the audio torture that would result. Of course, given the quality of movies, similar could be said of DVDs.
CDs, or similar, are still a very handy medium and will be there for a while still.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Why would you use CD's again???
I've been buying a lot fewer CDs, mostly because it's taking me longer and longer to find them at a reasonable price.
A few years ago I could go to the local store and get new releases for $10.99. Now I go in and new releases are $18. Well, I'm not paying that, my limit is $12. So I just wait until something I'm interested in drops in price to under $12.
Basically, I cruise Amazon marketplace and half.com a lot, wait for sales, check clearance bins, and so on.
Maybe I'm atypical, but I know the record industry could quadruple their profits from me by dropping their prices a little. Mute records had a sale one time where they put big chunks of the back catalog on sale at mid price, and I immediately sent in a $150 order.
I've been tempted to buy a couple of albums from the iTMS recently, but only because they're $9.99 there, but $20+ on CD (import only releases). Otherwise, I'd prefer the CD every time. And in fact, I've not bought from the iTMS recently, because I'm waiting for someone to get Hymn working again first. Stupid Apple.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
No, you sell product, which is data.
Insisting on selling the physical media is a very very dead business model. The only reason the big labels are able to continue doing it is because they have enough lobbying power to outlaw anything else.
All your base are belong to Google.
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. If it isn't tangible, and it's not a service, is it really for sale? I can't bring myself to seeing so.
You're not selling anything tangible besides the CD. I can't "hold" music in my hand, with a CD I'm holding a bunch of 1's and 0's that represent that music engraved onto a plastic disc. Sure the disc is a tangible object, but it's fucking worthless. It scratches, wears out, etc..etc..nobody cares about the CD. They want the MUSIC.
So, since I can't hold, move, blow up, or eat this music of yours, why are you even selling it in the first place? I have qualms (as a fellow recording artist) with someone who doesn't think their music as intangible as a data stream.
Or how about this: maybe you're not selling as many CDs these days because your music isn't as appealing to people as it was in 1997.
Think Limp Bizkit.
When I was young and long before the time of Napster, MP3 used to be the only way I get new music. It was a time when you could find Spice Girls MP3s openly on some web sites and nobody cared. It was a time that it took a Pentium 100Mhz computer 70% of CPU time to play MP3s. The computer I used was hooked up with some crappy speakers, and I couldn't care less.
Nowadays I pretty much have disowned my MP3 collection, and I prefer buying physical CD to get new music. There are two reasons.
Although WMV and AAC are so good that you don't hear the rattle, it is sad the vendors try to show superiority of their formats by encouraging the use of low bitrates (less than or equal to 128kbps). Ogg Vorbis also does a good job. Nowadays it's hard to identify compression artifects, but to my ears compressed music just sounds shallow, especially pay attention to cymbal and snare drums. I also find it more difficult to identify what instrument is playing what part by ear, when the music is compressed.
Well, this is not surprising, since lossy audio compression by design removes the sounds that you don't consciously hear. When you consciously try to hear it, it's just not there. It's like trying to zoom in to a JPEG compressed image and examine the texture, only to find the texture is lost.
In general, I think a music CD priced at $15 is still worth the additional amount of information that you retain uncompressed.
I once had a signature.
Lots of artists make ALBUMS. They're not the crap you
find in the charts. Try some recent Funker Vogt if you want
some noise, Rasputina if you want something pleasant
Or any Residents album.
The CD will go away eventually, but what doesn't. While iTunes and P2P music sharing may be driving people away from CD's there is something else that drove me and other away, and that was free streaming music. I was thinking about this a couple months ago, when I was at the used CD store buying an album, the first album I had purchased in almost three years. My thoughts went like, wow I haven't purchased a CD in 3 years, ever since I started listening differnt streaming music stations. I pick the station to fit my mood and off I work. Just my 2 cents.
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I mean, how can you resist? The cover art is so much larger, the sound is so much more authentic, and the smell of freshly-cut vinyl...
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I admire you for sticking to your principles, but since you are freely sharing your music, have you thought about just selling the CD liner/insert material on its own and letting folks roll their own CD's? In other words, instead of offering:
.cda files, add CDN$7
CD = CDN$17
offer:
----
liner/insert for CD = CDN$10. Includes artwork, credits, etc.
If you want physical CD with hi-quality
-----
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
"Since its peak sales year in 1999, there has been a steady deterioration in the number of physical CDs sold and shipped. The most immediate blame is typically placed on piracy,
I only buy CD's. But there is a few problems. I've never downloaded a CD/DVD, but I have grabbed two MP3s from the usenet because you couldn't buy the original albumns anywhere (Frankie Smith, Johnny Rivers) at the time.
1) There is nothing I want to listen too. No AC/DC, No Led Zepplin, No Van Halen etc. The last CD I bought was Alien Ant Farm. Doesn't anyone from Generation 2.0/3.0 know how to rock?
