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Is the CD Becoming Obsolete?
mrnomas writes "What's to blame for the declining CD sales? Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians are releasing online? Is it because iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the country? Or is it just that CDs are becoming obsolete?" Quoting: "Forbes.com [ran] an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% in 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? What's truly happening is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats. What this indicates, so far, is that US sales of digital music will be growing at an estimated rate of 28% in 2008, however physical sales will drop even further, resulting in a net overall decline.""
Until downloadable music isn't compressed, or they are able to compress without ANY loss, there will still be a need for CD's. I think the under 25 crowd doesn't care that much, you wouldn't notice the difference on an Ipod, but on a nice home system you do.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Peak limiting, also called Dynamic Range Compression. If you know what this is, then you understand why CD sales have been dropping.
Maybe others feel the same way?
Personally, I find myself more interested in bands that put their music out on the net and/or sell CD-Rs themselves. (Nerdcore, Wizard Rock, etc.) I can't remember the last time I bought music from someone who the RIAA 'represents.'
This seems to parallel the increasing niche-ification of magazines and their cannibalization by the web. Not at all suprising, really.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Cds did a lot better when people didnt have as much access to online sources of music and when 56k was the rule not the exception. Now that any library, office and a large number of homes have high speed of some sort and more tech savvy people than ever it is no surprise that people are less willing to shell out 15 to 20 dollars on a cd that has a lot of music they didnt personally choose to have. People can go online, download the songs they want and do whatever they want [especially on p22p where DRM just doesnt have a foothold] with their music.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
All the miniaturization is nice, but one thing that has been missing from the music industry since the 1980s is the physical size of the record. A record album was a fairly large thing, and, covers were small posters in their own right. Nowadays, you get a little picture in a plastic case with the CD, which is nice and transportable, for sure, but it is not as effective as a total package visually as a big record used to be.
This is my sig.
In the future the storage will have no removable or mechanical/rotating parts- just like the human brain does not.
Motion City Soundtrack just released a video with a song from their new album on Youtube. I 3 it.
1. It's a high-quality, DRM-free copy of the music which I can convert into FLAC and other digital formats I choose. (Yes, there are exceptions, but it's much better than most online stores).
2. I have a semi-permanent copy which I can re-rip as many times as I want.
3. Shiny.
...but away from albums, too.
People are finally able to buy singles again. How much of this drop is due simply to people only buying the two good tracks from an album and leaving the other eight behind?
At least, I hope a physical medium for purchasing and keeping your music is not on the way out.
I hate downloaded music, I hate having nothing but some files and a printed out cover to show for my money (or no cover etc. if I'm not going to back them up individually).
I love having shelves of cds, with their cover art, their liner notes etc. I love the hard, physical format of them.
I'm forever worried that I'll lose or misplace, erase or whatever the tracks I've legally downloaded...
I want physical music delivery to remain dammit!
I don't care what anyone says, I still miss vinyl.
...until it's uncompressed CD quality audio, I don't care if it's protected by DRM to disallow sharing, as long as I can rip the files to AAC, WMA, or whatever other format I choose and copy them to digital audio players I have authorized for my personal use. Until then I'll only buy CDs.
no wonder, they become obsolete. In a time, when many DVDs are available for 8 dollars or less, a typical CD is just too expensive. Burn it onto DVD and sell it for half of what it costs now, sell it "previously viewed" on the street like many DVD shops do now. I would not be surprised if profits would go up.
People don't have a fixed budget for CD's and now they're hoarding it now because the music sucks - they have a certain amount of disposable income that they allot to entertainment, and they're not spending it on CD's as much as they used to. DVD sales only peaked last year - does it surprise the heck out of everybody that just as DVD players became affordable CD sales started to tank? People are also buying hi-def screens and home theaters in record numbers. Back in 1986 lots of people weren't used to buying VHS tapes, and they still bought records and then CD's and spent time sitting around listening to music. Most people don't do this anymore, they watch movies or premium cable or shows on their DVR's.
RIAA, meet MPAA. Sony, Universal, Warner - you're competing with yourselves.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Buying music without being able to sample each track is a hard sell these days. People are now used to being able to take an albeit brief listen to nearly every track on a CD before making a decision to buy. You can do that of course on either online CD purchase sites like Amazon, or iTunes. One of those will give you the music immediately, and generally for less than a new CD.
Buying music at a Brick & Mortar is buying blind. Usually they only have a small selection available on preview machines.. if they have one. "Gee, I hope the other tracks on this thing don't suck," is not a good thing to have going through customers' heads when they're shopping.
The last time I bought music CD at a store was fathers day, when I just wanted to get my dad some CDs that I knew were really good compilations. That's about the only use I have for B&M.
FWIW, I generally buy my music using amazon's marketplace. Better quality, I can rip my purchase legally to my specification, and it's dirt cheap.
There is only one proper distribution format
Tape
Fixed
Personally, I haven't bought a new CD in months, and that's due to one reason only. I'm in college and I can't afford them. $10 for a forty to fifty minute album doesn't seem like a very good deal when that can be used something like food or a longer-lasting form of entertainment.
Goo goo g'joob.
CD sales are down because people have become accustomed to being able to get the things that they want online. This and, due to the internet and mp3, people have started discovering more and more 'underground' music. It would be very difficult (read: impossible) for retailers like best buy, much less wal-mart, to stock the required inventory required to satisfy some customer's demands. The last to Cds that I purchased were by bands that most people have never heard of (The Breakestra, and Trevor Hall). I purchased half of the one online, and all of another. Why? Because i'm at work all day long, and i live too far away from the local record shop that would actually STOCK the bands that i wanted.
Two things have happened:
1.Big Box retailers like best buy and circuit city have pushed the mom and pop record shop out of business, meaning that in order to find the more obscure music, people are forced to go online.
2. People (like me) have gotten used to the fact that they don't HAVE to go to the cd shop to buy what they want anymore. In FACT it is sortof a pain in the neck to actually have to go. If i DO buy a physical CD, i have to take it home, get it out of the packaging, put it into my computer, rip it down to MP3 (lets face it, most modern recordings don't require a lossless format like FLAC), and upload it to my daapd server before I even really listen to it. If i buy the cd online, all i have to do is run qtfairuse copy it to a samba share and i'm ready to roll.
SO its basically convenience.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
1) Aganist Copyright Law, you are not allowed to convert to other formats.
2) Aganist Copyright Law, you are not allowed to backup your music.
3) Agreed. Shiny.
You can preview the tracks, then click BUY. If you're a big Amazon shopper like me, you get Amazon Prime and have everything in two days.
I bought a CD on saturday, and I'm enjoying listening to it. There are quite a few reasons I bought it in a CD format.
1. I like it uncompressed, I probably couldn't hear the difference with the new iTunes DRM-free tracks, but I don't have to worry about recompressing them later and having the flaws come popping out.
2. I run linux and it's really a PITA to boot over to windows to use iTunes, and eMusic doesn't have some of the artist I enjoy.
3. The cover art and the convenience of having a disk for the car premade with a nice pressing is enjoyable.
4. I want to buy from artists I enjoy so they can keep making music
I don't see online distribution quite solving these things yet. ALthough, I will admit, most consumers are a lot more apathetic about these issues than me.
I don't have exact figures but from what I've been seeing so far, people who can afford would generally get their music from a subscription service (e.g. iTunes, Emusic, etc), while those who can't will probably just download them off P2P or get them from friends. Somewhere in between is the enthusiast (like myself) who still like those liner notes, album art, etc. I'm also a completist. With those bands I really like, I'd rather buy the CD than download the tunes given a choice.
They're just becoming very shiny coasters.
I know a lot of non-netheads who would love an iPod, but fear downloading music from iTunes for who knows what reasons. They still prefer to buy CD's and pay for them to an actual human. I think it has something to do with fears of inputting their personal info into a web form (understandable, really).
I would like to see retailers that have a device that will "stuff" your iPod with the tunes that you want. Kind of like an iTunes brick and mortar store, but really just a machine not unlike those photo printing machines that are everywhere now. Think iPod kiosk. I imagine that if you could just plug your iPod into this device and pick your tunes, and then pay the register that it would get a lot of sales.
What I'm saying is that for a lot of people it is not "downloading" that they want, it is digital format that they are after. Provide them an easy to use digital format in a brick and mortar store and it just might work.
1) the Indie Douchebag. This Slashdotter will claim he only buys from 'local' or 'indie' bands, namely, his friends' garage band.
2) the Audiophile Loudmouth. This one buys 24k gold plated CDs, listened to on a 20bit DAC feeding monster-cabled speakers that he bought at Best Buy.
3) the Pirate. You all suck, Gnutella FTW!
Face it, none of the dorkwads on here, myself included, is representative of the mouthbreathers at Walmart whose choices power the economy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music
Where on earth did so many people on slashdot get the bizarre misapprehension that pop, lowest-common-denominator music is somehow more prevalent now than it's been in the past? It's always been there, at least since the 50's, and if you weren't conscious during the 80's and 90's, I assure you that the majority of music released during the decades was "safe" bubble gum pop. Think back, do you remember that music? No? Of course you don't, it was immensely forgettable and put out for a quick buck.
And I know that 10 years from now the same people who try to paint this phenomenon as new will be repeating the same mantra again and again, "remember back in the early 2000s when music was good, before they started releasing commercialized garbage?".
Yeah, I know, Slashdot is teh dupe, but this was two years or so ago.
And the fortune says:
YOW!! The land of the rising SONY!!
Most appropriate.
This is the obvious result of people finally being able to buy 1 song for a buck or two. Before people would pay 12~20 bucks for a CD that only had a few songs on it that they actually liked. That's the whole reason they are trying to force itunes to raise prices on certain songs.
I own a few hundred cds. I only listen to music at my home computer or with headphones at my computer at work. I haven't bought a cd in years. The only purpose they serve is to get the music from the store to the hard drive of one of my computers. I listen to the music on the cds all the time, but the cds themselves gather dust in my closet.
I hope so... HVD's are way cooler.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Considering the amazing success of DVD Audio and Super Audio CD, it's a wonder we have any regular CDs left at all.
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
I think that less music on physical media is sold because so much of the music lacks permanence. Very little is created now that will be of enduring value. it's all "flavor of the month" and all driven by dancing and sexy bodies, and the career of an "artist" is correspondingly short. There is less interest in having a copy of the music around; you already know you won't be listening to it six months from now, much less several years.
Unabashed plug: Those who are interested in independently-produced progressive rock and jazz... more complex music that's likely to be engaging and reveal new things over time... please visit workshopmusic.com; and turn it up loud. ; )
... and eventually, DVDs, USB flash disks, Blu-Ray disks, the hard disk drive itself, etc etc. Nothing lasts forever.
Sell for $5-$10. Music sales will go way up. "piracy" will still be around, but more people who like what they download will actually go out and buy the CD and encode themselves. Compressed music should really just be an advertisement for the real product. While at it, get rid of the stupid DRM schemes, ok?
Kind of offtopic....
WTF don't companies who make boomboxes that can read mp3 CDs put DVD drives in instead? It sure would be nice to have a 4GB fully integrated solution for weekend camping. Oh well. I'll just stick to the sansa with a boomtube, I guess.
Of course, the 1960s, 70s and 80s had decade-defining music. There's no such music for the 2000's. Not really that much worth buying.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Aside from the fact that I have been unemployed for a while, I really only buy 3-4 cd's a year, usually movie sound tracks. I listen to a lot of classical, and Mozart just doesn't produce a lot of new hits being dead and all. When I first got a cd player I bought maybe 50 cd's a year, but I have
all the major classical works. Unlike tapes, I seldom wear out or damage a cd. So little need to buy
anything new. I DO buy lots of DVD's however. Once again the poor US tech economy prevents me from getting more.
"Peak limiting, also called Dynamic Range Compression. If you know what this is, then you understand why CD sales have been dropping."
Yeah for years and years i didn't know what it was about pop I didn't like.
I have downloaded music illegally, but when i find a song i like what am i to do ? buying the CD doesn't help....
One artist a tracked down through myspace, and to get a clean version i had to order a record, as in vinyl. The artist couldn't even find a CD that wasn't messed up to send to me.
For me, it has nothing to do with copyright, just getting a "clean" version. This I will and have paid for with actual $$$.
First I agree, music quality has nothing to do with it. That accounts for a negligible market size. The real reason is gifts. How many CDs did you used to buy and how many did you used to give as gifts. I'd wager about 10% of the CDs you bought was the number you gave as gifts at christmas or other times. Possibly more. Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift. The original media is a much better gift than a burned CD or a pile of itunes gift certificates. It's not like the days of audi tapes where a Mix CD took time and effort and could only be made one at a time. THere the mix tapes were more valuable than the original media. With Cds its the reverse. I have no problems owning a copy but I prefer to give the original as a gift. It's the tangible media that is satsifying to the recpient. I'd say that could easily account for 15% of the market.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's been four years since I bought a CD because I just don't really care for mainstream music anymore. It's not that I'm waiting around for music to get better, it's because I just don't care about what the rest of the world is doing musically. The last brand new CD I bought must've been at least seven years ago.
