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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 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.
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.
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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 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'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?
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