2) Overpriced at the music store. $17 US is way too much to spend when you can get it on Amazon for $9.99. Music stores will go the way of the dinosaur.
3) Im transferring my Cassette and Album collection (over 500 albums) to MP3 myself. Thanks RIAA for offering me no option/help with a 10cent per song mp3 download, They could have made money on resales of albums I already own. Thanks Audacity team for a great program. Ronnie James Dio is restored and resides on CD now. Joe Walsh and Cheap Trick (Live) send thier regards. Queen, Bad Company, and Santana will all say Thank You later.
Just my opinon on why CD sales sucks. BTW, if some music lover cares to do a detailed book on how Audacity works, I'd buy it. I still suck at choosing the right filter.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
In a few years perhaps a cell phone-like device will be sufficiently ubiquitous and well-developed to allow everyone to download the music while they're watching the concert.
Until then, the best answer is to have phyiscal CDs at the show and digital downloads on your website.
Think about it this way:
A Vinyl reproduces sound through a percussive action, the needle hitting and bouncing off the grooves. Music, is also produced mainly through percussive actions, fingers plucking strings, etc..
A CD is a bunch of 1's and 0's that try to approximate what those percussive actions are.
Which do you think music lovers, people who should prefer live music to recorded music any-day-of-the-week, are going to love more?
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I don't really want them, but it's the only non-DRM format I can buy most music in. I won't touch anything with DRM because I won't be locked in to a specific piece of hardware or software to play the music that I bought the rights to play.
If they are selling only the "right to play on the hardware we say" then I ain't buying. Hear that sound, recording industry? That's my feet walking away with my dollars instead of giving some of them to you.
But you already are losing money, what's a few more bucks?
because CD's can be copied. So as they begin to promote a more restricted format, they'll make sure that it's very competitively priced, relative to CD's, and convince a volume of people to switch - thus maintaining their revenue.
Record companies don't make money from CD's, they make it from the stuff they put on them. If they can ship it cheaper, it's better for them. Ideally, they'd like to sell you a "hard" copy of their wares by having you download them from a peer-to-peer network and burn them to disk, or whatever, yourself. You could print the sleeve, etc. Number of burns restricted by DRM, as well as playable devices, if possible (you could burn a copy for each of a set of devices you have registered online, maybe). No shops, not even second-hand ones.
Maybe I should patent that distribution model...
I like having a perfect backup. 128kbps MP or AAC isn't good enough.
I bought Radio KAOS. A lot of it is forgettable eighties-pop style that EVERYONE was doing at the time, but there are a few good tracks, and the story was interesting and even slightly hopeful.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I don't sell MP3 because I don't sell data, I sell product.
I hate to break it to you, but CD's are just a medium to hold data. Your music is still a bunch of 0's and 1's. The only difference is the pamphlet, CD case, and the physical CD itself. Either way, you're product *is* data.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
"But there's no way you're going to spend $200/£200/200 on a single Blu-Ray disc. It's a psychological thing - you pick up the case in the shop and it doesn't *feel* like it's worth $200; so you don't buy it."
So in other words, bigger is better. That's a lesson the porn industry could learn.
What does the price of one have to do with the price of the other? Aside from the fact that this is digital information on a shiny plastic disk, there's no comparison. But, hey, I'll compare the two anyway.
A movie released on a DVD has usually made back its production costs at the box office (and then some). DVD/VHS sales and rentals are a secondary source of revenue for the studio.
A music CD's sales revenues are the main event for the artist and the label (and no, very few bands make money off of touring and merchandising...very, very few).
Okay, that's the supply side of things. How about the demand side?
I own some of my favorite movies on DVD. I own a lot of music CDs, too. I will maybe watch a DVD about five or six times before I get sort of tired of it and lend it to a friend or just stop watching it. Maybe I'll grab it off the shelf to play for a friend that hasn't seen it (and see it through their eyes, which freshens the experience).
By contrast, I can't count the number of times I've played my favorite CDs. I listen at home, in the car, at work. If I had a nickel for every time I listened to Television's Marquee Moon or Nirvana's Nevermind, I'd be rich enough to throw Steve Ballmer off of the Space Needle and get off on a technicality. $15 spent on a CD is a greater value to me than the same $15 spent on a DVD. Amortize that $15 against the amount of enjoyment you get from that creative work.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
The one good thing about commercial CDs is: they retain "some" value, after they have been purchased.
I also love Bruce Cockburn, who was amazing in the 70s, mixed in the 80s, and back to great in the 90s.
Point is, there's still good stuff out there, and that doesn't mean just filling out your Zeppelin bootleg collection. Turn off the radio and talk to people who share your tastes. Oh, and go to a Derek Trucks Band concert.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2006-01-04 -music-sales-main_x.htm
I actually agree with that, sortof.
While it's a good point that the movies on most dvds get a chance to debut and make cash in theaters, you can't over look the fact that artists don't just sell CDs, but perform live concerts as well.