I mostly listen to my own music which I give away for free on the Internet. Perhaps I'm self-centered. I imagine that many people are seeking free sources for their music. Why pay money when people out there are giving away good stuff for free, right?
imho, music CD's are worth no more than a couple of bucks. for $2, i'd have bought a lot of CDs ... personally, I believe that if the market hadn't been perverted, it would be worth a lot more. Of course, you can't really expect people earning six amd seven fiqure salaries to understand basic concepts like, say, economics of scale or something called 'ethics'
it's a crying shame that so few ruined so much for so many
Amen to no compression / lossless compression. I just bought like 5 CDs today. Not only is sound quality a huge factor, but I perceive some benefit to owning tangible, non-DRMed media rather than something that's filling up a hard drive which can go bad, or home-burned CD-Rs collecting dust in a closet. If I want to make car listening copies or custom compilations, I can rip the CDs onto the computer. From there I can also copy to an iPod-type device. But I don't have to. For my money I already have a plastic disc with printed liner notes which I don't need to fool around with if all I want is a quick listen.
With downloaded music, not only is the audio lossy, but then I also have to spend my precious time producing archival or car listening CD-Rs on my own separately-purchased, questionably-durable media, labeled with a Sharpie or some mediocre inkjet-printed sticker.
And what about rare music? When some remix/promo single or obscure album/12" is long out of print and not carried by places like the iTunes Store, and the torrents have all died down, I may still be able to track down an authentic, full-quality release at a used/collectible shop. I doubt I could be so lucky with old download-only releases, where any company hosting them would likely be sued out of business.
I still prefer CDs over MP3s. First, I don't like paying for something that I consider ephemeral. I still like to have something physical. It's convenient to purchase music online. Then I have the hassle of backing up this music if I reinstall my OS, or get a new machine. And that's assuming I'm allowed to make copies.
Second, it seems like I'm more restricted in how I can use my music when purchasing online. It seems easier for a company to control content that way. Sure, there are ways to defeat any copy-protection, but sometimes it's a hassle.
I'd rather buy a CD, convert the songs I want into MP3s and be done with it. That way I have the comfort of knowing I have a reliable, high quality backup which I can even stick in my sound system when I'm so inclined.
So going online I'd spending as much as I have with CDs, but I end with with nothing physical to show for it. No album art, no booklet, not CD, nothing. Just some crappy 600x600 jpg if I'm lucky and an MP3. Maybe I'll embrace that medium some day, but only when it's evolve far beyond its current form.
And to be precise, it's got to be 8-track - it is well-equipped handle the inevitable comeback of quadrophonic.
Retro cool in 5...4...3...
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
It's because I've already bought seven distinct editions of Dark Side of the Moon, two each of Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, and the White album, three of Rumors, and two of the Bee Gees Greatest Hits, and CDs don't wear out. What do they expect me to do - smash the CDs and buy them all over again? Buy them on Blu-Ray? Hell, why not sign my paycheck over to the RIAA? Sheesh! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The RIAA. They've made the situation worse for themselves at just about every opportunity with their "this is the way it has been, this is the way it always will be" attitude. All things change in a dynamic environment, only the short sighted and naive believe the status quo can be maintained indefinately. Instead of accepting the coming changes they faught them every step of the way.
Recently I bought the new Nine Inch Nails album. Not because I felt the need to support their label, not because I prefer my music on CD's (I don't), and not because it was a good album (though it was). I bought it because a glimmer of imagination and creativity went into its production. The CD appears black until it's played, once it's been heated up by the laser it turns white and reveals previously hidden writing on the CD itself, along with a bit of binary code that can be translated into a URL. Finally, a reason (albeit a small one) to own the physical media again. A little something extra that's pretty interesting and can't be owned without buying the album. This is adaptation, and it's a trend the rest of the music industry should be following. It's time to offer more than just 12 tracks burned to a CD in a cheap plastic case, it's time to justify the $20 price tag in an age where the same music can and is being distributed globally for free. And for god's sake it's time to let some good music through, instead of this constant stream of generic crap.
Most of all, it's time for the RIAA to go away and make room for a new generation of music entertainment, one that isn't terrified by change.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Now I'm just fucking cheap. But I don't want to pay $15-20 for a CD, especially since there is almost nothing that I would want to listen to (that I know of) that I don't already own on CD. Maybe if the radio wasn't so full of annoying ads and the same 5 garbage songs being pushed by big record companies being played over and over again I might find new stuff I want to listen to, but not the way it is now.
Of course there's always stuff like Pandora.com, but most of the time it plays stuff that I kind of like listening to while it's playing but don't feel compelled to purchase^Wlicense.
The Farewell Tour II
Me, I don't buy many CDs these days because I don't know what's on them. All the song names and CD labels look the same to me. I know I like something when I hear it on the radio or such. Then I try to remember the band name or song name while I'm driving and often forget. So when I go to a music store and see the thousands of options and I don't even know exactly what category the music I heard was in, then it becomes REALLY hard to find it. And when I do find it it's usually on a CD with a half dozen songs who's names don't mean anything to me and if I've heard them before I can't remember. So I choose not to spend $15 to $20 on a CD that I think is only worth $5 when I only half remember liking 1 song as long as I've remembered the name right.
On the other hand, I do prefer the sound quality of CD when compared to MP3 or radio play. And I do end up with things I like but didn't know about.
But overall, the quality of both the music and the sound recording just isn't very good any more. So I don't buy very much music these days, and keep listening to the many available radio stations and internet streams hoping to find something good (and remember it).
- James
I thought it was an obsolete format the day I first saw one. I was one of those audio tape holdouts because I hated the downgrade that CD players meant for me. Back when I actually exercised, the bulk, cost, and skipping of CDs made them prohibitive. I foolishly thought (maybe just hoped) they were a passing fad. Think about the data/area ratio you get nowadays. You could compress all the songs, music videos, and band gimmicks on a SD card. I'm just waiting for the industry to find their next "copy-proof" medium to upgrade/downgrade to.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
1. (99% of the time) No DRM
2. Better quality sound than lossy formats like MP3
3. Album art
4. Out of print, import, and rare CDs (which most of my CD purchases are) may become collector's items down the road
5. Convenient backup if you lose the ripped FLACs
I think physical delivery will make increasingly less sense. though maybe in the future, you'd be buying a "collectors edition" photo album from the making of the record, a poster, a keycode (to download a backup from the official site, anytime), and a small certificate giving you the right to download said music in whatever way you want, should the official site ever disappear in the future.
I lost my sig.
I don't know how popular my view will be around here, but here it is regardless.
Thank God for iTunes!
Now my music buying is easy & instant.
I don't have to make a special trip to the store to find out they don't have it anyway.
I don't have to have stacks of CD's in wrong boxes.
I don't have to buy extra shelves to stack them on.
It all goes straight onto my iPod, my old CD's are in a box in a loft 5000 miles away. I can take my whole music collection everywhere, I can stream it around my house & play it in the car.
I look forward to the day when movies are just as conveinient.
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
Smart labels are doing something ingenious: Including a coupon for a free digital download when you buy the record on vinyl. That way you have your nice vinyl record AND a digital copy to put in your MP3 player.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I blame Soulseek. Wait... shouldn't I blame Napster? Or was it WinMX? Actually it was Hotline from Big Red H before any of those. But somewhere along the line I got my first taste of crack... I mean free music. Free as in it don't cost me no thang. I'm sure in the long run it will cost me and we could argue that it's people like me that are slowly killing the music industry or whatever but whether or not that's true, I've quit buying cd's. I used to buy around 100 a year give or take. Now I buy maybe 3. Two of those will be cd/dvd combos that I only buy because they also have a dvd.
Part of the issue is that I don't want to shell out $$ for a bunch of crap and one or two songs that I like. Part of it is that I'd much rather kick it at home and get my tunes then have to go to BestBuy or wherever to buy a cd. It's convenience. It's laziness. It's whatever you want to label it. The bottom line is I used to buy a lot of cd's and now thanks to the intarweb I have a patch over one eye and I yell arrgh a lot.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
When I was teenager, we used to listen to LPs.
They were big, heavy, when you carried them home or to your friend's party, everybody saw who was your favourite band.
The covers used to be great mostly. Later the double albums were invented, then the cover artwork became even more interesting.
But that was not all, they could stuff into the big cover a folded, even bigger poster, which could end up on the walls of your room.
The best photographers, artists created the covers and you could watch them for weeks after you finally brought them home.
It seems like much less records were released. It was before everything, including politics, economy became just a clip, then a soundbite.
We used to listen to much less variety of records, but we listened to them much longer. We used to be curious of every minute of the album from our favourites. I don't think that they had better ratio with the great and not that great songs, but somehow even the not that great ones had something to offer. There were actually songs, which started to make sense only after listening to them over and over as "fillers" between the better songs, simply because you could not set up play lists and skipping was more difficult and inconvenient on a record player. You also risked to scratch the track.
There was also something magical watching the LP spinning, the light had a strange dance on the black tracks.
I love my iPod, don't misunderstand me. It's beautyful, small, extremely convenient.
I have also developed some attention deficit disorder, due to the fact, that you can have so much more these days.
I am also guilty of skipping if the first 20 seconds does not hit a raw nerve.
But sometimes I slip back into the past and listen over and over the entire CD, just like when I used to listen to Led Zeppelin, the Stones as they were just released and it seemed like the entire world was just waiting to see what they've got to give us.
Sometimes it happens, like lately with Sam's Town from the Killers. When I look at the tiny graphics on my iPod I wonder how the cover of their LP would look like, if they were stars when we used to be young.
I never wanted to go to Vegas, but now I am curious, for sure.
Some things don't change, I guess.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. We need a format that does not depend on the storage technology used. The pen-drive (aka flash drive) is perhaps the closest we have to such because the computer only cares about the interface, not the storage surface. Time to dump disks altogether for anything we want to last. (Pen-drive storage bits as they currently are may not last, but at least the interface is the same such that if they come up with a longer-lasting storage method inside, it would still work in old pen-drive slots.) In software-engineering speak, we need to separate the interface from the implementation.
Table-ized A.I.
99% of under 25 are not buying cds or singles, they are downloading for free (or swapping via itunes in colleges). Those older than 25 are not buying cds because cds sound like sh!t because of compressed dynamics and digital clipping introduced as a result of the loudness wars. The audiophiles if you want to call them, I think of them more as those that still actually listen to music (as opposed to hear it like most people these days), are buying used 15 year old cd's for 50-150 bucks on ebay because you cannot buy a lot of it or what you can buy sounds worse than a cassette tape! Every possible bad decision the studios could have made have been made. It is pathetic, there are mental defects in the organizations. Oh... And lets review how we can get music today....if I wanted a cd I would have to pay lots for special shipping and wait days or weeks because there aren't any physical cd stores anymore... or I could pay the same or more for a sh!tty low quality mp3 most likely with DRM and no album art and nothing... or I could download any quality of any album with album art and everything for free this instant... Which route would one most likely take? PATHETIC.
With the proliferation of mp3 players, the CD is an anachronistic format. Why buy a CD and spend the effort ripping it when you can just buy pre-ripped songs as downloads? Quality isn't going to be much of a factor, the offerings through iTunes sound "good enough". In the 1980s the music cassette tape became a dominant seller, and those were really crappy high-speed duplications of masters. Those of us with some sense of audio quality would still buy the vinyl and then make our own tapes on higher-quality tapes, but a huge consumer base just didn't care.
Cassettes also took off because they cost less than the corresponding vinyl album, so the portable convenience and price made them attractive and most people felt okay about replacing them after they wore out. If you look at albums on the iTunes Store they cost $10-$12 generally, whereas CDs are routinely $13-$16. So yeah, all the arguments about CDs sounding better than downloaded mp3 or AAC files is true, but I think it is moot for the majority of consumers.
There is plenty of new music for me to listen to since I'm living in the UK now, but the exchange rate effectively doubles the price of a CD unless the bands release something in the US, and they beat the best songs to death on the radio over here as well.
They've been underground since day one, have a small and fanatical audience, and are still selling at a high rate -- with no representation on ultra-corporate, ultra-mainstream iTunes.
Anti-Globalism
FLAC is a loseless audio compression technology doing the rounds. Winamp and VLC support it out of the box. Sizes are reasonable: 40 to 50% bears out with experiences mein:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC
Microsoft Media Player doesn't support it, but who uses that anyway (besides ET and n00bz)?
I carry my LP collection around in my backpack, so I can listen to it on my portable turntable thru my vacuum tube amplifier powered by lead-acid batteries.
And I pull along my 78 collection in my little red wagon.
(There actually were boom boxes with turntables, though not with tubes)
Listening to high quality music on high quality ostentatious home systems is being replaced by:
- Home theater (more emphasis on watching movies at home rather than listening to music)
- iPods
- Hidden, and thus slightly lower quality, music systems such as Sonos and Sondigo
- Talk radio -- this is indirect. The lessening popularity of music is coincidental with the rise in talk radio starting after Sep. 11. Everyone's a political activist or blogger now. Lack of music listening on the car radio translates to fewer new CDs bought for the home. Talk radio has helped keep listeners off music stations by playing snippets of popular songs on the lead-ins and take-aways surrounding commercial breaks.
Pointless rude Slashdot barb:You just keep bragging about your quadraphonic system with ported woofers.
I blame the RIAA. By scaring the population at large, less people are buying CDs to burn their downloaded music on to.
