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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.
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.
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.
Digital audio sounds terrible.
So yes, there is still a viable market for CDs.
Good thing CD's aren't digital audio...
Anti-piracy ad from the early 90s
http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/1672870/
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.
...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.
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.
Not sure from your post whether you're aware of this or not, but FLAC is a lossless format. Most FLACs are exactly the same quality as CD, bit for bit, and the exceptions are usually higher (not lower) quality.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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 ----
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.