With regard to your habits with watching dvds, I find that I tend to have a similar pattern with my cd listening and dvd watching. One CD will last 6 listens before I get tired of it and get a different one. While I can listen to a part of a song and be satisfied and stop, a dvd requires a committal of at least 2 hours for most. This is of course dependant on the dvd itself.
Also, CDs generally last less than an hour each, which means it would require 2 or 3 listens to get the same length of entertainment, not to say that you can't have a dvd playing as background noise (some even have the soundtracks on the disks themselves), so yes, I think that CDs are still way too expensive.
I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who feel the way you do.
I don't.
Distributing the cost across the time I spend enjoying a given medium, DVDs are still worth way more.
e.g. I have seen each of the back to the future movies on the order of a dozen times each, including one crazy night where we watched all three and all cut scenes and special features in one shot.
I usually end up putting CDs on the bottom of a pile after one or two run throughs.
To each his own.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Some people like to "own" a song, not a copy.
A "copy" (more precisely "phonorecord" in the case of recorded music) is a physical medium in which a work is fixed, such as a CD or your hard drive. When you buy a CD at the store, you're buying a phonorecord. The only way you can "own" a song is to write it yourself (but even that is questionable).
PC Games tend to come on DVDs these days, even the fastest broadband would take long enough to download 4.7GB
So leave the downloader on overnight. How much does such bandwidth cost vs. sending a DVD via FedEx or UPS or round-trip bus fare to a game store? And if you want instant gratification, then include the game engine and the training mission's assets in a separate download, and download the rest of the missions while playing the training mission. Or you could use algorithmic textures to squeeze an entire game down to 96 KB.
To rip and upload!
I don't think it's that clear cut.
I happen to think that CDs are overpriced. I've also never been much into the "record store scene". I encounter and experience music through my friends and acquaintances, and going to the record store hoping the album I want is there just doesn't appeal to me.
And if I'm going to order online, I'd rather have it now, and have it cheaper, than pay $12.99+shipping (it'll be here next week or so...)
I'm sure there's still money to be made selling CDs. I'm certain there's money to be made selling other digital media, too.
It's your business...do as you will. I think that people who think too narrowly as to what their business is all about tend to not be able to stay relevant to their customers in the long run.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Well, it's nice and warm in the time-warp bubble, I assure you.
;)).
Compared to the "future" media (music either downloaded for a fee, or on high-density CD-shaped media, or I suppose sold on flash media or other newfangledness), CDs are good IMO because the players are everywhere (new optical drives playing CD-shaped disks are all compatible, but old CD-ROM drives are out of luck playing Blue-Ray / HD-DVD / etc), and because they're *physical.* That has its drawbacks, but I'm glad that my CDs -- mostly in cold storage now -- are still around for me to rip anew if necessary. New recording techniques can be higher density of course, but most downloadable music (whatever its recording pedigree) is highly compressed; with CDs I can choose the compression level (at least up to the limits of the disk
Also, related to the ubiquity of the players, is that the disks' content are mostly amenable to no-loss conversion to other data carrier, and they have to be if they're going to play on any standard CD player. (Not to argue about Sony rootkits etc -- that's why I say 'mostly.')That's an issue I wish wasn't important, but there ya have it.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Are CDs dead?
Short answer: NO.
Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
On a serious note, CDs are free of (effective) DRM. When I buy an overpriced CD, I know I can play it forever, on anything, in any format of my choice. I ultimately ge the ability to listen to that music for life. I often do not (or will not, soon) ge that with an overpriced music file.
Quality is also an issue. Tell what percentage of the online music shops give away lossless music files?
CDs also are a physical object. It's important: I love the excitement of just holding that cool-looking disc of my favorite band's new album, impatient to get home and listen to it! Also, CDs can be given around as presents: compare "Happy birthday, Maria, this is the new Edguy album, you'll love it!" to "Happy birthday, Maria, this is a tiny slip of paper with a gift-certificate / unlock-code / download-coupon for the new Edguy album, you'll love it after you download it and burn on this Vertabim CD-R!". See my point?
Besides, I just love shiny things. No, the CD is alive and kicking!
The Physical CD or the CD-R as well know to call it is long dead. It has been replaced by the new age DVD's and the DVD-RW's, which in the future will be replaced by Blu-Ray, etc. However the market for external discs is not dead, though Broadband has penetrated the masses and though P2P, etc have evolved, and though online storage promises to be bigger and better with the coming of free GB players and the so-called coming soon G-Drive!
The Discs will be alive for a long-time. Mostly until Broadband penetrates the real masses and until the web becomes the true home eliminating the need for a oS.
As long as there is music that's not available for pay-per-download, not popular enough to find on P2P, but still in print on CD, there will still be a market for CDs.
New pop stuff could go ahead a quit with the CDs. It will save the music labels the costs of manufacturing and distribution and it will make the portable music player manufacturers (read "Apple") more money as the last folks finally break down and buy and iPod since they can't get the stuff they want on CD anymore.