Or have I missed the point?
Simply put, consumers hate cds, myself included, for a variety of insanely obvious reasons:
1) If I buy one disc, I have to carry it into my car, then into my portable cd player, then it gets lost under the seats or behind the desk. It's cumbersome.
2) If i'm in my office and want to listen to a CD i forgot at home, i'm screwed.
3) Ripping cds is not obvious to everyone, as is moving files around from pc to device to whatnot. On top of that, add all the ridiculous digital rights management making this task even harder, and the general people are lost.
The online distribution model will win because it's simple, and it does what the public wants. You put some dollars here, you click some buttons there, and voila, the music is with you to listen in your office, your car, portable.
I have a stash of hundreds of cds at home, gathering dust somewhere. Why do I even need those physical layers of plastic and aluminium? So I can carry 20 lbs of material with me so I can chose what I want to listen to? MEH.
CDs are dead(ish).
You managed to say "Its the piracy, stupid" without getting modded down. That takes some serious skill on Slashdot. And yes, "Its the piracy, stupid".
The average customer doesn't give a toot about "do whatever they want with their music", since what they want to do with their music is "play it", and DRM typically permits that. The average customer does not care that they cannot play music imported from Japan's Sony store on their Linux box, chiefly because the average customer is buying made-in-the-USA bubblegum pop to play on their Windows machine, iPod, or CD player. If you're the average customer, you could grow old and die without DRM ever inconveniencing you enough to notice. (No, the average customer does not care that if their Windows box dies and their iPod dies then they lose access to their music library. The average customer does not *have* a music library -- they have a selection of CDs they are listening to right now. Many of them are in the wrong CD cases, liner notes have been lost, and some are bare on the dresser. Not having access to that selection in 6 months doesn't concern them, because they will be listening to new CDs in 6 months, because to the average customer music is an experience like seeing a movie in theatres and half of the fun is that it is new.)
The flexibility of buying only the tracks you like is a great feature of iTunes, but nobody is filling up those 4 GB iPods* at ~25 cents per MB. The iPod is a cultural phenomenon, selling 100 million units worldwide. The iTunes store has sold about 300 million *songs*, and it is joined at the hip. Three songs per machine -- if one buyer buys a 12 song album, on average three buyers buy nothing. Are these three songs per machine causing the decline in CD sales? They must have been darn good songs!
No, really: its the piracy, stupid.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I wonder if the death of the small CD retailer has had a larger effect on CD sales. Just about every used CD shop I've ever shopped at are gone or have had to expand the line of merchandise they carry. And mid-level retailers are gone too. I went to the Monmouth Mall in NJ the other day, and noticed that there was no music retailer in there anymore. If I want a CD, I have to purchase it at a big-box retailer like Circuit City, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or Target, or buy it from an online retailer. With the death of the small retailers has come the disappearance of the used CD market. In the pre-Internet days, I wanted cheaper used CDs instead of new CDs. Now, I can't buy used CDs in any store near me, and I know that if I don't like the CD, I can only get rid of it on eBay.
You can play your CD all day every day and not have it go bad.
The act of playing a vinyl record will damage it. Just like with clothing, your favorites will quickly be destroyed but the icky ones live in your closet forever.
The RIAA is gonna blame piracy, no matter what the cause of declining use or purchase of compact disk media is.
Considering that the other physical forms of music distribution (records and tapes) have become obsolete due to the pushing of the CD medium, there seems to be a cliff ahead of us (and by "us" I mean the sales portion of the music industry) if CDs are indeed passe.
Shifting paradigms are fun.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
you see that hole in the middle of the cd, where there's nothing but clear plastic? the media i use now fits in that hole, has much greater storage capacity than cd-roms, and doesn't make my computer sound like a 747. its storage capacity will catch up to dvds sometime this year, and maybe even hd-dvds in a few more years. plus, it's rewritable, so i don't need to have a hundred.
if content delivery is solved by high speed internet, i have no doubts that content storage and transportability will be solved by flash memory. i don't think performance will be an issue.
I personally have not purchased a physical CD in about 8 years. I dont even listen to the radio anymore. I prefer to listen to my engine and just relax. I can see how the CD died though. Why would you want to carry around a big honking portable CD player and a fragile CD with only about 12 tracks when you could carry an mp3 player with hundreds of tracks?
Lucky you. I bought Right Said Fred.
Putting a disk in my player for a 3 minute song is NOT worth it, especially when the other songs are so intolerable that one can't bear to listen for even a moment. I junked the whole disk.
I suppose I'm glad. That one bitter experience cured me of my foolish habit of spending $15 to $30 for plastic disks encoded with useless nonsense. I'm not supporting the RIAA anymore.
I'm too sexy for the RIAA. To sexy for the RIAA. Too sexy for lawyers...
I think that, at least for me, it all comes down to a price/convenience tradeoff. The reason that online sales are growing so much is simply that MP3 and similar formats are convenient. On a single hard drive you can fit the sort of music that, on separate CDs, takes a huge amount of storage space. And they're right there at your fingertips. Couple the advantages with the ability to buy music without having to leave your chair and you can see that the traditional CD, while better quality, has a general feeling of being less convenient. The difference is subtle, but enough that people would prefer to download the music rather than go to a store, buy the CD, and then take it home. And let's be honest, the first thing most people would do with it is rip the CD and throw the music onto their iPod. Relative sound quality doesn't even come into it for the average joe.
CD sales would go up a lot if their prices were adjusted to reflect the fact that the market has radically changed over the last ten years. I'm not sure how much the average album is going for in the US, but here in Australia you'd expect to pay around $25 AUD. Personally I would love to be able to afford to buy a pile of CDs, but at that sort of price I'm not even going to consider it. If they were closer to $10, I'd be buying a heck of a lot more, because at that price the slight inconvenience of the media is balanced out. Heck, I'd consider picking up entire discographies.
As far as i'm concerned, i seldom buy pop/rock CD's because of the quality of the sound. I don't know it this is the reason why people in general are abandoning CD's, but it's my own reason. As some ppl here said, CD's are being badly masterized resulting in hyper-compressed, clipped music with no dynamic range whatsoever. The great advantage of the CD medium is it's enormous dynamic range (90db,) compared to other mainstream mediums like the vinyl, but instead of taking advantage of this, sound engineers follow the trend and prefer to push things all way up. Well it happens that they can't do this compreesion mess in vinyl because the needle would jump off tracks, so, in many cases, we end up having much better quality sound on vinyl. When i really like an album but i hate the way it sounds, i'll end up buying the vinyl version. If there's no vinyl available i'll put in in a list for a future buy, when this loudness war will be over and i will have the chance to get a proper remastered CD version. Red Hot Chilli Peppers are a good example of this: they asked another sound engineer to remaster Stadium Arcadium in vinyl (unfortunately not on CD) and surely anyone can tell the diference from the bad, loud, and clipped sound (CD) and the a very well crafed masterization in the vinyl version. For a better explanation about this subject i recommend everyone to watch this video. And talking about mp3, as CD's are kept to maximum average loudness we can less ear the subtilities of each instrument so there's no point in talking about quality and there isn't a great difference between a CD and a MP3. We are using very few of the extent capabilities of the CD medium with actual pop/rock rules of "hot" masterizing.
That sounds like a playlist to me. I think we could share these on the internet. We wouldn't be limited to 74 minutes. We wouldn't be limited to one single band.
Say, aren't people doing this right now?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Vinyl is analog. Your film in your camera is analog. As the quality of digital cameras improve people have bought more digital cameras. Still, a lot of photographers still use film. The problem I have with CDs is that it's quality hasn't improved. The problem I have with MP3 is it's a lossy format. You can buy DVD audio disks with higher sample rates than CD, but the content is not there.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Moving to better audio would have been one approach... Movie industry figured that one out. However, they are so scared of their own shadow that the idea of a better product scares them. They are more interested in trying to preserve the status quo and release best-of CDs to milk cash.
SA-CD or DVD-A could have been their salvation, but that would have required pushing the format (all new releases in SA-CD/CD Hybrid discs, so you can use your old CD player and play the material). Houses have LOTS of CD players, 2 cars, home stereo, maybe the master bedroom and a teenagers room. Nobody is putting SA-CD players EVERYWHERE, but they might have bought 1-2 of them if all new CDs supported the new format.
Teenagers like to listen to music... SA-CD boomboxes would have helped make that a reality. But they decided that hey, let's try to collect $30 a SA-CD, and crushed the market. If they had moved up market, and included AAC/WMA/MP3 files ON THE DISC, people might have traded the MP3s online (but they can do that now with a simple CD purchase) and preserved/grew the market.
However, they decided to focus on "plugging the analog hole" and "preventing piracy," making the formats more complicated, players more expensive, and didn't release Hybrids... who the hell was going to buy a SA-CD that they couldn't play in their car. I remember my dad diligents copying every new CD, that went in the stereo case, to a cassette deck for the car for a while... that's unnecessary when Hybrid tech exists, and impossible when you don't make it easy to copy the new SA-CD to CD.
The desire to listen to music on the iPod in no way endangered CD sales inherently, but that would have required more effort to release good CDs, not overcompress the music by making everything LOUD, and encouraged better quality hardware... companies like Sony that do hardware and software could have raised the bar with inexpensive SA-CD bedroom stereos that sounded okay...
However, CDs sound better on a decent system than MP3s, and SA-CDs no doubt sound better, but the refusal to support SA-CD killed it. Digital audio is damned convenient, busy moving my old CD-Jukebox (400 disc, takes forever to change CDs if you want to mix up tracks) to a lossless media server, but there was no reason for the studios not to make that a reality, other than laziness and a fear of change.
Alex
Cause you've hit the nail on the head.
Obviously some mods are easily offended.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
CD sales are no indicative of being obsolete.
When manufacturers omit CD drives,then it be obsolete.CDs are cheaper then DVDs.
I said it back then, and I'll say it again now: the recording industry should have been making huge inroads into digital delivery way back in the Napster era. Now sales for their main medium are collapsing and they don't have enough control over the new delivery system to milk it for enough of a profit. (They did try to control the new system - pity they didn't realize that the best way to control it was to provide the best digital delivery system on the planet and make it ubiquitous. The solution was not to try to rein in the technology, and certainly NOT to haunt their potential buyers with the constant threat of lawsuit.)
I'm not making a defense of piracy here, I'm just saying that RIAA members made some really BAD business decisions back in the day, the main result being that they now have to rely on a computer manufacturer to give them the digital release portal they should have built for themselves. Serves the idiots right.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
1. is hearing damage subsequently encoded into one's genes?
2. do these genetic changes appear in the general population in, not generational spans, but 5-10 years?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Who are these idiots who only buy downloaded tracks? I cannot fathom that.
I want to OWN my music. I want it to be uncompressed, un-DRMed, and I don't want to have to pay for it all again should my MP3 player die, or my hard disk bite the big one. If I change MP3 player brands, I want my music to be compatable, and to not have to rebuy it.
CDs are great. They play everywhere. There's a CD player in my car. My car does not have an MP3 player that I can "sync" with my music library, nor does it have a way to connect my MP3 player to my Car's audio system.
The notion that CDs are becoming obsolete is absurd.
I don't pay a cent for any downloadable music that isn't the free and open and universal MP3, and even then I burn it to a CD so I can play it anywhere I want.
Besides, when you download, you don't get anything PHYSICAL. You don't get liner notes, lyrics, artwork, or even "track order". Music and albums are so much more than just collections of "singles". You lose all that on many MP3 players that you have to go out of your way to get the tracks to play in "album/CD order". And it's ridiculous to pay the same for a 20 second "interlude" track as you do for a 15 minute opus track (whether classic, pop, or rock). And finally, being forced to buy the whole CD to get a single song I liked has opened up my eyes and my tastes to lots of music I never, ever, would have heard on the radio. Generally my favorite tracks are not the singles.
So no, CDs are not obsolete. Not by a long shot.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
There is no reason to bring vinyl or Bob Dylan into this.
You could mention that the CD resolution is below what your ears can detect, or that the frequency is not high enough to represent multiple out of phase intstuments.
Just saying that your scratchy records are as good as live is just old-fartism.
I suppose you think that film cameras are better than a 10 megpx cameras too?
I just spent well over $250 on CDs, mainly to get some new tracks for my mp3 player. Since I've already bought most all of the CDs I know are good, I was mainly getting older, classic rock stuff, with songs I always wanted, but never had the albums. Some of these were imports, costing over $25.
Well, I found the same thing you usually find on newer albums. The few songs you know off the albums are usually the only good ones. Once you get away from the best all time groups (Beatles, Stones, and a few dozen others), this is often the case. On the worst set of albums, I basically paid $100 for five or six songs. Well, I won't be buying too many more CDs after this.
I've found through the years that the only way to know if a CD is worth the money is if you already know most of the CD, or if its a group your familiar with and trust. Buying CDs for one or two songs usually means paying $15 for one two songs. I also can't trust reviews. I bought a couple of these albums based on reviews, and I'm surprised how mediocre they are. Of course, I've always found this to be true. Back in the day, Rolling Stone magazine would rave about an album, and I'd hear it or buy it, and think it totally sucked. And my tastes are pretty mainstream classic rock.
