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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 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.
Digital audio sounds terrible.
So yes, there is still a viable market for CDs.
Good thing CD's aren't digital audio...
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.
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.
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.
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
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