Music like older jazz, classical, other obscure music and anything aimed at listeners over the age of 50 will have a CD-buying audience for quite a foreseeable future.
apart from physical CDs and iTMS, there is a very good DRM free third alternative......a russian one! I hope slashdotters don't pay 99c a song when they can get a whole album for the same amount. Their music catalogue is 50 times better than iTunes too.
CD is both brittle and depreciating solution because the media is undergoing a time sensitive decaying process and the laser heads have a limited life expectancy rendering the content useless.
Hi-end audio CD players occupy the $20K territory with a 10 year life expectancy. Do the math. How much should it cost to have hi fidelity music? CD is an EOL (end of life) technology waiting to be surpased by non-deteriorating, Open source protocol, future-proof solution.
My vote is for Apple to loft MP7 for true hi fidelity, publish an open interface to the standard and rollout HiFi Stereo systems centered around an MP7 server for HiFIeverywhere, anywhere around the house.
forget 'mp3' has suddenly become the generic for all audio file formats (the Kleenex of facial tissues, the Q-tip of cotton swabs), no one seems to care that CD's sound better. When I found out that DVD's were capable of 24-bit audio, I couldn't understand why there weren't more records available on DVD format. This is an aspect Sony tried to explore with a 20-bit media, but it failed miserably. By the time I had heard about it, it was long gone. DVD players are nearly ubiquitous now... what the industry needs is a hybrid CD/DVD... a disc that would play audio in all CD players (but not much, maybe 20 mins of 16-bit audio), and would also play quite a lot of 24-bit audio. From what I understand of the technology, the formats are completely incompatible. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be developed.
The Admin and the Engineer
And [SCRATCH] me too[POP]... I love [RUMBLE] rummaging [RUMBLE] around [RUMBLE] with vinyl [HISS] when [SCRATCH] I have [POP] the [SCRATCH] time, but CDs are so much more convenient. And quite a bit hardier, too ;-)
Eat the rich.
That's awfully arbitrary. A couple pages would be okay, but chapters are sacred and must not be copied!
/. sig, would you be liable to be sued by me for millions?
What if I published a 2-page book containing only two sentences? Nothing in the law would prevent me from registering a copyright on it the same as a "normal" book.
If you found that at the library or a friend's house, and read it and memorized it, would you be infringing my copyright if you wrote it down later because you found my two sentences incredibly witty? After all, it's the WHOLE BOOK! This is for personal use and not for selling or exhibiting in any way, mind you. Just like downloading music is.
What if you used my book as an e-mail or
What I'm getting at here is, the law shouldn't hold someone liable for proving someone's business model bad. The RIAA members are claiming that they own certain patterns of sound waves that are easily reproducible. What they ultimately want is to be paid every time you hear a song, not just once when you acquire it. They created commercial music radio, where copyrighted music is broadcast--for free, in the clear--and then they scream in agony because the people are choosing what they want to hear, and refusing to pay $18 for one half-assed song that they'll probably listen to 2 times. They're saying, "What you're selling is not worth $18. But I'm going to listen to it a few times for free, just like people who listen to the radio do."
Imagine you and a friend are both out eating lunch. The restaurant is playing a local radio station on the speakers. You have your iPod on, listening to a couple of songs you downloaded last night on Gnutella. Two songs come on the radio, Song A and Song B. Your friend listens to the songs. You, on your iPod, happen to be listening simultaneously to Song A and Song B at the same time!
The RIAA would have you believe that you have committed a tort against them, but your friend has not. (They actually would like for you, and the public, to believe that you've committed a felony, but that's because they're assholes.) How can that be? The two of you were listening to the exact same sound waves! It's absurd to claim that just because you can pause a track and your friend can't, that you are a "pirate"! You could hear the same music the same amount for free just by adjusting your radio dial skillfully enough! You just chose to skip that part. If their case against you in this instance has legal merit, then that means only one thing: The law is stupid, and needs to change.
Is the Physical CD Still A Viable Market
Yes.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
-RIAA.
I just spent several days ripping my cd collection to MP3 and throwing most of the discs away. I like music and having a sizeable collection just takes up too much space and is difficult to sort through. CD's also get scractched and for these reasons, I decided I do not want to have a lot of discs sitting around. However, there were a few that had special packaging, exceptional album art and photos, and carried certain sentimental value.. so i kept them. I will still go out every now and then and buy a CD if I REALLY want to have a physical copy, but for the most part I would rather just pay a reasonable price to download the music I want.
The EMI answer was to change my MP3 player to something that would use Microsofts WMP v10 ! Yeah, right, thats likely too.