In short, it just isn't worth the money to buy CDs, unless you already know they are good and fit your taste. It isn't worth the money to pay $15 for one or two songs. I personally don't download illegally, but perhaps part of the reason peaople do is CDs which are 9/10ths crap aren't worth the money. There aren't many quality artists anymore, of the stature that the Doors, Hendrix, Zeppelin, Who, Dylan, Stones, Beatles, etc. were in their heyday.
I think when people buy four or five album and find they just paid $50 for four songs, it drives them to filesharing. Its pretty painful when you pay more then what you paid for you mp3 player for 6 good songs.
This ad space for rent.
As much as I enjoy CDs, i think the move to downloadble formats is a good one. think of the environmental impact of a CD, drilling for the oil, shipping it to the polycarbonate plant, processing the plastic, shipping, recording, shipping, storage in a warehouse, more shipping, heating/lighting at the store, fuel used for staff memebers to get to the store, fuel used by the consumer, etc.... mp3s just use some electricity, so from an environmenatal standpoint, MP3s are probably a good thing. plus they are free, which is a great bonus.
-I only code in BASIC.-
We play video games. We use the internet. We even play internet video games.
There are lots of new things.
We can only divide our time and money so many ways.
So, music gets a shrinking slice of the pie. Oh well.
I can't believe you people are arguing about this.
CDs have been obsolete for years.
That's interesting, but I'm the complete opposite:
I never cared much for the album art (I bought it to listen to the music, not look at some random artists' pictures/paintings).
I hate physical objects, not because it's proof that I have it and that my money bought something tangible, but that it means I have to physically store and maintain junk. With digital, I can near instantaneously make a dozen copies, store them in multiple places/devices and even send them off on the internet. Meanwhile in the physical world, it's as if nothing happened. And when I do lose track of something, in the digital world there are all kinds of search tools available to help. If I lost something physical, I have to physically look for the stupid thing and there's a good chance I won't be able to find it (because I let someone borrow it 5 years ago and they never gave it back!).
Copy protection sucks, but I make it a point not to rarely buy copy-protected music.
There are so many devices these days that play music: computers, car stereos, ipods/portable music players, cell phones, pdas, etc. As such, I don't find it a hassle at all to find a device that can play my digital music.
The only problem with digital is that the storage medium is not infinite. But I'm getting closer to solving that problem storage hardware/software comes out.
The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.
Are you honestly claiming that you can hear frequencies higher than 22.050 kHz? Or noise components below -96dB? CDs may have poor sound in practice for all sorts of reasons, but the basic sampling of the analogue original is not one of them. Careless, thoughtless production and over-processing I can all too readily believe in, but not problems with the essential theory at the heart of it.
As long as piracy is down, I guess its worth it. Be it downloading from the website or buying CD's the industry is not going to suffer.
they said crap like this about my Japanese laserdisc colletion about ten years ago too. i bought the last three laserdisc players i could find so they aren't obsolete to me. i don't care what you home-theatre-philes say, the Star Wars THX laserdisc boxset and WOW laserdisc are better than any DVD!!!
this will blow over, its not like CDs are beta or blu-ray.
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
How did the sales of writable CD's do ?
So long as so much music is missing from itunes that is readily available on CD, people will be buying CDs.
I personally also do not wish to be locked into apple's products for playback.
So for me it's emusic, if what I want is available there, (for cost considerations) or physical CDs if it's not on emusic (any major label stuff and lots of other stuff too)
Have to admit I'm constantly surprised by people who value "album art". I mean, why? It's not as if the band drew it, or it somehow enhances the music. It was done by a marketing team somewhere. Anyone want to explain this one to me?
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
- Higher base quality (vinyl purists aside of course) - which means as disk space, compression technologies, etc. change I can always go back and re-encode to the new format and have the chance to pick the quality I want. While the 128kbps I get from iTunes is great for the latest Soilwork album, listening to the Berlin Symphony Orchestra crank out some Vivaldi is a different story. 128k just doesn't cut it on a decent sound system. Plus when a new compression/storage format comes out I don't have to buy the @%^!@&!@$ album again!
- Liner notes! Yea it's old school but I like to lookup the lyrics, see band photos, read the fun facts and credits some bands sneak in etc. Some bands actually make the liner notes a piece of art more so than the music they bothered to record. There are few CDs I'd buy for just the album liner, but here is a chance for the record companies to make a reason for physical albums.
- DVDs - a lot of bands have been including DVD music videos with the CD. While most of the videos are crap it's a great idea. If record companies and bands put some thought into this it could be something else that (arguably since DVDs can be ripped) adds more value to the physical medium. DVDs, while rippable, iTune-able, etc are still a little heavy for day to day use for a lot of people. Furthermore see item 1. While still a lossy compressed format, DVD quality is still miles above most transcoded videos you pull off the net.
Of course all these arguments assume the player technology doesn't go down the toilet. With the number of CDs and DVDs out there I'm somehow not too worried about players being obsoleted anytime soon.For those who like album-oriented music AND the option to rip said music, losslessly, to hard drive, the CD is a very good distribution medium. There are potentially better sounding formats (no, not vinyl, but DVD-Audio or SACD), but neither is normally rippable in full quality via digital means. Downloads are these days generally in fine consumer quality for one's MP3 player, but at a lower quality than a CD.
The problem with CDs is one largely created by the recording industry themselves, in particular, the major labels. In their continual efforts to marginalize artists and own an increasingly large portion of the market, they have drastically cut artist rosters, and increasingly relied on Big Hit Records to maintain their profit levels.
So a funny thing happened... they replaced "real" artists with those manufactured by the labels; not 100% across the board, but enough to make the hits extremely mandatory, every year.... there were no longer enough established artists with a long-term fan base to fill in the holes between hits. And art has never been something you could put on a production line.
In addition, most people have a fixed entertainment budget. When I was a kid, you could buy a record or a book, or go see a film, that was pretty much the extent of consumer media. These days, there's music (purchase or download), DVD, videogames, rentals, online subscriptions, etc. All competes for the same buck.
Legal downloads have become a kind of pressure release valve for much of the listening public. Rather than add to sales, they've reduced them.. the same people who might have chose "CD" over "Game" this month can now just download that hit or two, they only songs they really wanted anyway, and still spend most of their cash on the DVD or game or whatever. I grew up with album-oriented rock radio... I still listen to whole albums, still buy them. But the recording industry destroyed this model with their push to Hit oriented radio... sure, they'd like a CD with multiple hits, but in the downloading model, you have to win each hit purchase, not simply that first one that bags the CD. Most kids don't think in terms of albums, period. This is the same culture that took compilation CDs away from bad K-Tel TV ads and put them (the "Now that's what I call music!" series, for example) into the top 10... that's just another form of single.
I don't think CDs are necessary anymore, but until there's a lossless download available, with similar pricing, I won't be buying downloads. I did subscribe to eMusic.com sometime back, when they offered unlimited downloads (128kb/s MP3, yeah, but DRM-free), but I dropped it when they went to a limited model... which was single-oriented, even on an "indie" oriented service like eMusic. I can't see spending the same money for a lesser product. The CD is still superior to downloads, but doesn't necessarily remain so forever...
-Dave Haynie
> WTF don't companies who make boomboxes that can read mp3 CDs put DVD drives in instead?
Because they'd have to pay to include CSS even if they never need to use it.
Ever since the early 90s, I've dreamed of having every album on a chip.
Recording companies, ship your music on flash cards! 512MB cards cost less than $10 now, and with lossless compression they can hold an entire album.
Now all we need is the players to support them, or maybe just USB adapters to standardize all the incompatible formats!
The problem for the music labels is that music is now a disposable item. As the size of music collections has increased, the perceived value of each item in that collection has reduced. If my collection is 10-times the size, each item is worth one-tenth the amount. Therefore the street-value today of one album is about $1.50 and hence AllOfMP3.com became hugely successful because they charged to the perceived value of the music being purchased.
Personally I do have a decent home stereo and would buy SACD/DVDA material if it made sense. But there's next to no material available in these formats, so I don't intend to crash the cash on the hardware.
Well, CD music _is_ compressed. It is compressed from master quality to 44.1 KHz 16-bit PCM. This is also a form of lossy compression.
/David
And also, lossless compression _does_ exit. FLAC is a prominent example.
I know that the winds are not blowing that way these days, but I would really like to be able to buy my favorite well-produced music (Pink Floyd, for example, as another poster mentioned) in a quality better than CD quality. A step in the right direction would be if I could get it on SACD or DVD-Audio. And I am talking about putting the original stereo masters out on these formats, not gimmicky multi-channel releases.
Heck, I wouldn't mind buying online music if I could buy everything with no more lossy compression than the above-mentioned master to CD compression. And certainly not if I could buy it in DVD-Audio quality or similar. But that is not going to happen, I'm afraid.
But as for the original question posed in TFA: Since everybody has DVD players and recorders everywhere now, one would think that at least DVD would be the preferred way of distributing audio. But then, one could ask, isn't the DVD becoming obsolete? Disregarding all the DRM associated with BluRay and HD-DVD, we really need a new physical format with more space and the possibility of more modern codecs. A higher capacity medium is one battle. DRM is another battle. Let's first get BluRay (or HD-DVD, but...) to be the standard, then when it is cheap and we all have recorders, I am sure we can begin fight DRM in various, possibly illegal ways. Fair use.
This weekend I bought seasons 2 and 3 of the new Battlestar Galactica on iTunes. I did it for two reasons.
The first reason was price -- I was able to get season 2 for $25, where it is priced out on Amazon for $10 more. I could shop around and find a better deal I'm sure, but that leads into the second reason.
There was an instantly gratifying lack of hassle.
I didn't have to go to the store to get it. I didn't have to wait 3 days for shipping. I simply clicked "buy now" and began watching as it downloaded. I don't feel ripped off for having a lack of physical media because plain and simple, I'd probably just rip it to my shared drive anyway -- which is another layer of hassle to get it in the portable format I desire.
It's the same old reasons for why I bought my first music album online rather than getting the slightly more expensive CD. I didn't need the CD anymore. Many more people feel that way each year.
We're not all deaf and lazy. We're simply out to hear a decent tune without a lot of work going into the process. We, the average, enjoy slightly lossy music as much as we enjoy less than HD video. We don't study our entertainment too much and are quite satisfied with substantially less than perfect.
That's why we are the masses and others are the aficionados. We all play our parts, and the sales follow the trends we set.
The big issue isn't whether it's CD vs. vinyl - it's how the sound gets mixed and warped and produced. Digital gives you more tools to adjust that, which not only means that good sound guys can do good things with it, but band sound guys can do bad things to it. These days just about the only people producing vinyl are going for the audiophile market (ahem.. snobs... ahem.. :-) which wants the sound to get managed in ways that sound better than the sound that gets produced for the Britney Spears Clone market. In the early days of rock&roll, nobody had a clue how to engineer the sound - the vinyl from those days is often produced just as badly as bad CDs today, with worse equipment and badly placed mikes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is totally flamebait. As another poster pointed out, you're wrong about the master-to-vinyl vs. master-to-cd process. But that's not why I'm replying...
I buy a lot of vinyl. Not because I think it sounds better, just because I like it better. Here's why:
As far as the sound goes... my LPs sound every bit as good as your CDs. Yeah, my turntable is an ornery pig sometimes, but it's usually just a loose cable or something. So, are CDs obsolete? I think so. Especially in the retail world. Every now and then, an album comes out that I want that isn't available on vinyl--in that case, I usually cave and buy the CD. Like I said, though, it's becoming more and more common to find every new release I'm interested in on wax.
PS: Between the time I started typing this and the time I pressed preview, your post got moderated down by 2. BONUS!!
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Also, it's gotten to be much easier for performers to put together their own CDs, and for small music producers to build garage studios for when performers do want professional production help. That means that you no longer need a record label to front the cost of production, and bands that don't need a label to fund tours and can do their own promotion don't need to be in hock to a label to do that, although sometimes it can be a good deal depending on what kinds of business skills the band members have.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And there are many online stores that will sell you CDs at a lower cost than you get them on the iTunes Store. The difference isn't earth shattering, but why pay more to get less? (albeit a little faster)
B-b-but I thought all decreases in CD sales were the fault of piracy.
I buy hundreds of CDs per year, perhaps even thousands and I know many more who are just like me without being either audiophiles or geeks. In fact, nearly everyone I know buys 20, 50, or even 100 CDs at a time whenever we go out shopping for them. These things are invaluable for burning off all the music we buy online or acquire through...ahem...other methods. It's not just music they are good for either! Did you know you can put computer files like Word documents or even installable programs on CDs too?
I seriously question where these idle speculations about CD sales are coming from. The only thing better than a CD is a DVD and you don't THOSE slowing in sales, do you? Thought not.
On the other hand, the web not only gives the band a way to tell you about themselves, it provides room for them to provide lyrics and other material about their music. One friend of mine has an album of sea chanteys and similar music, some traditional, some her own. The CD has 3-4 pages of text - she's got the lyrics for the songs she wrote herself, and says that for the traditional tunes you can get them off her website, "or make them up yourself, because you're supposed to do that with traditional music."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Due to the vast quantity and abundance of material, music has become commoditized and people don't give it the value it used to have. So, fewer people are prepared to pay essentially a high price for a cd.
