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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."
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.
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.
There is no way CD's are going to disappear in the near future.
As a Slashdotter and a 20-Something: The only music I have purchased online was from a gift certificate - it was so terribly DRM laden and hindered that I vowed never to go back. I will only purchase CD's, at the end of the Day I have a tangible product and I can use it anywhere I want. Yes, I fall into the category which rips CD's and if this becomes illegal then you can be sure that I will NOT help the recording industries bottom line unless they can prove that I have some control over how I use the product that I purchased.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
So, if I go to a library with my laptop and rip a few tracks from a non-DRMed CD, is that considered fair use? I'm not breaking any encryption. Is that any different than copying a few pages out of a library book?
You can strip the DRM on the iTunes music. I probably shouldn't admit to it, but this is how I listen to music under Linux. I should mention that I don't share the music after stripping the DRM and that, if there were a way to do this without stripping the DRM, I would.
I use iTunes under Windows, then JHymn (http://www.hymn-project.org/). The unencrypted files will play problem-free under Linux and can translated into MP3s without issue as well.
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.
Sure, physical CDs still have a market, I think they'll be useful for quite a while for boxed software products.
Remember when Norton was selling software on Zip disks? I still chuckle at that.
Now as for music CDs, those may be heading for a downward trend.
I don't get it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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 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.
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).
I still buy CD's for one reason: Sound quality. The average song downloaded from a online retailor is of terrible quality, usually 192kbps or less, and i'll admit a lot of people can't tell the difference between a CD and a MP3(or other losy compression audio format) but i can and thats an issue for me. My MP3 player supports a wide range of file formats, but i usually end up useing FLAC, it eats space but it sounds much better, no digital garble, no washed out cymbols, no muffeled vocals. I guess i have to blame the crappy headphones that come with the iPod for the general publics ignorance to the way compressed audio sounds as compared to 1440kbps CD quality audio. Just give it a try, get a friend listen to the same song, on the same set of high end headphones or studio monitors, in both MP3(even 320kbps) and CD format and ask witch one sounds better. Even if it is subconcuois they will allways choose the CD audio. The CD (or other high bandwith) physical media will allways be around because the people who make the music and true audiophiles will want the high quality sound.
It's worth noting that myself (and many other geeks, I'd imagine) avoid using the iTMS for the sole reason of the CRAP. While 99c is still a bit much for me for lossy songs with no booklet (I've made a few exceptions, but I think they were all stuff not available locally), it'd be fine for me if it was the equivalent of .flac (lossless, no crap). I'd like the booklet, but I more or less stopped caring about the same time that the cheap bastards at the MPAA started swapping in ads for chapter indexes in DVD cases. I'll admit, though, the security tag thing being stuck to the disc itself was a bit more disenheartening than just ads or nothing.
It's not even the vendor lock-in that bothers me with crap. Well, not entirely. I have an iPod and see no reason to change to something else, nor to carry something else in my pocket that can play music as well. One computer being able to play my music at a time is enough for me, believe it or not, and while I don't like the idea of a limitation, I also see no reason that I'd need to allow five different machines to be able to play protected media at once. The principle of the product vendor not only telling me what I can or cannot do with my product but then enforcing it (it's not like warning labels - there's nothing that technically prevents you from using a hairdryer in the shower except common sense) is just wrong in every way imaginable. In fact I'd much rather see enforcable warning labels than what's going on digitally - I don't need to hear about the guy who's suing the chainsaw company because he thought he's tough enough to stop the blade with his hand, despite what the label said.
Once someone goes and cracks iTMSv6 encryption, I'll be much more willing to use the store to buy music. For the time being, I really can't be bothered to get a v5 installer going on a separate computer with a separate account and a separate card (which, seeing that I have a single debit and no credit, could be problematic), then jHymn the music, convert it to MP3 and add it back into the library of the computer that I actually sync to the iPod and play music from. Could I? Yes, but the amount of effort I'd have to put in would almost make it easier to just get music the old fashioned way.
Ruling out piracy, of course. It's not as if I'd prefer to pay nothing for a higher quality and unprotected version of the song, which has a considerably better chance of having a scan of the booklet than a download from iTMS. Nope, not a chance. I love giving money to the people going out of everyone's way to screw me over and lock me into a specific vendor.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
In the January sales last year, I bought a classical music boxed set. It contained 40 CDs, and cost £25. At this price, each CD cost less than a single track on iTunes. About 80% of it was both good quality and not a duplicate of something I already owned (in a couple of cases, it was a better recording than the version I had). A this price, I would buy enough music to need to upgrade my iPod annually. At £5-10 for a single CD, I generally have better things to spend my money on.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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!
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.
Yah, I'm a CD buyer as well. I download stuff here and there, and I have most of my collection ripped to .ogg files, but I still like to have a good old CD in my hands sometimes. For me, I like supporting the artists I really like (be it little indie bands that press their own, or big names that put $$ in the hands of the RIAA)...I really don't even like having CDR's in my 'collection' as I feel that takes away from it. I think it's to do with having the CD jacket, cover art, etc that goes with the music. For me, that's a part of the art of it...
I really don't like that most of my $15-20 goes to fat cats instead of the artists, and I do realize that cd-covers.org (or whatever) is out there, but I'm not likely to change anytime soon.
That being said, I'm purchasing fewer CD's now than ever. Maybe I'm getting old and not finding as many good new bands that catch my ear, or having a family is changing my lifestyle (no time to listen to it all...?), I'm not sure.
Anyway, that's where I stand on this. (If anyone cares.)
-Ben
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
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
2005. http://news.monstersandcritics.com/business/articl e_1137269.php/U.S._losing_pulp_and_paper_mill_capa city
if like me you lived in one of the larger paper lumber harvesting regions of the US like me you'd have known that paper companies had been liquidating their assets for more than a year, to try to compensate for lower demand/more competeitive global markets.
yup, the sale of former timbering grounds have freed up massive chunks of valuable real-estate at rock bottom prices, at least here in wisconsin.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html