Pros of CDs:
Pros of audio files:
While I usually rip my CDs to AAC as soon as I get them, I still always buy my music on audio CDs so that if I like the album, I can always re-rip it whenever the previous codec I encoded it with gets surpassed by a more efficient one, and so that if I dislike the album, I can delete the copy I made and sell it second hand. I also buy a lot of albums second hand, something which is a bit of a grey area with legally downloaded DRM-encumbered audio files right now. If the audio CD dies as a medium, it will probably be a lot better for the environment, but a lot worse for the second hand market until companies either improve DRM or give up on it altogether.
CDs have many advantages over digital files. They are portable, compatible, and reliable. The #1 place that americans listen to music is in their cars, and most cars don't have mp3 player capabilities but they can play CDs.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I suspect that an important force pushing against CD sales is born out of the crossing of three trends:
- Portable MP3 players are getting more common and more widespread in use
- Easy access to digital format music (either legal or pirated) is now widespread (aka Internet & broadband)
- Copy protected CDs
Nowadays anybody that has a portable MP3 player and buys a CD runs the risk of not being able to get the music into the MP3 player - in other words "not being able to listen to it on the move". Avoiding the problem requires having the correct apps and/or technical skills to go around the copy protection mechanism AND finding out which copy protection each CD has - this is time consuming. The approach of returning the CD to the store if you cannot copy the tracks to your MP3 player is also time consuming.
Downloading the music from the Internet is easy, usually (if you download pirated music) compatible with MP3 players and provides almost instant gratification.
It's hardly a surprise if people stop buying CDs and go download the tracks from the Internet.
Before, piratig music was a question of money
Then the music industry came up with Copy Protected CDs
Now pirating music is a question of money AND more convenience than buying it
Good going guys!
I think the article is incomplete. They ask the question "Is the Physical CD Still a Viable Market," but then go on to explore only the technical aspects of the issue, not mentioning the quality of the music. Ten years ago or more, and especially now, people who bought CD's often bought them because they were expecting a solid album, ie little or no filler songs, a lot of good songs, one or two excellent songs or hits. Those kind of CD's made it worthwile to go to the store and put down $15. I get the impression that such albums started to become more and more rare in the mid-nineties. At that time I was in my late teens, so I was very eager to buy good, new music, but it started to die after the Seattle scene began to fizzle-out. Instead I went back in time and started "discovering" old bands, to the effect that now out of the 150 CD's in my collection, less than five were released after 1995. The whole music industry is struggling, not just CD sales. If you look at revenues from live performances, they must have gone down significantly too. Almost no-one plays football stadiums alone anymore, and it seems that the only ones who can fill big arenas CONSISTENTLY are the old bands that made their reputation over ten years ago: Pearl Jam, Metallica, and the old fogies like Elton John and the Stones. So it seems that the quality of material affected the medium: people did not want to buy a whole CD with one hit and nine other pieces of crap on it by some new band, so instead they went to find that one song they liked on the net. The interesting question then is will the medium affect the quality of the material, ie will bands now concentrate on making good, single songs that will quickly grab the listeners' attention and instantly gratify them, rather than concentrating on making a whole great album that fewer people will have the inclination to go out and buy, or even to listen to front to back through the web. I am very afraid that this may be the case, it's too bad because some of my favourite pieces of music were entire albums that had great character throughout, without necessarily having a big hit, eg: "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd, "Exile on Main Street" by the Stones, or "London Calling" by The Clash.
A baby seal walks into a club...
www.sourcio.com
We need to realize that the market stabalizes itself. As crappier music is released, society as a whole gets dumber and learns to enjoy crappy music. Thus, the great circle of crap continues...
I may be wrong but you're downright ugly!
What ever happened to "albums"? I mean actual pieces of work which as a WHOLE are something more then the individual songs? When was the last time there was something like that?
People change. What people what change. What people spend their money on changes as they get older. If a lot of people still wanted albums, and were willing to pay for it, then they would still exist. Don't try to fight the change. If you are an irregularity, resisting change, holding onto some long lost dream of how things should be, then you will be bitterly disappointed. At least, this has been my experience. Concentrate on the important things!
Since principles are important to you, let me offer a bit of advice, take from it what you will. 1) Make your music available in .ogg format, many free-software zealots are too lazy/morally opposed/lawful to install the mp3 playing plug in. Good example, fedora core 4 does not come with mp3 playing capability installed by default due to patents.
2) Use a Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ license on the music, preferable by-sa, put some of the tracks up on op sound.
3) Aggressively advertise
4) Consider taking commissions/requests for pay.
5) Consider ads for you website. Don't put too many ads however or the site becomes unreadable.
If you wanted to, you could go to the local newsagent's shop and "pirate" a newspaper using the photocopier. Except that, even if you were prepared to put up with a stack of loose papers with overflows, it would still cost you more than buying the original.
