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Sony Closing 18M CD/Month Plant
coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website."
That's a stunning amount of plastic waste and manufacturing process waste no longer being generated.
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... They're not blaming piracy?
If this plant were in Canada, the government would impose another tariff on blank CDs and give the cash to the CD manufacturers. Have to make up for the evil pirates somehow!
Trolling is a art,
I was in Walmart a month ago looking for two CD's that I wanted to purchase. Neither was particularly obscure, and both were recent (released within the last year). They had neither, and actually I couldn't believe how small their selection was compared to what it used to be. I understand the convenience of downloading via Walmart or Amazon, but what I can't understand is why people wouldn't actually want to have a bit-perfect digital copy on physical medium as a back up.
Anyone else read the title as 18M per CD per month? That is one poorly placed slash.
Don't be fooled. The summary says nothing of the sort.
It says it's "Shuttering" the plant - a clever mind game to make you think they mean "Shutting Down" but they are actually just installing new blinds for the windows. It says that on March 31 it will "Close" - they probably just mean locking up for the night. On April 1 they might "ReOpen". 300 people will lose their jobs? They didn't say who, when, or where, it was only implied at the plant, but its not really specific enough to be sure. They could mean just 300 people in general will lose their job. A very low-ball estimate, if you ask me.
So Sony is cutting costs. No prizes for guessing whether or not this reduction is reflected in the cost of their products.
Even, if one does the math, they are just going from 0.000017 workers per CD per month to 0. Not a great loss from this point of view.
The difference is that they are no longer cashing in $20.00 - (pay of 1.66e-5 worker) per 20 or so musics people listen to.
-><- no
"Sony Closing Plant 18M/CD/Month Plant"
Aside from two Plants...
18 Million Per Cd Per Month?
I will probably be hanged as a non-ecologist, braindead dinosaur but I feel sad about that.
_Not_ all of us like to download files, with regards to music. I like to buy CD! I pay for the packaging, I pay for the few pictures in it, I pay to have my music spared the tragedy of sound-compressing (= loose of quality) and to have it immune from any form of HD crash, OS crappy behavior etc.
I listen to music on a stereo, not on a wireless or a PC. So, for me, CDs is a perfect format and I feel sad about the fact that, within a few year, I will have lost this little pleasure of mine: to order a few CDs from times to times to add to my collection, be forced to download from a torrent site, somewhere, soulless MP3 files....
Daniel
I think their department of redundancy department was siphoning funds...
... because nobody trusts Sony CDs?
Have gnu, will travel.
He's directly responsible for these job losses.
Just goes to show how much of cost scam CD are/were. When there is a glut of memory for example, the retail price drops. Now there is a glut of CD production and the cost stays... fixed. I guess their thug business practices are showing. All parts of the cost of production for music have gone down, and the last CD I bought was still the same cost as the CD I bought 5 years ago. Good job, music industry, you've killed your own market with your own greed!
Sony is a Japanese company, but this is a New Jersey plant that they're closing.
Presumably, some additional people will have to be hired in Indiana, where they're consolidating operations, but probably not as many as they're losing.
Keeping jobs is hardly a reason to keep that plant open. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that they're doing any of this in the US at all. I thought it had all be outsourced to where the labor was very, very cheap.
Manufacturing is increasingly a poor way to make a living. Machines do the work better than people, and physical artifacts can be made very cheaply. The non-physical artifacts may simply be replaced entirely, as in this case.
Good luck to those out of work.
300 people are responsible for making 18 million CDs/month. I saw another story about a sleeping bag factory cranking out 20 million bags a year with 500 empoloyees for the whole company. I read somewhere that American manufacturing capacity is the highest it's ever been. What are we going to do with all these people. I keep hearing 'Well, the world needs ditch diggers too'. No, no it doesn not... I guess we can let them starve to death in the streets.
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18 million per CD per month? those are quite expensive discs...