Rubbish! If you think CDs are overpriced then you're not:
a) Buying them from the right retailers - High Street stores like HMV and Virgin in the UK are *RIP OFF MERCHANTS* and I fail to understand how they stay in business, and
b) You're not listening to the right music. The idea that CDs have "one or two good tracks" is utter nonsense! That may be the case for plasticised modern pop music but there are plenty of 100% classic albums out there no matter what genre you like - it's just a case of doing some research before you buy.
The real problem is that music has become far too "disposable" for a lot of people meaning that they're unwilling to give it time and effort - both in hunting down the best CD prices and finding good music.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
is only accurate in representing the FREQUENCY of a tone. You are unlikely to get near the peak at your limited sample set so you have to guess what the amplitude of the tone is.
E.g. your sample of four numbers are:
-8 -1 1 8 1
What's the peak? 8? It isn't any lower, certainly. Well, at much less than the nyquist limit your numbers may be
-10 -8 -5 -1 2 6 9 11 8
Ooh, sampled slightly offset from the earlier set and, if symmetric, could be a p-p range of 22 or a little more.
So you cannot tell at the nyquist limit what the peak really is.
So for some music where the amplitude is important (woodwind/brass?) more so than frequency, you can still hear a difference down at 10kHz.
The advantage of CDS, or at least full album's worth of mp3s as opposed to singles is the sense of the album itself- an album is something constructed, not a bunch of tracks thrown together. I still buy CDs (not new releases) because I like the feeling of an abum as a whole, even If the first thing I do is rip it for my iPod
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
All 22KHz sounds are not equal.
There's a difference between a 22KHz sine wave, square wave, sawtooth wave, etc. which you're not going to capture by sampling at the Nyquist frequency (Personally: I think this is the reason why vinyl sounds better than digital).
There's also a problem with aliasing. Try sampling a 21.5KHz wave at 22KHz and you won't get the original wave back.
So yes, there's definitely a need for 96KHz/192KHz @ 24 bits and these days the technology to do it wouldn't cost $0.01 extra.
No sig today...
I don't think the technology itself is a waste. It would take me forever to back up everything I have on DVD-R discs (I would need to burn 50-60 of them), but with a writeable Blu-Ray disc I would only need to burn maybe six discs (or something like 15 HD-DVD discs if I chose that as my backup medium). This would definitely take up a lot less time and a lot less space. Optical discs themselves (CD, DVD, and what have you) certainly are not going to become obsolete just because the record labels can't sell anything in stores.
1. Substitution with mp3 sales 2. Peer to Peer sharing 3. Baby Boomers already have their music on cd. (ie Beatles aren't releasing new music anytime soon) 4. Change in teen/uni student social dynamics - less time spent going to concerts, more time spent gaming. on the internet & watching/buying DVDs 5. Poor investment by music labels in new acts
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
- mp3 is bad
- cd-da is bad too, because its standards (44Khz/16 bit sampling) can not compete with recent (and widely used) codecs (AAC, OGG, WMV)
- vinyl is better than cd-da, which does not(!) mean "we all should go back to the analog world because digital is crap".
- sa-cd is a hack and deserves to be not accepted
So where to go? Easy. Look at home cinema. They managed to get DD5.1 to a wide audience. And if you do not own a 5.1 Set, you just can ouput all channels to your regular stereo (2chn) system. The future will decouple the codec from the media. Even car systems will just read DVDs and interpret whats on them. _Hopefully_ this will be ogg which is efficient enough for the next 50 years in terms of compression, ability to compress lossless, raw data specs and channel count.
Oh and one more point: I cant stand the guys with the golden plugs and their 5000 $ home equipment listening to CD-DAs arguing that mp3 is shit... as we wouldn't know that. But your 5000 $ stuff doesn't make the CD any better.
We are used to loading 4.375 gigs on the dvds and thats what we use mostly... one disc scramming in 4-5 movies and days of music. so when we go buy a music cd and realize that this WHOLE disc plays for just 72 minutes, sub-consciously we feel a bit disappointed . . . just think about it, of the very few cds you have bought recently how many did u keep using as such, and how many have u ripped and just used the compressed files. most car stereos and hi-fi systems now support mp3 and wma, so the question of buying discs to play in those devices is not considerate.. I think this is also a factor for declining cd sales.
"Ohhh. really. I have a pair of thousand dollar cables to sell you....." its a funny crack and it made me smile but the amusement is tempered a little by finding myself agreeing with the general point that vinyl just can sound much better than the CD. I don't consider myself to be an audiophile, I readily accept technical explanations of why/how vinyl is inferior to the CD, and I can't tell the difference between an mp3 at 256 and one at 320 but I can tell the difference between a record on a USB turntable through my PC and external speakers and the CD version of the same music through the same PC and speakers - and the vinyl sounds better - what really puzzles me though is that if I convert the vinyl to a Lame encoded mp3 at 320 bitrate - whats great about the vinyl sound is nicely preserved - I can't pick it from the original vinyl - so again, sounds better than the CD but with all the advantages of a digital file and none of the disadvantages of the vinyl format (plus - you gotta love the cover art thats possible with them big ol' records)
Isn't music supposed to be live?
Whether it's a concert hall, a back room of a pub or a muddy field, it's always better than when trapped in a circle of plastic or other device. Ted Nugent had the right idea (allegedly).
The point of using 96Khz or 192Khz isn't to have a higher max freq (due to Nyquist), but having a better resolution in the audible range to avoid aliasing. A 12Khz sound played on a digital system running @ 48Hz will be nice (at least, unless you suffer from presbyaccousia). A 12010 Hz sound on the same system may suffer some aliasing (a full wave doesn't quite exactly take 4 sample to produce and the maxima could be missed, giving some kind of beating in the sound). On a 192Khz system, sound in the 12Khz range all take some 16 samples and even if they aren't quite exactly aligned with the sample rate, there's much less risk of distorting the waveform.
Nyquist theorem gives us information about the highest frequency that *could* be recorder/reproduced using a given sample frequency, *if all condition are optimal*. It does not guarantee us that all sound will be perfectly reproduced up to this frequency. In fact, the recording of a N/2 sound on a N frequency sample could also completly fail if, by chance, the dephasing was such that the sampler did measure at the exact moment when the source cross (either rising or falling) the 0. What the proponent of 96 or 192Khz are saying is, if the sampling frequency is an order of magnitute high (say N * 16 for the sampler) this is much less likely to happen, and you *mostly* have optimal conditions for *any* sound up to your target frequency, even if the sound has funny dephasing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If/when CDs really do become obsolete, what will be the "baseline" for digital media? Right now, any and all downloaded tracks for me are compared against ripping a CD. I treat the compact disc as a "master" for consumers - any quality digital copy can be made from the CD. What happens when that "master" becomes a 128k AAC from ITunes? People can't honestly argue that downloaded music files (well, the vast majority) are *high* quality....what is going to happen to the music industry when the standard quality of it's product only sounds good when on an Ipod or driving down the interstate? Is anyone in the industry concerned about that?
There may be potentially better sources for playing music, but the CD isn't used the way it was used before. Listen to a Pink Floyd album and hear differences between loud parts and soft parts, the different instruments clearly seperated, it just sounds great and uses the dynamic range of a CD very well. Now listen to a CD for sale in the store right now (or RHCP's Californication for that matter). You wil not only hear one solid block of -loud- sound, there's a chance you will hear a freakload of clipping too. Things that should 'whoop out' in the mix (kick drums) can't because of the insane compression and squishing everything together for the sake of loudness. Until people stop clipping the audio and making stuff too frigging loud (NO! it won't be louder on the radio, it WON'T sound better! Some albums are quite unhearable for the sake of loudness), I won't be buying CD's. The only exception is the last Iron Maiden. It didn't had any mastering, just straight out of the mixing bord with no EQ'ing and other stuff. The album has a perfect wave form (no clipping at -all-), like it should.
1) Small media - who wants a 750MB/74 minute limit
2) Bulky player - who wants a big cumbersome player
3) Crap is Crap - who wants The Best of Big Hair Bands
4) Beyoncaisha Effect - your favorite crap diva releases singles not albums
5) Rap is Crap - XXX remixes not the shit that Wal*Mart wants to sell you
And last but not least -
Anything that will make record companies suffer is a good thing. May they all sexually service barnyard animals in hell for eternity.
CDs being so much more expensive to produce than LPs you know.
That's alright. Most of the population finds Bose speakers to be far more pleasant than studio reference monitors. Don't feel bad, though - you're in plentiful company.
(you lost me at "USB" and "through my computer" - between the A/D->D/A conversions happening and the emi/rfi noise associated with computer hardware, you're hearing ghosts)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Basically it talked about all the digital download junk and piracy and stuff but didn't blame all of that for cd sales falling... it blamed the fact that that musicians are still relying on an ancient, nearly obsolete format known as CD, and they expect people to pay the same price for that cd as they do for a million dollar blockbuster film on dvd that cost hundreds if not thousands more to create... in essence the article requested that musicians move to doing dvd format with 5.1 dolby digital and forget about cds since cd quality really ain't all that much better than mp3 downloads... the article mentioned that musicians keep griping but are not doing anything about it... dvds automatically have better sound quality capabilities since you can store more... they have beter secuirty than cds do... and they overall are just a better way to go. Article also mentioned that game designers started going to high def music long before mainstream audio has, as has Hollywood movie making, and that it's pretty sad that musicians are lagging so far behind - so they more or less deserve every bit of piracy, quality sound complaints, etc. because they are just sitting there letting it happen... preferring to hire dumb lawyers instead of using that money to make higher quality stuff that their audiences would embrace and love...
Back catalog stuff is no longer selling.
You used to borrow one or two albums, tape them in "real time" from vinyl to cassette.
Now you borrow the hard drive and take a copy of your friend's entire album collection.
Kids don't buy albums...if they can't get it from a friend, iTunes will sell ONE song.
Worst, most acts now suck, as the concept of taking a band, letting it grow, and getting a following are out the window. You are a hit or you are gone. If you are a hit, then we are back to iTunes for that one hit and no album sale.
Let us face it, the market is saturated, and the one thing the music industry never, ever expected, took place...a CD burner became available, then affordable, and is now trivial.
Out where I am, a new CD costs in the neighborhood of $18-$22. Considering that most CDs have perhaps one or two songs that people know about, and even after purchase it may go as high as 5 songs on a CD, that $18 price seems very high. A large part of this price comes from the high costs of distribution, and also needs to cover the need for the retailers to make some profit on each sale, but in general, that is a huge part of the reason there are fewer sales.
That really is the problem with the industry, higher and higher costs due to inflation and gas/energy prices(gas for distribution, and energy prices causing the price of everything to go up). When you can download tracks legally, and get only the tracks you want without paying for songs you don't want, you end up better off with a music download. The quality of a CD will be higher in most cases, but why pay $18 for what may be one good track on a CD that you otherwise don't know anything about. As a result of this, you have the people who will download the CD illegally to see if it's worth buying in the first place, but in sampling the music, they find the quality is acceptable, and may not go out to buy the CD.
Perhaps a better model for the record companies to go into is to push for a change, where customers can walk into a "record" store, and request a bunch of different tracks, which can then be burned to a legal CD for the price. You may end up paying the same $18 for 8-10 tracks, but at least you get a set of songs you actually want, so don't feel ripped off. In addition to this, the store is providing a service(making a mix CD for you), so you feel you get your money's worth.
The fact is we have d/l and riped so much we quit cds in favor of data dvds da.
I remember going to buy my grandfather's first CD player in 84, a Meridien, where we listened to Sonny Rollins in a sound room. As a designer of audio equipment for RCA and such and an owner of the most expensive tube amps money could buy -- Marantz Golds, Macintosh, etc... -- he was really awed by the dynamic range. Early CDs where engineered well and while an ear could pick out certain digital characteristics, the dynamic range made up for a lot. The bass was amazing.
Vinyl and tape degrade, as well as distort the music, and are rarely played optimally. The CD made up for certain limitations and provided new ones. Unfortunately, the labels began forcing the volume into the upper ends of the dynamic range later, resulting in weird dynamics. This isn't the fault of the media however.
Any scheme using AD DA conversion introduces loss. At all times. Always. You can get it to a point where your input data and output data are virtually identical, but it's still virtually identical. It's never the same signal.
So your 'perfect reproduction' argument is not only flawed, it shows you don't quite understand what's happening.
On the other hand a lot of the studio recordings nowadays are made in a digital format as well, although almost without exception at a much higher sample rate than that used on CDs. Otherwise mixing and redubbing music (introducing back chords, etc) will degrade the quality even further.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
DVD-A can never be successful, and the reason is quite simple - the acronym has been used already, and many of us can never forgethow.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
> Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more
> 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians
> are releasing online?
CD sales are diminishing because of one fundamental problem - most of the music being released these days is shite; and people have already purchased most of the older recordings that they want to buy.
Declining CD sales must be caused by piracy.
Gospel of the RIAA 1:1
It's been several years since the last time I bought a new CD. I like to think that my taste in music is reasonably diverse, but these days when I walk into a music store, most of what's there seems to be formulaic and/or computer-generated crap. Plus, it's bloody expensive!