..... ah for the days when people were easier to satisfy} which will take 1.5 * (100 / $HIT_RATE_PER_CENT) A4 pages at medium/high ink coverage. Call it £3 per CD and even though the blank disc is the cheapest item, you're still making barely any profit -- you'll never sell enough "pirated" CDs to pay your living expenses. But it's a good sideline if you're in the kind of job where you literally have to decide each day whether to catch the bus home, or walk home and eat. {Bear in mind you can burn off more calories walking in wet clothing than you'd get from a meal.}
That's the business model the CD companies need to start using if they want to avoid "piracy".
The maths: A CD-R ready for burning costs just slightly more to manufacture than a stamped CD-DA or CD-ROM {assuming you already have a master to work from}. An audio cassette costs three times more to manufacture than a CD, again assuming you have a master or want it blank. Burning a CD-R takes ($DURATION / $SPEED) * (100 / $HIT_RATE_PER_CENT) minutes, during which your computer cannot be used for anything else. The hit rate is not 100% when you use cheap CD-R media at high speeds; you can get better hit rates at lower speeds or on more expensive media, but in the final analysis it works out cheaper to put up with a few beermats {and no worse for the environment, since the manufacturing process hit rate is the same. Just as many or more "expensive" discs end up in landfill as "cheap" -- the only difference is they haven't passed through consumers' hands first}. You then have to print the cover artwork and a label {it used to be possible to get away with the title handwritten onto the disc with an indelible marker and a simple track listing, even handwritten if the burning run was short, for the right price
The record companies aren't having to pay for individual inkjet prints; so they can have a CD packaged and ready to sell for a lot less what than the "pirates" can do it for. They can sell it for the same price, maybe a pound more -- for most people, that much money is not worth the effort of saving {especially not for the sake of the lyrics, band photos and other nice stuff you don't get with a "pirated" CD}. As long as they sell enough CDs to cover the one-off costs of mastering {the band's advance and studio time}, everything else is pure profit.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I think there will always be demand for the highest fidelity recordings we have availible ie. cds. Just go down to your local used cd store and you will find plenty of people who still care about what they are listening to.
Even those who don't care about booklets and cover art might care about a disc with a spiffy spine that they can spot on a shelf, rather than a slew of unmarked cases.
I use lots of digital computer media, iPod-owning, FastDVD Copy-using, World of Warcraft-playing mediaphile that I am. But, I also keep all my CDs and tend to buy from half.com and rip rather than purchase from iTunes. (128 kpbs AAC is junk, I want to be able to convert to futuer formats, and I use the originals as assets in media [e.g. movies] I produce myself.)
With regard to my personal DVD collection which I use for both research and entertainment, I was running into a bit of a problem with unmarked cases. Last week (of 6 March 2006), I started searching for open source front ends for MySQL media asset tracking. Let's just say I'll be glad when some of these developers get their alphas beyond planning stage. It took me 3 days to figure out the right key words to Google, but I finally came across commercial closed-source software that pulls data from iMDB and Amazon using keyword searches, UPC codes, ISBN numbers, and scanned bar codes. (Not Delicious Monster, but very similar.)
The software I found costs $18 for DVDs and $18 for books. They also write software for games and CDs, with discounts for buyers who purchase more than one package. The software all have iTunes-like interfaces, and they provide not just the perfect complement to unmarked DVDs but also to commercial DVDs. It is a thousand times more convenient to be able to search my collection according to director, writer, year, title, cast, etc. Heck, I can even search and sort according to place purchased/acquired, borrower and many other criteria.
Try that with physical-only media.
I like physical media, but physical media just can't do the things digital media can and, one day soon, digital media will do everything physical media can.
blog
CDs don't suffer from bit-rot like CDRs. Their only problem is that new music is overpriced; it only costs about 50 cents to stamp one of them out, when CDs are mass-produced. Yes, there are other costs associated with packaging and distributing them, but have you not noticed that copyright-expired classical music CDs tend to run about $5 or so? Folks, just let the Law of Supply and Demand do its thing here. Someday some Big Music House will decide to lower prices as an experiment, and the consumer response will be overwhelmingly positive. Then the bean-counters will finally get the message.
To me and quite a lot of people, music purchases are often impulse buys - we've heard something we like so we will buy it if the opportunity to buy it presents itself. I have never gone shopping specifically to go to a store and buy a CD, I only ever go in music stores because I happened to be passing and thought of something I heard that I enjoyed.
Same goes for shopping on the Internet. If I can't pay for a download, I'm unlikely to pay and wait for a week and half for a CD to come from the other side of the planet (and posibly get held up in customs). Allow me to purchase your music online and download the result straight away, and you will get paid. You don't do that - why are you surprised that no one is buying?
I have bought more albums in the last year than I have in the last 10 years. All but one of the albums I've bought in the last year were from independent artists. Only one was on CD. The reason I have *bought* so much is because the artist or label provided the convenience that it was an easy impulse buy either by being on the iTunes Music Store or sold on their own website or via Magnatune. I wouldn't have bothered if it meant mail ordering a CD then having to go collect that CD because it wouldn't fit through the letterbox so the postman had to drop in a 'delivery left' note. Sell your music as online downloads and I'm sure you'll get a lot more support.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Personally, I think the CD market could still keep going strong. I actually would rather buy a CD of songs than buy them all via a legal music download service. The number one reason is because when you buy a CD you don't have all these DRM restrictions that you get on legal download services. So until download services get rid of DRM, the CD market shouldn't do too bad.