I had the aversion to non-physical media for quite a while..but like most I have found digital to be acceptable in quality (for me music is mostly for background noise and even with headphones a higher bit-rate sounds "good enough" for me). With a little redundancy in the home network the "collection" is assured to last. The biggest hurdle for me was will an MP3 be playable 20 years from now...but after thinking about it, the likelihood of being able to play a digital based format is probably much higher than being able to play a physical one, how many 8-track, turntable or cassette players do you see these days? I'm more willing to bet on the longevity of the digital copies. As for album artwork and liner notes...there really hasn't been much effort put in to those in years so the labels have managed to reduce the desire for those on their own. I still buy the occasional CD but the first thing I do is rip them and then put the original on a shelf to collect dust.
a CD manufacturing plant in a country with an actual working EPA is far, far better for the environment than the toxic waste dump that we are creating in China right now,where environmental activists get thrown in prison as 'enemies of the state'. . Thats what we do to make all of these iphones, ipads, iwhatever, which seem to get thrown out every 2 years for the 'new generation'. Close your eyes, stick your head in the sand, pretend that magic fairys give you printed circuit boards. also, where do you think the energy comes from to power the servers for downloads? it ain't some wind farm. i don't see any "renewable offset purchasing" logo on the apple istore. that 'clean tech' is powered by dirty, dirty coal dug out from the innards of a mountain and burned in a giant plant that pours smoke into the air
That's nothing. AOL mailed out at least 20 million per month.
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Maybe not exactly surprised, more dismayed. If something only has say 3 years "sales life" but the copyright on it lasts for some 90 years, that's dismaying.
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Good riddance!
The most reliable storage media is still magnetic tape.
Incidentally my 10.5in reel mp3 player needs a new backpack...
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No more Sony dumping their byproducts into our ecosystem, its a win-win
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It's a staggering amount for a single factory - enough to supply AOL for about three days!
No sig today...
Let's cite the impact of producing less plastic items! I understand people worked there; still, people can be retrained (I suggest, to work in solar/wind manufacturing plants)... CD plastic, however, represents raped biodiversity; something we all rely on.
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That's how it is, in a Post-2005-Rootkit World, the world will never be the same ever again.
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The plant which is closing is in Pitman, NJ. The article never bothered to mention which plant. Whatever happened to the basics of reporting - who/what/where/why/when?
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Yes, instead we've replaced it with the 6 month cycle of ever increasing CPU transistor count, more memory, "smart" phones, LCD TV, hard drives, etc that are required to play these "digital" downloads. (CDs are digital too).
And of course, as soon as something's wrong, or it looks obsolete, toss the whole thing in the garbage and expect the global oil-powered economy to deliver a new system to your door. Wow, so green!
The worker to production unit ratio is never a measure of anything important anyhow. It isn't a great loss, as you stated, but it isn't a great point either.
Well there will always be a small demand in the future for CD's. They still occasionally sell buggy whips, player pianos, and Model-T windshields too.
Hey Slashdot, why do you let these schills come here to make money from you?
Submitted by... Coondoggie. The blog this links to is run by Michael Cooney. Hmmmm.
Well Mr. Cooney, just as the comments on your ad-revenue blog say, you have failed to mention the location of the plant. Then instead of providing us with the link to your "source", you link us to your site to generate hits.
You sir, are a hack.
Here's the actual news story:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/homepage/20110112_Sony_will_close_South_Jersey_CD_plant.html
I'm not sure this is the most effective use of condescending quote marks. Usually when you use those, it is to imply that the thing in quotes is false, not that the thing in quotes is true elsewhere also.
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This is part of the reason I switched to using a netbook for work and play. To prove that I don't need to take part in at least part of this cycle. Too many people upgrade simply to have the newest or most powerful thing they can have, rather than realising their 5 year old laptop or whatever is actually still a capable machine (especially if you get rid of Windows).
which is totally what she said
I predict that they will be sought after, much like vinyl records are today, and with much the same rationale. The difference is, this time they'll be right.
Don't get me wrong: I love vinyl records, but I like them for being vinyl records. I don't make any specious claim that they sound better.
I do, however claim that, with the exception of some FLAC downloads, CDs sound better than digital downloads. Of course, the real question is whether or not it matters, or if MP3 and other lossy codecs are "good enough". It's up to the end user to make that call.
www.wavefront-av.com
So, to prove you won't just buy another machine...you bought another machine. How's that again?
Is it possible to buy music online without lossy compression? On the basis of my admittedly limited search, on-line music all seems to be compressed using lossy algorithms. CDs (jazz, classical, fine recordings, etc.) provide such uncompressed/lossless source.
