A Bleak Future For Physical Media Purchases?

KevReedUK writes "The folks at ZDNet are eulogising over the upcoming death of physical media music sales. They refer to the noticeable drop in physical sales of albums whilst digital sales continue climbing (albeit at a reduced rate). Their central argument is that 'the music industry was pillaged by piracy and competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games ... [2007] marked the lowest tally and the steepest decline since Nielsen began publishing estimates based on point-of-sales data in 1993, a Nielsen representative said. The peak year in that time was 2000, when sales reached 785 million units.'"

Comments

Get off my lawn!

[Graftweed]

Distribution of content (music in this case) over the internet, definitely has its advantages from the point of view of the consumer, such as no time wasted going to the store or waiting for goods to arrive, and also a myriad of advantages from the point of view of the content producer.

That being said, there are several tradeoffs that I, personally, am just not ready to make unless I'm forced to by the discontinuation of CDs or by a change in the distribution model. Here are the things we are losing as we move way from CDs:

• Raw CD Audio - I can take the lossless raw cd audio and encode it into my pet format of choice with minimal loss of quality. If I start with a MP3 and assuming that's not my pet audio format, then the loss of quality if I use a lossy codec will be noticeable.
• Used Market - I like how I can turn to the used CD market if I don't want to pay full price for an album, or if for some reason I have a problem giving the producer in question money. It'll be a cold day in hell when the EULAs that each distributor uses allows the resale of a downloaded audio file.
• The Physical Product - A pet peeve of mine to be sure, but I like having the actual object. Not only are some pretty damn cool, they serve as a backup and look good on my CD tower.

I'm willing to overlook the last one if they tweak the distribution model to address the first two as they are the real deal breakers for me. Especially the absence of a used market.

Duh

[saladpuncher]

The older generation that buys music as a physical medium already has purchased everything they want. My mom isn't going to repurchase the White Album no matter what new wacky format it comes out in. The new generation doesn't see those shiny metal discs as storing music. They grew up with everything being digital. Even if they burn everything to an MP3 cd, how many songs will that store? 200-300? Their friggin phones can hold that. Their ipods, zunes, etc can hold thousands or more. Do you think they are going to buy an album for 20 bucks that has ONLY 10 songs? The end of the physical medium is here. Open up a web site and sell all of your stuff online for a good price. Oh wait...Apple already is :)