This entire thread explains why "they" are trying to lock down HDTV, and all other video while they are at it. We are not supposed to have options. The interactivity of the internet, be it for commerce, trade or piracy, is a problem to those who made their zillions putting "acts" into the top of the pipeline, running it on the radio and TV they owned, and "us" lined up to buy it, until "they" had squeezed all the money out of "us", and then "they" gave us a new act. This was fine until the net. I'm old enough to have a collection of home tapes, all recorded from vinyl, during the "home taping kills music" propaganda. While we may have had 5 tape players in row recording, this pales in comparison to today. We had to buy the album "they" put in the pipeline- we could not find new acts without "them". The net changes this. Indie acts don't have to go to the "man" where they can make a few million dollars gross and still end up owing the record company. Meanwhile, I don't buy anymore. I have sat radio in the car, which fulfills all my needs for music, without crapchannel playlists and commercials. My kids all think music comes from a computer, and look at a CD as "too big for the music". In the words of Mel Brooks in "Blazing Saddles" "Gentelmen ! we have to protect our phonybaloney jobs !" HD and Blu Ray are not out because THEY CAN'T GET THE DRM WORKING. I hope technology makes sure that "they" don't win. The whole DRM thing is to make sure that HDTV is a "top down" system, just like the "good old days" were for record companies. My kids already know about DRM, and my daugther (9) knows that iTunes are a rental, not a buy. Still, with millions of buyers out there (me), the first HDTV recorder that has inputs and records will make a fortune. Are you out there, china, india or africa. In the end, the RIAA will join the Maginot Line in History.
As long as drastic and even draconic copy protection measures are taken (*ahem*Staforce!*ahem*), there will be no choice but to actually have the disk/s.
I have to assume that the comparisons are between digital distrobution and physical disks whether they are DVD or CD-RW etc.
Also, my father just did a backup of his laptop. How did he manage that? Through the use of CDs. So, I doubt physical CDs will be phased out.
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
I am beginning to think that I may never buy music again, which is a little sad.
Most of all, I would like to by CDs so I can play them on the big stereo, transfer the music on them to my PC for convenient playing (I spend alot of time on m PC), and to my mp3 player. The last 5 CDs I have gone to buy all had DRM on them designed to prevent me doing this. So they want back on the shelves - they are of no value to me, worse than that, I don't know what damage they are going to do to my PC. Given the choice between music and my PC, there is no contest.
Second preference, I would like to buy high quality music online so I can play it on the PC, transfer it to my MP3 player, and burn to CD for safe keeping and for playing on the big stereo from time to time. The record companies are also working hard to prevent me from doing this. They either sell DRM stuff that won't play on my hardware, or wants to install god-knows-what on my PC.
The few free-format sales outlets that I have seen all want me to subscribe - commit to spending a minimum anout every month whether I want that much new music or not. I hope that one day they may choose to allow the likes of me - an infrequent buyer - to do business with them as well, but I see no sign of it at the moment.
I suppose, in one respect, my opinion of value of a CD has changed because my listening habits are changing. Once upon a time I didn't have a PC or an MP3 player, and the only way I had to listen to music was on the big stereo in the living room. I bought CDs specifically for that stereo. Now I spend most of my listening time on the PC, on the mp3 player, and least of all (but loudest) on the big stereo when everyone else is out. But I don't feel I am being unreasonable, and since I now spend more time on the computer, I have less time in the living room to listen to the big stereo anyway.
It is interesting to note that the article makes no distinction between file sharing and CD ripping. I regard file sharing as pirating, but I don't see ripping a CD that I paid for onto my own PC and mp3 player as bad, so we have a difference of opinion here. This may be the root of the problem. If the record companies expect me to buy each format separately, pay for the same music three times, then they are going to be disappointed. Especially at those prices. As I said earlier, given the choice between music and my PC, there is no contest. And the music companies are forcing me to make that choice.
They will take my vinyl records from me when they pry them from my cold dead fingers.
"I appreciate your advice but my principles are more important to me."
(...carries principles to poorhouse...)
The Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Sessions was literally "5 guys" around a Focusrite mic in a church. But that's the exception that proves the rule.
What you said. It was a good example of minimalist recording, and it worked very well with the slow-blues nature of the tracks they chose to record in that session. They were largely taking advantage of the acoustics of the church.
Looking at it another way, picture MTV Unplugged, but rather than unplugging the instrumetns, they unplugged the recording equipment.