I'd like to have archival quality for the source music. Also, when playing discretely instrumented classical music on a good hi-fi, compression artifacts are sometimes noticeable.
So Sony promised us that when production ramps up prices on CDs would drop. Since this really didn't happen, now that production is ramping down will prices go down?
I'm only 22 and I prefer CDs at this point because they are Lossless and DRM-free. Though if digital distribution can provide me with lossless and DRM-free tracks I would not have a problem using that method.
Though I usually buy used CDs off places like Amazon for about $5 a disk so I also believe digital distribution needs to be cheaper as well as better quality if I am to start using it.
The plastic really is a waste seeing as I generally rip that CD to my server once and then never use the physical disk again.
Alas, like LPs, we get into things like the loudness war. For example, the original song when first put out in the late 90s had good range and fidelity, the rereleased version in 2003 is overly compressed garbage compared to the former...
The CDs are at least a vast improvement on vinyl in this and various other regards.
I rip in FLAC instead of MP3 like memojuez - as it's hard to find non-lossy legal downloads for many things, this is at least a minor reason
A lot of my digital collection consists of CDs I borrowed from others; that combined with some downloads means that my aversion to non-physical media is decreasing somewhat.
Though I mostly listen to the digital collection, some of the physical discs get pulled out fairly often
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
That's fucking crazy. 18M per CD per month? I think you meant 18M CD/Month
Personally I find the price of a digital download (around $10) to not be much of a gain over just buying the physical CD for $10 to $15. With a CD I have a physical backup of the CD should my computer ever crash. I realize that I could probably just make backups of my downloaded music (which I already do), but I feel a bit more at ease having the original CD.
I also like having the Album Art sleeve when I buy a CD. I know that some digital downloads allow you also download the album art but my crappy printer is nowhere as nice as the one that comes with the CD.
I guess when I spend $10-$15 dollars on a physical CD I actually feel like the product I bought was worth that amount whereas a digital download, I don't feel is worth $10 for what I'm getting. The price, imo, for a digital download would need to be around $5 for the trade offs to be worth my money.
So far, I've really only used iTunes to purchase music when it's something really rare that I can't find elsewhere or if it's something that I want to listen to immediately. Otherwise, I'm happy ordering from Amazon and enjoying their free shipping.
I guess Sony root kits aren't selling as well these days.
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Though Vinyl often does sound better, but not because it's vinyl.
Vinyl typically uses a different mastering of the audio with much less dynamic range compression and thus sounds much more dynamic. If they would simply put these "better" masterings on CDs or in digital downloads more people would be willing to switch from vinyl.
Or perhaps a better solution. Since its digital why not offer both masterings so the user can choose the sound they like more. Though I can't believe anyone would knowingly choose the dynamic range compressed copies given the choice.
Where is the comment from the RIAA about music pirates causing this?!?
The RIAA has missed an opportunity to spew more of their rhetoric.
Could always consider dropping the price to something resembling the cost of duplication + reasonable markup. But oh no, they would rather die.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Heh. No, it was more to prove I could be more mature and get by with a low power (in both senses of the words) machine. It wasn't primarily an environmental statement. The annoying fan whine that a lot of laptops have was also a factor, it's nice to have a silent machine.
I also wanted to test how feasible it would be for some of our staff to do their work on such a cheap and low spec machine, especially the offshore guys who often lose or damage their laptops and need a replacement. So it made sense overall.
which is totally what she said
Maybe AOL has decided to cut back.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So is this the infamous Sony DADC plant that was a prime source of laserdiscs with Laser Rot problems?
If so, then good riddance.
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But, I bet I buy more CDs than most huge music fans. I have friends who brag about having not bought music in 5-10 years. Take the compensation out of the market and you end up with corporate factory musicians backed by accountants. Buy those CDs either at the concerts or in the stores and keep the music industry strong.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Kind of glad I didn't. I know a bunch of people who will be out of work now.
They failed to understand the mythical CD-Month. When will managers ever learn you can't just keep throwing more optical disks at a task and expect to get it done faster.
When I buy a CD, I rip it once and afterwards stow it away in a box. Then I listen to the music on my PC and my DAP anyway.
With or without CDs there will be new mobile gadgets and for some more time PCs even. But those old school PCs will be replaced sooner or later, too. Devices get smaller and they do get more environmental friendly, so why still produce CDs if no-one except some nostalgia freaks need them? You could ask the same thing about PCs once SoC-Devices become as poweful as full-blown dekstop PCs and still get the same answer: no-one needs them anymore.