25 years ago, I remember that the first CDs were 50-100% more expensive than vinyl records. I complained about this to a store owner at the time, who responded with "Oh, don't worry. Once the production ramps up, the prices will come down." Well, they never did. To me, this seems like yet another indication of how long there's been a serious lack of competition within the industry. So, I guess the consumers are to blame: not only for buying those first CDs anyway, but also for continually voting people into office who's only significant interaction with the recording industry has been to accept campaign contributions from them.
Anyway, as a result, my CD collection is still only about a 10th the size of my old vinyl collection. These days, if something attracts my interest, I'll get it off the Internet. After that, I support the artists by going to their concerts.
Yes, but the difference between a 22kHz sine wave and a 22kHz square wave is that the pure sine wave has content only at 22kHz whereas the square wave also has content at odd harmonics of 22kHz (66kHz, 110kHz, etc). Unless you can hear those frequencies (and you can't), a 22kHz square wave sounds exactly like a 22kHz sine wave.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
"(you lost me at "USB" and "through my computer" - between the A/D->D/A conversions happening and the emi/rfi noise associated with computer hardware, you're hearing ghosts)" what I was getting at was that I use my PC primarily as a music player - all my CDs, downloads, and vinyl are sitting on the hard drive and played through software (Ozone) intended to reproduce the sound of valves/vinyl and out to nice Roland speakers on the other side of the room - if I want to just play a record (for pleasure or ripping) its done via a turntable connected to the PC via USB -- 'in principle' I accept the hearing ghosts thing but in the end it just 'is' that the vinyl sounds different and I like the difference - (I actually sort of wish it wasn't the case cos nowdays just asserting that you prefer vinyl to CD flags you as having audiophile pretensions that can't really be easily defended)
It should be obvious to anyone who understands their history why CD sales are slowing down.
In the beginning was the LP. And we bought our music on LPs, and transferred it to tape (reel-to-reel at first, then cassette). In fact, if it hadn't been for someone wanting to link a record player and a tape recorder together sometime in the 1960s, there would be no AJS318 writing this; but I digress. We had our LPs. Some of them were good, and some of them were crap. And we had our tapes, including quite a few made from other people's LPs. Some of them were so good that we went out and bought our own copy of the LP straight away. LPs by design had a limited life, and many consumer-grade record players did little or nothing to prolong that.
We also had 45s; but these were mainly bought by a younger, more impatient market segment who had to have the latest song now and couldn't wait for it to appear on a long-player. Singles were also bought by those who liked a particular song but couldn't afford the full album -- or had already listened to it and decided it would not be worth buying for one song! The other main market for singles was with the amusement machine hire companies, for stocking juke boxes in pubs, cafés and leisure centres.
Then came the CD, and we began buying our music on CDs. Not everyone was convinced at first. Some of us began buying music on CD that we already had on a cassette made from somebody else's LP, or on an LP that we owned but which was beginning to sound worn-out. It's worth mentioning that the early CD players, even consumer-grade ones, tended to be well-made and put out a high-quality signal. Like the first transistor amplifiers a quarter of a century before, they represented a technology that had to prove itself in the marketplace; and the only way for the CD to succeed was to be noticeably better than the LP. One of the CD's distinguishing features was the provision of copious sleeve notes that had previously been associated only with some of the better LPs. While the page format is smaller than an LP cover, a standard CD case can hold a 16-page glossy booklet and a modified one can hold a whopping 32 pages. That is plenty of room for the full lyrics, band photographs and production notes -- and by design, it is difficult to reproduce well.
At this point we also ought to remember another important difference. The CD had an 80-minute maximum running time, as compared to about 45 minutes for an LP. Although it was possible to get over an hour of music onto an LP, this came at the expense of signal strength (and therefore quality) due to the need to pack the grooves more densely. Where in the past, a record producer might have had to make tough decisions about what to include on an LP and what to leave out, with almost double the space available on a CD there was a temptation to fill it all. This brought about a paradigm shift in album production. And whilst CD singles existed, CD juke boxes were designed from the outset to be capable of being stocked with albums.
Then came a generation of smaller and smaller hi-fis, made possible by the omission of a turntable. Some of us began buying music on CD that we already had on LP. Around this time, manufacturers also began cheese-paring; using cheaper components, polyester capacitors instead of ceramic, unshielded cables, tinned connectors instead of gold-plated, single PCBs instead of separate analogue, digital and power boards. The CD was officially no longer in competition with the LP, and it no longer had to try so hard to prove itself. (Cf. what happens to some people when they get into a stable relationship and therefore no longer have to advertise their availability to potential mates.)
Digital downloads are what the single-buying population -- i.e. teenagers and younger kids -- are buying. Without wishing to sound patronising, these people haven't yet felt the need to have a physical product to look after, to handle and to display. (Some are t
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Really , there is a distinct difference between compressed formats, cds, sacds, dvd-a, and vinyl. It's not hard to hear. It does not take great ears or audiophile "culture". It simply that different formats have different characteristics that differentiate them from hearing the same material live. People have been programmed by copying records to tape and other tapes to tape as they grew up to listen for hiss or pops, which is a common issue of tape. It is easy to hear. The digital formats, even the compressed formats don't have hiss so people's cultural programming says that they sound "CD quality". But that is only in respect to hiss. Digital formats have other distict and easy to hear features that are "culturally" ignored by people. In fact, current recording methods make the other factors less relevant, but still easy to hear. It is very similar to hearing Dana Carvey imitate George Bush. He doesn't sound anything like George Bush when compared side by side, but when you hear them separately it is easy (because of the cultural cues that Dana uses) to say to yourself, "That sounds exactly like George Bush".
The real impact here is going to be on music itself, because if the recording media only "impersonate" the major characterics of music, the more subtle and IMHO important and lasting characteristics of music will be ignored by future musicians.
CDs are stereo only, and generally cost more than DVDs, which are 5.1 surround *and* have a video track.
I would like to see classical concerts released in DVD format. These I would buy.
Are CDs obsolete? Not yet. The question should be "why are sales dropping?" Here in Zambonia, we pay a levy on unrecorded CDs. I wonder what the *combined* sales figures (recorded and unrecorded) are. Add to that the flash levy, and then compare. After all, flash devices didn't exist when CDs were released.
I support the media levy, which, by the way, the Kanukistan version of the RIAA lobbied FOR (for years), and now is lobbying AGAINST. What a crock of shite.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
NOT fycking likely, CDs/DVDs will remain until a significant (~80%) majority of the public has +2MB/Sec bandwidth to the home. The USA at present will be about the 20th to 30th country to have +2MB/Sec bandwidth to the home. I expect this level of telecommunications services (~80%) to USA homes will be about 2025ce (due to bandit-pricing), unless Congress and Corporatist cause further easy-money customer-hostage (RIAA, FCC, FTC, DMCA, Telcos...) delays and corporatist/politician excuses.
..., our faux-leaders' predilection for business, government, and religion dogma which provides plausible [treasonous] spin-truth lies for corruption and amorality for the ruling/privileged few, will always fails US Citizens and humanity.
The USA today ranks 20th in telecommunications, and 30th in heathcare
NOTE: It ain't their fault, can only be honestly applied to non-USA citizens.
We need to accept all responsibility for creating this vapid aristocracy of
wealth and birth rights in the USA. Our USA revolutionary founding fathers,
mothers, and family would all be extremely disappointed in all US for the
mess our disgustful greed and pretense pride. We have all rested, far to long,
on our WWII and historical founders' wreaths of laurel without delivering any
new building material for our children's destiny and National Security.
May gods/politicians/plutocrats save US all.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
In the last few decades, recorded music has met with a steady decline on all fronts, not just sales. It's the quality aspect that bothers me. Much has been said about the way record companies hack the sound to pieces by making everything sound like it does on the radio (as if radio isn't total crap). Even older recordings are "remastered" in this way, thereby removing any incentive I have to purchase albums that might be missing from my collection.
Production: What is interesting is the reviews I see occasionally complaining when a band "sweetens" the music too much -- in other words, adds instruments, or perhaps a whole orchestra to make the recording sound like it wasn't made in somebody's basement or garage. Let's not equate primitive production for good sound, folks.
Then there's the artists. For every great singer out there, there are a dozen Bob Dylan wannabes. Hey, let's face it, Dylan sounds like he gargles with broken glass every morning.
Songwriting quality: where are all the pop bands with something to say, other than how much they want to rape and abuse women? Rare, indeed.
Record companies: In their greed to promote the big hit single in this digital age, they've abandoned the artists capable of holding your interest for an entire album, artists with long-term playability. Pop music today is down right *boring*. The old artists are either dying off or have lost their touch (e.g., Paul McCartney should just give up music and open up a vegetable stand somewhere), while the new artists pay too much attention to what the companies tell them.
Buy CD's? What on earth for?
I'll tell you something. My fourteen year old has discovered my LP collection from the 60's, 70's and 80's (about 1200 have survived the ravages of time), and he spends his spare time digitizing them onto the computer. He loves the music and the sound of these old dinosaurs, and will "rip" an LP even where I already have the CD. He hates what's on the radio, and feels like he's found buried treasure in these old archives.
Buy CD's? Why on earth would he want to do that? He's not finished listening to my LP's yet!
And there's perhaps the real reason CD sales are in decline: it has too much competition from what people already own. Something like Windows Vista having XP to contend with, I guess.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I for one, want CDs to remain because I like to have control over the encoding process. I am a bit of a stickler when it comes to that. If I own the CD I can rip it as I see fit. I like my MP3s at 320kbps. Also, for my MP3 player I like to use the WMA format because of the higher quality at smaller bitrates. Music is not 'one size fits all' for me. Being a fusionhead a lot of the bands I like are not gong to be readily available on iTunes, etc, thus, being able to have their CD helps a lot. I think the decrease in CD sales is due to the downloadable option of iTunes, etc. I'm sure some people don't want to have a load of CDs taking up space in their homes when a downloaded MP3 will do. That's fine for them but doesn't work for me. Also, how many times does one like the whole CD anyway? iTunes gives you the option of downloading only what you know you like. Another thing I see which the labels might not want to discuss is the price of some CDs. I still see some CDs marked at $14.99, USA prices, not imports! That doesn't quite work for me or a lot of others. I guess some labels haven't learned that greed and screwing the consumer is not a good business practice, lower CDs sales is the public's answer.
Hey,
I'm still buying CDs and will continue to do so as long as I can get what I know is or suspect to be good music on the format. I've bought a couple dozen this year alone with some purchased in a brick-n-mortor store and the rest online. Granted, the future cost would be, of course, a factor.
I think many stores are attempting to sell CDs at a price too high for most of them. Come on, in general, a CD costing more than $14 won't make in to my shopping cart until I've shopped around and know that I can't get it cheaper. Still, I may just wait on it to drop in the price. I've done this. In my experience, the best time to buy CDs is the week of their release. Pricing tends to be best at the chain stores. I check weekly ads and then snap up those I want for the sale price.
With only one recent exception, I've not actually listened to a CD in more than two years. I buy and then immediately rip to MP3. I then add the music to my iPod(no iTunes here...so move along) and home-grown jukebox(Linux baby!). I buy CDs, because I want the physical item and a widely supported backup. Plus, I could also sell them if I ever needed the cash.
Gotta get back to work!
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
I've used one CD in the last year. It's a CDRW & I used it twice, once to install Unreal Tournament 99 & once to attempt a headless Linux install on an old computer I have laying around.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
You tend to get a lot of aliasing at higher audible frequencies and at 22kHz all you can record is a square wave since you've only got two samples per cycle. A 20kHz sine wave recorded with a 44kHz sample rate is going to lose a lot of data. Whether or not humans can hear a difference is another argument, but a 22kHz sample is definitely not perfect at the upper end.
"psychoacoustics"
fuck you
I think it's hilarious. The only reason this is even news is because sales are down with MAJOR recording labels. Independent labels are thriving the better than they have since the 80's. Independant artists are doing better than they ever have (not saying they're doing great, but it's definitely feasible to make a good living as an independent artist). Let the major labels tell you the cd business is nose diving into the crapper all they want, it's just that independent music is on an upswing again. When major labels find the next new "sound" to push to consumers, the mainstream will be back buying cds. The only cd purchases online downloads are stealing from the stores are the mass market, platinum+ sellers...which will continue to sell millions of copies, despite piracy and online mp3 purchases. Just like tape dubbing hurt sales in the 80's and cd burning hurt sales in the 90's.
The answer is to drop cd prices back to what they were in the 90's, offer customers a way to explore and search for new music instead of just pushing a few select artists while relying on word of mouth to sell cds (word of mouth = "lemme burn you this cd" instead of impulse buy), offer retailers incentives to install listening stations in stores like they used to have, and offer DRM free mp3 downloads of the album with purchase. Most people want the cd long enough to rip it and put it on their mp3 player. Giving free drm free downloads does the consumer a favor and gives them an incentive to buy the disc rather than search out a pirate version of the cd and wait for it to download. Put trust into the consumers and the consumers will trust you.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
(end-of-msg)
Congratulations, you sell buggy whips and your wondering why no one buys them.
Okay - I've seen this comment enough times that I just have to set the record straight. There's nothing in compressed music that makes it inherently inferior to lossless. A CD is usually 720 megabytes. If I want to load it with the highest quality audio possible, I will always choose to compress. A 50 meg MP3 file has vastly superior audio quality to a 50 megabyte PCM file. PCM is usually around 1536 kbps. Can you imagine what an AAC file could do with the same kind of bitrate? I'm guessing at least 192 KHz, 32-bit audio with no perceptual artifacts.