For those not familiar with this album, the recording of Sweet Jane that appeared on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack that got lots or airplay about ten years ago is from this session. Minus, of course, the movie dialogue that somebody should be superimposed over the lead-in making me very grateful that I had my own copy of the album, unadulterated.
www.wavefront-av.com
You hit one of the two reasons that I still buy CDs: lossless CD quality, which of course is incredibly lossy compared to analog recordings, but is good enough for my ear. But 128 kbps? Even AAC? Sounds like total crap, especially with a pair of good headphones.
The other reason I still buy CDs is availability. Sure, I have a broadband internet connection, but the music I want is either not available on the P2P networks, or is available in such awful quality I wouldn't download it unless I was unfamiliar with the band and wanted a preview listen.
The funny part is that the obscure CDs I buy are not available in my local retail stores, so I still end up using the internet to get my music. But at prices comparable to iTunes music store, only far higher quality and with bonus liner notes and a backup CD that's pressed, not burned.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
t o o . . . m a n y . . . i n s i g h t f u l . . . c o m m e n t s . . .
*gasp!*
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Considering that many good bands still release their new albums on vinyl, too, I'd say that yes, the CD definitely has a future. Maybe not for Bitchney Spears (or, in ten years, her latest clone); maybe not even for the RIAA and similar syndicates, but overall, it does.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I think my PC/audio setup is pretty good for an unemployed teen, and I have a lot of fun raiding my Dad's old record collection to find the gems. It just doesn't feel right playing The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck on CD when I have them on nice, warm and authentic vinyl. Also, the size of the sleeve and the picture discs are infinitely cooler than any CD.
When CDs are no longer available. They are the only place you can get music that is uncompressed and un-DRM'd (as long as you disable Autoplay on your CD drive anyway). Lest anyone chime in like a broken record, yes you can get around DRM in iTunes by making an audio CD out of it (!) But you'll end up with a POS double-compressed track (and the iTunes compression is no great shakes).
The actual figure from BigChampagne, as reported by Cory Doctrow, is "less than three minutes"
"In the DRM world, security is breached so long as there is any person with the wherewithal to make a cleartext copy of an asset and put it on the Internet. In practice, this happens with amazing swiftness. Big Champagne, a company that monitors P2P networks, says that iTunes-only tracks (e.g. assets that are only released within DRM wrappers) typically appear on P2P networks less than three minutes after they are released to the iTunes Music Store."
http://www.xs4all.nl/~collin/test/hpdrm.html
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Really? I would've thought that just shipping a few sheets of stapled paper as regular mail in a flat envelope would be much cheaper than shipping a CD and jewel case in a padded one. Well, never mind then. Your music is interesting, though. I may wind up getting something.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Over here, we have 20 gig a month download caps.
You're outside North America, right? Is that cap only for traffic to and from your ISP, as many other Slashdot users have reported is the case, or does it also count traffic within your ISP? If the former is the case for you, then it might be wise for publishers to implement classful routing of peer-to-peer transfers, where the program's routing algorithm prefers topologically closer nodes (that is, nodes with a longer common IPv4 address prefix).
shit... i can't sit through one coldplay song. you, sir, are better than i
But I suspect the real fight isn't between the industry and file sharers at all; it's between the big labels and the independents.
In the good old days, making records was a hugely expensive process: you needed studios, producers, mastering, pressing, distribution, advertising, and financing for it all. And the big labels had all of those sewn up. You wanted to make a record, you went to them. The system worked, and the big labels made huge profits.
But look at the situation now. You don't need big expensive studios, coz you can record straight to a reasonably capable Mac or PC, which can simulate lots of the effects and other gear. You don't need expensive producers, coz you can practise and learn what you need in your bedroom. You don't need expensive mastering facilities, coz you can do all that in software now. You don't need expensive pressing facilities, coz you can burn CDRs. You don't need expensive distribution systems, coz you can deliver over the net. You don't need expensive advertising, coz word-of-mouth can work. And without all that expensive stuff, you don't need a big company financing it.
That's not to say that those expensive facilities don't make it much easier to create a good (or popular) recording. Time, experience, good gear, good people, and/or media-saturation advertising certainly count for an awful lot. But they're no longer necessary. Bit by bit, the big labels are losing their control over the industry; bit by bit, they're having to compete with independent artists and labels; bit by bit, they're being taken out of the loop.
And I suspect that's what scares them more than anything else.
But they can't get any public sympathy for that. So they concentrate on those 'illegal file sharers'. They frame the debate only in terms of those two polar opposites, and divert people's attention from anything else. And they hope that that'll get the public (and legislators) on their side; that that'll some how justify their attempts to lock down the industry. For example, if they levy charges on blank media or on P2P music transfers, who loses? The independents. If they get legislation to enforce encryption or watermarking or whatever, who loses? The independents. Anyone else making music, from lone bedroom musicians to reasonably big non-RIAA labels. That's the RIAA's real enemy, and we shouldn't let all this fuss over P2P distract us.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.