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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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a nice idea but it will never happen due to two things - customer perceptions & record company greed.
Think about it - let's say you suddenly decide you like The Beatles and start collecting their recordings. You'll probably end up collecting, say, 20+ albums by them - that's $200/£200/200 the record company gets out of you in total. If you buy the albums on CD, you don't notice you're spending that money because you buy, say, 1 CD a week as you can afford them. And when you have them all, you can look at the nice row of 20 Beatles albums on your bookshelf and feel that the money you spent was worth it because you have a nice big fat row of CDs in front of you.
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.
Look at DVD - in theory, we should be all playing audio DVDs now because for the same size of disc, you get anything up to 10x the data storage on a DVD than a CD. But if record companies released audio DVDs that were just straight conversions of existing CD albums (without, say, 5.1 enhancements to the music) everyone would feel cheated because they'd know you could get so much more on each DVD disc - so they wouldn't buy them.
I'm pretty much the same with my Gameboy Advance, Gamecube and PC games. I've bought very few GBA games because when I look at the size of the box (which is oversized anyway for the size of cartridge inside), it doesn't *feel* like it's worth $50/£35/50. I'm more likely to spend the same money on a Gamecube or PC game because psychologically I feel like I'm getting more for my money.
From a storage & technical perspective, it would be great to cram my racks of CDs into a space about 1/100th of the size but from selling actual products, this is as much about selling products as it is about technological advancement.
DVD is the classic example. I now own no VHS videos because I've replaced everything now with DVD. I've therefore bought a lot of movies at least twice in my lifetime (perhaps even more times when I've bought the standard edition DVD, then The Directors' Cut later on). One issue that's convinced me to do that are all the "extras" I get like commentaries, documentaries, deleted scenes, etc. yet, in reality, I probably watch all of those on about 1/4 of the DVDs I actually buy.
Yes, I admit it. I've fallen for the marketing of DVD hook, line and sinker...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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 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.
Sorry, but I think the fact that you need to categorise what you listen to into such microscopic categories indicates that you're just promoting vinyl because it's a "cool" thing to do.
Vinyl works as a medium if you spend an extortionate amount of money to spend on a hi-fi system and have even more money to spend on a storage vault for your vinyl albums that keeps them at a fixed air temperature and humidity. Anything else and they warp very easily, you can hear every scratch, and each time you play them the quality detiorates due to the unavoidable wear you induce on them due to the friction of a stylus rubbing against the side of the grooves.
I won't pretend to understand DJs and the dance music scene but IMHO limited vinyl pressings and "white labels" are simply about creating an artificial "rareness" to make every DJ think he's that bit more special than any other DJ.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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!
I agree. The first thing I do when I buy a new CD is make a copy for my car and MP3 it so it can enter the regular rotation, while the actual CD sits on a shelf and collects dust, but dammit, it's still nice to have. A lot of artists still put a lot of work into the art and content of the cases, and my car (which was made in 1999 and has a Bose stereo system, mind you) has a hard time with CD-Rs (yes, even when I use expensive discs burnt at 4x) so it's nice to have originals for that. I just don't get it when people buy full albums online at nearly the same price of the CD. They're missing out on the tangible CD from the purchase, all the artwork, and the full-quality audio.
...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.
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.
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.
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/
CDs, or similar, are still a very handy medium and will be there for a while still.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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
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.