This whole "uncompressed is superior" business is a myth. If we insisted that DVDs have uncompressed video, we'd be stuck with short, pixelated movies because uncompressed DVD-size video takes 40 times as much space.
MP3 has its bitrate capped at 320 kbps. Don't go tarnishing the good name of other audio codecs.
One of the more interesting reasons I've seen for the decline of music sales is the increase in DVD sales. Many people only have so much money to put into entertainment so that choice to buy a movie which has become increasingly popular is money that is no longer going to CD sales. It is a thought at least.
I love the whole RIAA is evil and people aren't buying in protest idea, but I buy that as much as "next Thursday noone buy gas to show the evil oil companies", yeah right. I don't buy nearly as much music any more. I think it is because I fall into that crochety old guy who already has a huge record and CD collection so owns most of what he wants already category. I would however probably buy quite a bit of music from iTunes or the like if it was DRM free, a much higher quality, and a bit cheaper, but alas.
phenomena.
You can accurately get the FREQUENCY of a f/2 sample set, if you're assuming that this is a sine wave is correct.
What you have lost is that you can't tell the amplitude. So any error in quantisation of amplitude is magnified. And, when you're looking at quieter harmonics, you have fewer bits left over to represent them cleanly, so your errors are higher AGAIN.
This could see a piccolo exceessively over-hyped in a composition one second and under-represented the next. Beat frequencies are BELOW the frequencies of the signals involved and are therefore able to fit comfortably within the hearing range of even quite poor human ears.
I buy my music online mainly because it's much easier I chose the direct download option because it's quicker, of course I don't have a system where you can actually hear the difference so what? Of course there is more too it than quality, because I'm much too lazy to actually change cds everytime I want to listen to something differently - so I'd end up compressing the music myself anyways.
But I think there might be something to the first part aswell because when I look at my music collection the majority of my albums have been released before 2002, maybe even further back, and 95% of it comes from bands that excisted before 1995 so if anyone is like me well... I do have some new music but it's surely not mainstream and much of it would be nearly impossibly to get on CD in Denmark, at least if I want it at a reasonable price compared to what it'd cost me as mp3.
Serious, the way the cost of food and gasoline have gone up, I'm sure many people have far less discretionary income for things like the latest bad pop album. And they are probably not the only industry that will see a decline. That said, my CD buying will remain unchanged, but I don't buy many anyway, and the stuff I buy is never the stuff they are marketing... things from the back catalog in Jazz, mostly. I get my really cool new stuff from Indie artists on the internet without the record company middleman.
-- John
It isnt strange that the CD sales decline, but I dont think it is because of DRM as much as the fact that, compared to MP3, CDs are simply not very convenient. The way most people listen to music it doesnt really matter that the quality of MP3 is not quite as good, especially since most modern music isnt the kind where crystal clear sound is critical. If you are driving a car or jogging or something similar, many CD players will cut out every time you bump the player, but an MP3 player wont. And you arent listening carefully anyway, you just want a pleasing background noise.
On top of that, of course, comes the fact that MP3 music can be copied very easily between all your equipment - computer, phone, players etc.
People don't care about sound quality. Now that they've seen that they can put their whole music collection on a little box the size of a deck of cards, the only thing 99% of people care about is size. Take it from someone who owns a high end stereo store. The number one request I get is for "wireless speakers." This is followed closely by "a tiny amplifier." People just want invisible music. They're not listening seriously, it's all for background. And now that they can download anything they want, why the hell would they buy space-taking CDs? The CD is dead. Ironically, the only people who do care about quality have gone back to vinyl, largely because the CD selection locally is dwindling to the same size.
Case in point: what would happen to a restaurant if it were run like a music industry.
Once upon a time in America, a new restaurant opened its doors. The owners called it restaurant Medallika. The rumors of delicious food have started reaching far and wide, and the restaurant grew ever more popular. Every once in a while the chefs would change the menu, the reviews would pour in, and the ecstatic public scurried in to savor the taste of the latest offering. The owners called their regular patrons their "fanbase", and treated them like family. And in return, the patrons became so loyal, that even when the chefs occasionally fucked up, they would still come and even recommend the place to all their friends. And of course, when cooking their own food at home, the would try to reproduce their favorite Medallika recipes.
But the world did not stand still. Technological innovations were introduced, which enabled the customers to share their recipes with millions of others with a click of a button. The "fanbase" even had the audacity to create and sell "Restaurant Medallika" merchandise. The restaurant's popularity has now achieved exponential growth, and soon it became one of the most successful nationwide chains.
Then the lawyers came. Apparently there was an impending grave threat to the success of the franchise: some rogue customers were exchanging genuine restaurant's recipes, and cooking at home without compensation to the franchise. The lawyers said this was tantamount to stealing the restaurant's intellectual property. The owners pondered over this: the profits were clearly still growing, but what if the lawyers were right? Could it be true that the recipe sharers were cutting into the profits? In the end, it was decided that the rogue sharing must be stopped immediately. Legal actions were taken. First to fall was the "nerve center" of the rogue sharing "Sleepster". Many others followed, but something was not quite working. As soon as one of these "nerve centers" went down, another one spawned in its place. So it became necessary to go after rogue fans themselves. Restaurant would send agents to monitor people's eating habits in their homes, and report back if anyone was illegally infringing on the restaurant's intellectual property. Arrests soon followed.
The lawyers reported on the early successes of the campaign to curb "piracy", and collected their righteous reward. Then quite unexpectedly, the profits started falling. The lawyers conducted studies, and concluded that falling profits were the result of "piracy", and steps must be taken to pursue the rogues even more vigorously. More and more arrests followed. The lawyers stepped up their campaign. Then one day the restaurant Medallika opened its doors with a new menu, which all reviewers claimed was the best ever. But nobody came.
What happened?
Okay, we are moving to a high-capacity, modern disc format. One presumes that the data is compressed... CDs aren't because decompressing wasn't an option with the hardware then. Nothing released now won't compress to the level of cheaply available chips.
An option for Audiophiles? They HAVE the option, it's the SA-CD/DVD-A tracks, that's the audiophile version.
The whole point of the loss-less schemes was that rather than ripping WAV/AIFF files, you could get 2:1 compression with the advance in hardware from the late 1980/early 1990s to now, and therefore, we picked up the compression.
Why on earth would you release a high-end format, SA-CD/DVD-A with a "lossless" CD-quality format? Either you want convenience, so MP3, or you want quality, which means SA-CD/DVD-A. The point was, rather that let people rip, just include the 128 MP3s on there.
Long answer:
The CD is not obsolete unless you look at it only as a sales figure. The CD is simply a PLACE TO PUT A FILE. It will be usefull for a while, until massive USB thumdrives can plug into your car stereo (Please save me from the obligatory "its already here" posts cause folks, it ain't here yet for the rest of the world). We now live in a scary world (for merchants) where files live free, hopping from one medium to the next and from one format to the next.
The CD is dead. long live the CD!
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I bought my first LP in 1974 and I still have it. I still have almost every LP and CD I bought between then and now.
How many Maroon 5 downloads will still be around in 2040?
I really hate these inflamatory questions disguised as news titles. (Is your cat stealing your money?! Find out at 11!!)
Anyways, regarding the "Loudness wars", I like it "loud". And believe it or not you can compress the dynamic range WITHOUT clipping. I don't know who these idiots are who think you automatically get clipping by compressing range. What you really get when doing, say a 3:1 compression, is the softer sounds get louder by alot. The medium level sounds get louder by a "medium" amount, and the sounds already loud get very little boost.
Now as for WHY I like it compressed? As one person stated here before, more often than not music is competing with other background noise. ALSO, not everyone has a high end playback device. Most PC users, and most standard car stereos have control only over BASS and TREBLE, and that's it. And the quality of your speakers factors in too. Now if you were in the business of selling music and you had the choice of making the music sound best on millions of standard stereos, OR making it sound best on HIGH END stereos, which would you cater to? I'd cater to the larger market of course.
I wonder what percentage of CD sales in 2006 were a result of retail sales at Tower Records (RIP)? Was there an uptick in 2006 due to the clearance sale when Tower went belly up? I suspect that more than 10% of the decline in 2007 is simply due to the lack of one of the major retailers. Sure has cut into my purchases; browsing online cannot compare to browsing hands-on in a brick-n-morter retailer.
What I would really like to see is more devices that play flac files which are archived on DVD's. It could be more convenient than uploading them to a device. There are quite a few that play mp3s archived to CD, but going lossless would probably require a larger storage medium, as flacs tend to be right around 50% or so of the size - so a DVD containing flacs, or a DVD DL containing flacs, and moving forward, Blu-Ray disks or whatever containing flacs.
Also, flacs can compress and read higher quality audio as well, I believe, if you compile the program with those particular options.
Perhaps having a laptop or something along those lines might be the best way to enjoy music going forward. Plop in a DVD with flacs on it, plug the laptop into your amplifier or whatever.
The only real data that we have on CD sales comes from the entities that have the most to gain by claiming that CD sales are rapidly falling. By claiming that CD sales are lower each year, the three or four multinational media entertainment companies that believe they own most of the world's recorded music can use that claim to push for laws that will make it impossible to copy a CD with a computer drive. Sure there will be a hundred people on Slashdot who can break the encryption, but there will also be a billion people who won't be able to do so.
Let's look at this from another perspective: CDs are bought primarily by young people, and the world's percentage of young people is booming like never before. CDs are a middle class good and the world's middle class is expanding like never before. CDs are a low-cost item and are marketed as a self-contained impulse status purchase: the world's new exploding set of middle-class young people are eager to buy low-cost status items.
Therefore, it is impossible for CD sales to be falling. Sow could they be? Generally in economics, when it is impossible for something to happen, then it doesn't happen. In all probability, the media companies are lying, and CD sales are actually strong. It's like Enron telling everyone that business is booming and then going bankrupt in a flash. It's a huge lie repeatedly told by the people who have the most to gain from this lie. It won't be the first time that something like this has happened.
So take this claim of decreased CD sales with skepticism. There is no reason for it to be true.
IT seems like what you're hearing has more to do with differences in the mastering choices than the technology. Neither CDs nor Vinyl are perfect - they're both imperfect duplications of higher-end masters that are, themselves, imperfect duplications of real sound. But vinyl recordings are typically mastered to sound "thicker" than CDs - the difference is why, even after you've ripped the files to MP3s, which are imperfect copies of their sources as well, you still hear your preferred sound - it's the mastering choices, not a reflection of the technology or the precision of the reproduction.
Everyone is talking about how the music industry is in the dumps. But, the problem is not really new. Whenever there is a lack of exposure to new music the music industry takes a dive. Some of you might be old enough to remember when the music industry crashed back in the early 80s. Experts and pundits at the time laid the blame on piracy and video games. The theories were that kids were sharing music via cassette tapes and that kids were too distracted by video games to buy music. Sound familiar?
So the early 80s had Tom Petty shooting an arcade video game with a gun in one of his videos and Bow Wow Wow pissing off the industry with their pro-copying song "C30, C60, C90, Go." It all seems so incredibly naive now.
Of course the music decline had nothing to do with either cassette tapes or video games. It was that white kids were sick of what radio was playing. (I'm guessing black kids were sick too, but I cannot speak from their experience.) They were sick of faceless corporate rock featuring bland music by such groups as Styx, Journey, and Reo Speedwagon. They wanted their own music, but no one was playing it.
However, once MTV got into enough homes it started exposing kids to new music and the industry took off big time. MTV brought black music to white kids along with English new-wave, metal, and alternative. (And the surge was certainly helped by the release of the CD format which made plenty of people re-buy their music collections.)
That huge wave continued until the 90s when MTV stopped playing new music. About that same time the radio industry started consolidating and extremely narrow play lists killed off any music diversity heard on the radio. The music industry was stuck exactly where it was back in the 80s: Radio stations playing bland corporate music and fans not giving a damn because they had nothing worth giving a damn about.
It was also at that time that I stopped buying new music. Most of the music I had been exposed to was via word of mouth, sharing mix tapes among friends. Artists such as Husker Du, John Zorn and Fishbone. Once I went to law school and didn't have time to hang out and share music with friends my exposure to new music ended.
That changed with Napster. The cool thing about the original Napster was that it more than peer-to-peer, it was actually person to person. With modern P2P programs you're not downloading from one person, but from several people all at once. But with Napster you were connected to one person and they were connected to you. When you saw someone download one of your favorite songs, you'd think, "Gee, if they like that song, they might have something I would like."
I'd check out share lists of those people and would be exposed to music I had never heard. And I'd chat with people all over the world about music. I went from buying no new music to buying about two or three CDs a month. Bands such as Wilco, the Old 97s, and Pizzicato Five, to name a few.
Of course that ended when Napster pulled its plug. And because other P2P programs didn't have the same person to person feel, I stopped being exposed to new music and stopped buying new music again. Modern P2P programs are only good when you already know what you want. They're not designed to expose you to music you've never heard. And we have the music industry to blame for that.