I'm surprised no on has connected the dots yet, but ever since the downfall of AOL this plants ultimate demise has been as predictable as the tides.
That's actually awesome. 300 workers have been displaced to go send their resumés around and find a better job, making more money or taking a senior position in manufacturing or management with their decade of experience.
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5 year old laptop or whatever is actually still a capable machine (especially if you get rid of Windows).
He's a member of the Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society. Built to last, the future is the past.
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Isn't the CD a digital music format or has 16bit LPCM been reclassified as analogue?
Why is the business decision always close or keep open? Why doesn't Sony try to re-invent its CD division as a contract service for other small labels who cannot afford their own plant or, depending on the flexibility of their equipment, a low cost place to have your band's CD created? I mean. after 1988 they have to have most of those equipment assets fully depreciated and paid off, so they can probably afford to operate it at a steep discount.
More importantly, a CD is a token of ownership and is something that can be "excluded" or transfered by the end user.
Any other form of "ownership" is either a glorified rental or effectively unverifiable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...was that it must be an old RCA plant and it's annoying to see it go.
i drive through this plant everyday while going to work. their parking lot is always full. really feel bad for the people who worked there. but this is the life for people like us who are engineers and develop technology. the fact is "it get better and will ultimately replace the primitives".
Yah, that is so cool! I'm sure every one of them has credentials for senior positions. And with the current economy and competing with their fired coworkers I bet there are 300 great jobs just waiting for them.
"Hi, I operated a cd making machine for 10 years."
"Ummm, no one is making cds anymore. Next."
If they could make more many just switching by jobs don't you think they would have before this? When I got laid off it took a year to find a job after intense effort and then it was only with a substantial pay cut.
I'm not saying they should keep the plant open just to keep paying them but don't make it sound so pollyannaish, like it's a good thing.
Yes, instead we've replaced it with the 6 month cycle of ever increasing CPU transistor count, more memory, "smart" phones, LCD TV, hard drives, etc that are required to play these "digital" downloads. (CDs are digital too).
So let me get this right, you replaced your 6 month old computer...hell, let's say you replaced your 5 YEAR old computer, solely because it wouldn't play the "new music"? I'm pretty sure that any Pentium 4 CPU is already many times the power needed to play music. (I played music on a 486 w/4mb ram, and had power to spare). Even allowing for decoding MP3s, any Pentium 4 would still be overkill for the purpose.
Maybe, just maybe, people are upgrading their computers for reasons other than solely to play music.
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Not exactly. I binned my Amiga. But I also know the gaming system I built 6-7 years ago is far more powerful than the netbook that does me fine from day to day.
which is totally what she said
I can appreciate the arguments that CDs may be wasteful to manufacture, however this is a real disappointment to me. Granted, the music industry often does a poor job recording music but it's still far superior to the crap we get with MP3s, ACC and other formats. I notice a difference even at 256 kbps; music just doesn't sound as crisp, like it's faintly muffled.
I'm convinced that people who claim they can't hear a difference simply aren't paying attention. I'd say the difference from 256kbps ACC to CD is greater than from CD to SACD or DVD audio. A study has shown that with either of those formats audio has to be uncomfortably loud for people to start noticing the difference. But with MP3s and whatnot all you need is to run the music through some decent speakers or headphones.
On the other hand, I can appreciate the convenience. I import my CDs into iTunes so that I have my music available in my car and at the office. But therein lies another major problem. With CDs I have the freedom to make as many copies as I like for any device I choose. With digital downloads I'm chained to wherever I purchased the music and I have far less flexibility with where I can enjoy that music.
For most people, however, this is certainly a situation where convenience has trumped quality.
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I wondered what studman69 was up to these days.
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good blog and opinion buth wrong forum !
please try at some other place
...that I might not need. Youtube, Last.Fm referrals, and music blogs keep me well-informed about what music I might enjoy. People say to support your local music store, but really - CDs just don't need that hands-on "test-drive feel before a purchase like headphones and such do. I go to my local store to buy CDs at the discount bin and root serendipitously through to find something I might like. Everything else - rarer stuff, which is more and more what I buy these days (Klaus Schulze, e.g.), I can just order off a website megastore that has it in stock. No need to look at the CD before purchase - I know what I will look like.
