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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.
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.
...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?
...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.
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.
I haven't bought a CD in months, and have instead spent time rediscovering the music I already have. It takes a lot of time to rip a large collection to a digital format, and so you tend to be a bit more invested in it.
With a large collection, it's also easy to find tracks that you haven't heard in a long time, and you're more likely to stumble upon tracks you've never heard.
Just my two cents.
Technology tips and tricks.
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?".
I think many people make the mistake of always associating CDs with Major Labels. There are thousands of non-major labels who do not choke their musicians by collecting disproportionately large fees from CD sales. My question to you is this: if major labels ceased to exist, and The Artist collected a legitimate proportion of the profits, would you really start buying CDs again? Or has it become easier to dismiss the medium as irrelevant? It worries me that the physical transfer of music in tangible form is declining. The art that goes into album design and track arrangement is very important to the message that the artist is attempting to convene. Removing this "wrapper" is like not watching the opening montage to a movie. The songs then become sugar packets that you empty into your iced tea.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
Actually what I think most people are really objecting to is the way that record companies pump up the volume and saturate the band. Everything sounds like a car commercial the way they use it.
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
You don't listen to music while you're doing those things?
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 ]
Honestly, compression is only an issue with a small subset of music anyway (though it may be a large portion of the high-volume sales). The real issue with the whole CD vs. LP debate is that most music hasn't even been recorded in analog in almost 20 years anyway, and hasn't been mastered in analog in 15 years or more. I don't even think most modern CDs include the 3 letter SPARS code to tell you whether it was recorded, mixed, and mastered in analog or digital. Most of the LPs I own were recorded in digital and converted to analog, not the other way around (for the CD version).
On the other hand, some people still use analog for various parts of the recording chain because they like a certain sound they get from a particular piece of equipment, and attribute this strictly to an analog/digital difference, even though digital components could reproduce the analog sound if someone took the time to make it do so (usually by analyzing the modifications made to the sound by the analog equipment and then reproducing them on the digital).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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