The music industry has to accept that the vast majority of people only buy music they're exposed to. People will see a movie based solely on a commercial, but they will not buy a CD based on a commercial, unless they've heard at least one song enough times to actually like it. Marketing music is odd because you basically cannot sell it until after the person has already "used" the product. Nowadays the music industry is holding its assets so tightly that they're killing themselves off.
If the industry really wants to save itself, here's what they should do. First, come out strongly against radio consolidation. In fact, press the FCC and Congress to backtrack and open up radio ow
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Wheras the technology allows bands to go direct to the public through sites like cdbaby.com - that's where all my friends seem to sell their cds. And there are other similar sites. I bet those sales are not being counted.
Another factor is the decline of the chain CD store. Nowadays, if I need a CD I go to an independent (Music Millenium in my case). I don't expect to be able to find the CD's I want to buy in a chain outlet(Hazmat Modine would be a recent example - try finding that in a Borders and they are one of the better chains). So this too leads to more purchases from independents, and possible undercounting.
Given the poor quality of downloaded bit rate compressed music I also expect that the market is further fracturing into ephemera (aka product) on download and higher quality on CD. Nobody in their right mind would want to listen to Pink Martini on download, for example, because part of the delight is the antique glossiness of the recording.
Squirrel!
In order to avoid audio artifacts caused by aliasing of the digital signal, the audio must be filtered so that no frequencies approach the sample rate. The filters needed to do this by their very nature distort the audio signal. Because the CD sample rate's Nyquist frequency (1/2 the sample rate) is so close to upper range of human hearing, the filters actually do change the upper audio frequencies. There are phase shifts and decibel bumps all over the post 15KHz high frequency range. This is what causes the perception that CD audio is inferior to vinyl. Because it's true. It's true even though in theory the sample rate covers all audible frequencies.
If CDs audio were sampled at a 96KHz rate and reproduced at that rate also, then yes, they would sound the same as vinyl records. Because the upper audio components of the signal that give the brain clues to nature of the audio signal would be unchanged.
I like LPs with sexy singers like Julie London and Dolores Gray because the photos are much larger than a CD.
And to whomever thinks CDs sound worse than vinyl, needs to get their ears checked. I will agree that there are poorly remastered CDs, and CDs taken from the wrong source. A "properly" recorded and/or (re)mastered CD has far more dynamic range than vinyl. Do a) and b) comparisons between vinyl pressings and remastered CDs. Proof? Get a copy of Manfred Mann's Earth Band's The Good Earth on CD (remastered in the early '90s) and play it against the US vinyl pressing on Warner Bros. The vinyl sounds terrible due to a crapy pressing, then couple it with the surface noise. Any one that has vinyl collection of thousands of records will tell you - most vinyl was cheaply pressed.
Finally, want to here a "new" release that's only on CD and sounds better than vinyl? Check out Opeth's Damnation. What a wonderful recording. Simply sounds stunning.
www.itjerk.com
Let's see - music piracy has pretty much reached an equal level of penetration as that of broadband use in the US. Probably similar levels, if not greater in other countries.
Why would people buy a CD if they can simply download - for free - anything they want? OK, perhaps not anything they want is available. The key here is that the current, popular music is 100% available. These are the sales that used to drive the music promotion machine. Radio play, advertising, music videos and everything else that is part of "music promotion". Well, I would say it is pretty much over.
CD sales through large chain stores are going to drop as broadband penetration increases. At some point the large chains are going to say it isn't worth the floor space any longer. iTunes and other music sales online account for perhaps 1% of the music on portable players today. Sure, it is a nice niche to be in because that 1% is fairly profitable but it is only a very small niche. I don't see the percentages changing much, if at all.
This pretty much means the end of music promotion. Radio stations aren't going to be playing music they aren't paid to play if they then have to turn around and pay for playing that very same music. Advertisers aren't going to be paying top rates for their ads to be surrounded by the whatever is left over. It will be like talk radio ads, very low rates for the most part. Thus ends a good portion of what people in the US have grown up with as a result of music promotion.
I have no doubt there will be plenty of people that record their own music and want to "publish" it on the Internet. Some will be good, some will be utterly ego-driven from people that "know" they are the best guitar player or singer the world has ever seen. It will be quite a different listening experience for most.
Some will just keep downloading the back catalog of everything recorded from 1955 until 1990.
Is the CD Becoming Obsolete?
No, I think the guys at Audioholics are just bored today, or they need some advertising hits on their page.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
Some people like some things and other people like other things. Somebody might think every song on an album is gold and another person might think only 2 or 3 songs on the same album are gold. You and I could listen to the same album and have completely different opinions on it, so your argument is not very helpful.
Call me a crusty old man of nearly 40, but CDs are the only way I purchase music now and likely to continue to be that way.
Why?
Well, mainly cuz the CDs that I bought ~20 years ago still work fine today, but the floppy disks I used in my Mac 512k ~20 years ago are essentially unreadable now.
I have no faith that spending money on iTunes (or whatever) will yield music that I can still use in another 20 years. (Not to mention the fact that the CDs are better sound quality. Yeahyeahyeah, maybe my ears can't really tell the difference, but it gives me more options when an even crazier compression scheme is discovered in the future.)
If CD sales are down, perhaps the reason is that it's getting harder and harder to find new interesting music... radio in the USA has become essentially worthless for this in the last 10 years due to massive corporate consolidation and uniform playlists. This sort of business model may make it easier in the short term for those companies, but long term they've lost a customer.
Oh, wait, no, I just don't care.
I'd rather have gigapop Internet like South Korea does everywhere and download the music direct from the actual band from their website, cutting out the middleman who gets 99 percent of the profits.
Buy a CD direct from a band - cost $12 - they get $6 to $8 profit.
Buy a CD thru a music vendor (except for indie music stores) - they get $0.01 to $0.02 profit.
Buy thru an indie vendor (we love you Sonic Boom Records! - they get $1 to $2 profit.
I choose options A (when at a concert or after a friend twinks me on Facebook) or option C (when I just want to browse for cool stuff).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Offer me the over-produced manufactured shit that passes for music nowadays and I'll ignore it.
Offer me DRM-encumbered over-compressed downloads and I will walk away.
Offer me some decent new music and I'll have a listen.
Offer me some decent new music in an uncompressed, DRM-free format, and I'll buy it.
I don't want to be one of the curmudgeons grumbling about all the new music being crap, but the fact remains that I tuned out in the early 1990s, and have heard very little of interest since. My latest (in terms of production date) music purchases are Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno and Drama by Bananarama, both released in 2006. Hardly mainstream music, either of them.
...laura
How the hell did you get modded insightful for revealing that you OPEN up a CD, burn it, then 'give the original' as a gift? That the cheapest shit I've ever heard!
How we store our music collections is changing, from a single unit of storage, like a CD, to massive storage of many units (flash, hard drive).
The single unit of storage as a method of delivery only is a dinosaur waiting for the meteor.
Classical music is even more reasonably priced, I've discovered. I'd been holding off buying classical CDs in hopes I'd get my act together, buy a new cartridge, and transfer my LPs to my hard drive. Then I went into a local record store (a regional chain here in New England) and wandered into the classical area. I bought a complete set of Beethoven symphonies (6 discs) by Sir Georg Solti and Chicago Symphony for under $50! A complete set of all Mozart's piano concerti (12 discs) by Alfred Brendel, Neville Marriner, and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields cost about $60.
Granted all this music dates back to the 80's and 90's, but who cares? It's not like this year's performance of Beethoven is going to be light-years ahead of Solti's.
"What this indicates, so far, is that US sales of digital music will be growing at an estimated rate of 28% in 2008,"
OK, so CD sales are on the rise, then... good...
"however physical sales will drop even further, resulting in a net overall decline."
So there's an overall decline in net music sales... Must be tough times for the iTunes store.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
The parent comment is not safe for work, so don't click it if you're somewhere public/restricted.
And for people who think that optical cables do make a difference..They sell one for $1495 for 1ft.
n _every_minute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_bor
I wonder if they sell enough to make a living. The number of people with high disposable income and low intelegince is a small group. I doubt they get enough volume to make a living.
The truth shall set you free!
Even if this is the case, (and there ARE at least a few companies such as RTI that will take hi-res masters), when you put the CD file onto vinyl it does something to the sound that makes it better than the CD. There are hundreds of new LPs you can buy and compare to the CD which came from the same source and the LP will sound better 90% of the time. Why? Who the hell knows, but the conclusion is the same.
To go with SA-CD media centers, you will rip to the SA-CD equivalent of WAV now, and in 4-5 years, the equivalent of FLAC begins to make sense. You can't magically compress 2:1 losslessly. You CAN with CDs because there is zero compression, because when the CD spec came out, you didn't have processors in the CD player. The SA-CD/DVD-A are going to be as small as possible given the reasonable playback hardware.
Your comment is, whatever the content, I want to squeeze it into half the space. As compression is a function of compressible data (patterns) and processor, eventually you'll get enough horsepower to get a 2:1 ratio on the DVD-A content, but I wouldn't suggest that it's now. However, including a 128 MP3, AAC, AND WMA, just to make everyone happy, should use what, 10% of the space? If you only include one of them, say MP3, you're using 3% of the disc, that's a reasonable accomodation to the digital side.
The lossy codecs serve a purpose, portible machines. The CD hybrid layer serves a purpose, backwards compatibility. The SA-CD serves a purpose, high fidelity.
Alas, the recording industry didn't push this way, and instead gets eaten by Torrents...
Not only that, they sued the crap out of Napster, which was a sloppy way to find music but cool, and left in its place Torrents, which are best for trading LOTS of files. In the Napster days, you downloaded a song, after a lot of effort, and if you liked it, bought the CD. Now, you don't Torrent an MP3, too much effort, you grab the whole CD because why not.
Seriously. They have done double blind listening tests. VERY FEW people can tell the difference between uncompressed and 192 Kbps MP3 reliably. VERY few.
That's not to say some can't, and that's not to say perhaps they picked songs that didn't make it easy to distinguish. I note I have listened to some songs (from Billy Joel, of all people) where the MP3 rips were noticeably missing in treble (brass, in fact). But, to insist that most people could hear a difference between 192 Kbps and 384 Kbps is simply wrong, because repeated studies (Google's out there -- use it), have shown that, by and large, they cannot.
I take it you're not a fan of 8 bit peoples.
"A combination of low quality hardware, poor digitising algorithms, and sloppy mixing does produce audibly awful results compared with say an inexpensive 12 track mixer and a good old tape recorder."
Bach's music is not brilliant because he recorded in digital surround(if anything, he recorded on paper, and the minds and souls of his followers), it is brilliant because of the inherent structure within the music itself. Yes, the organs used to play it were (and that are used to play it) are awesome and fantastic(see Wendy Carlos), but the same music seed could be written for a smaller device, and grow to make use of a larger; a scaleable work. God alone can create the organ worthy of a Bach; all else is close approximation; human imperfection. I do not claim to write music, or that I will ever be able to write music on that level. But that is my goal. And I plan to do so with the ubiquitious hardware that I knew would be available eventually; ie crappy computers.
Some music makes sense only to the artist(guilty as charged here), others seem to take a community and act as a catalyst of thought or action for that community(study music, another of my interests, is included here, along with rap, moving political music(most of bob dylan?), and so on). These three types of musical art(brilliant, self-delusional/nihlist, social) are examples of music that is orthogonal to your 3 criteria.
Thank you for allowing me to bring clarity and focus to an otherwise busy and complicated life by posing such a delicious example of why it is I strive so hard.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Obviously, I meant lowpass, not highpass.
This came up in a discussion I had with some friends in college, one of whom actually had a cassette that was taped from a "Top 40" radio station sometime in the early 70's. Most of the music was, in fact, crap; we just remember the good stuff because it survived that weeding-out process.
/. post I saw in a similar thread some time ago. "For those people who think that over-produced pop music is a new phenomenon, I have three words for you: Donnie and Marie."
This is also a good place to quote another
You just need to read the reviews of the "experts" in the filed to realize this.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Given its niche nature, labels big and small have not tried the DRM crap in classical music lovers as far as I can see. I have still to find a classical music CD encumbered with idiotic DRM protection.
In the other hand, some other more mainstream stuff I bought was DRM crippled. The CD found its way back to the shop as a defective item in very little time.
The shop assistant told me in one occasion that this copy protecting mechanism was necessary to stop people copying the CD, to which I replied, "OK, how do I play it on my computer then", he wasn't going to give me a method to go around the pointless "copy protection", so he had to take back the defective product.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
> hence the fact that the vast majority of records sounded very bad > indeed. Maybe it was different where you were, but I disagree. I still have many of my 70s records and by and large they sound great. I also frequented high-end hi-fi dealers, and far from insisting on Dark Side of the Moon they generally said "bring your own records, play what you like." These invariably sounded far better on decent equipment than on cheap stuff. One of the frustrations of vinyl is the amount of investment required to get something approaching the best from it. Tim
My dad had an amazing collection of vinyl, several hundred of discs.
The day he saw and played a CD for the first time in a shop, he came back home, packed all the vinyl and sold them as a collection, as well as his turntable.
With the money he got he bought a CD player and 2 or 3 disks (insanely expensive back then).
So your whining about CDs will get you little sympathy. I am doing pretty much the same with my CDs btw, ripping them, and storing them away (the attachment to the cover "art" baffles me, but to each one his own).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.