My laptop is almost 10 years old (700 megahertz Pentium something). I recycled it from an ebayer. I've got you beat. ;-)
I will miss CDs. They have superior (lossless) quality over the digital downloads. After all these years of companies trying to move from lesser-to-better music technology (records, cassettes, CD, Surround Sound), it turns out what people really wanted was 10,000 songs to fit inside a small box, even if those songs are incomplete (lost sound). The average person didn't care about quality at all.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As much as I hate Sony and the general music industry this actually just a CD factory.
I find it sad for the employees who took technical pride in making the CDs, regardless of their contents.
I played music on a 68000/7 Mhz and 512K RAM. Unfortunately it was only 8 bit sound (C= Amiga) but it was still music. Still enjoyable. And impressive for 1985.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Nothing to stop you from downloading lossless audio files, and such files could easily be made available which were far superior in quality to a standard CD.
But as you point out, once you reach "good enough" then convenience and/or cheapness will trump quality. Most people listen to their music on extremely lousy equipment anyway, so the difference between compressed and uncompressed is often irrelevant in many cases.
But the real reason for closing the plant is because sony want to sell the same music, at a lower quality, but for the same price (Despite the massively lower production costs - ie no need to run factories like this).
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My CD rips have been lossless since I got a 1TB drive.
I've been "working" hard at it for a year, and still have filled only a couple hundred gigs, most of *that* not even audio.
Some of the old rips in 128kbps I've even bothered to redo if I still have the disc handy.
(It seemed kind of ironic to have longterm-favorite classics in 128 and recently acquired modern stuff in FLAC)
I notice a fairly big difference going from 128 to 256. From 256 to 320 or lossless, it's not quite as pronounced.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
... at that plant (I used to live nearby) was in Quality Control. They would hire people to listen to the Golden Master CDs for defects before mass producing the CDs from the master. People would line up around the block when they had those openings. The pay wasn't great, but where else could you listen to unreleased music all day and get paid for it?
I never heard of that static-image "video" trick being used off of YouTube. :)
Anyway, can't FLAC be used for higher than 16-bit/44100? (I have one of my favorite modern albums in a 24-bit/44100 release by the artist, and I've heard of yet higher FLAC resolutions)
You make a point about the recording job - that's step 1 - a bad job can't be salvaged by a good format, and a good job is still very listenable even in a bad format.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Wells Fargo has announced the closing of its horse buggy factory
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Even new, buying CDs on Amazon is very price-competitive, especially if you have Prime's free shipping.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Manufacturing/distribution is an important component of the price of a CD, yes, but it's not the only cost.
For instance, the few bucks that the actual creatives (musicians, songwriters, producers, et cetera) actually get has to come from somewhere. :P
Record labels may well take too much of a cut, yes, but they ought to get something if the artist finds them useful.
(I wonder how the retailer cut compares for CD sellers versus legal-download sites.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
You might happen to like only a couple songs even if the artist's good; it's not entirely limited to the "good single + album filler" artists. There are several bands where I dig the greatest hits album but haven't gotten further.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
agreed - digital album downloads seem to be one of many cases, music and otherwise, where isn't worth the trouble to try and save a couple bucks.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
another ones bites the dust.. digital downloads are changing the scenario all togather for biggies like Sony and its time they change and start riding the wave.
Thanks to AOL for requiring this humongous amount of CDs when they used to spam every single one of us in our snail mailbox with registration CDs.
...but couldn't they re-tool or something to produce CD-R's, or maybe DVD-R's? Maybe re-tool half of the plant, keeping half in production for the reduced volume of regular CD's?
Admittedly, I have no idea how much the processes differ, or whether it would even be possible, but it seems to me that this would be less wasteful than just tanking the entire setup... After all, as online sales go up, CD-R and DVD-R sales *should* rise as well if the current generation cares about backing up their media at all. They'd probably have to drop the 'Sony Tax' on their burnable media pricing to actually see a portion of that pie, however...
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No, I was trying to point out that people using "digital" in the sense of DOWNLOADING are so stupid they don't even see that it can't be anything else BUT digital, and that CDs are digital too. Were there ever analog downloads? Does anyone ever say "Hey I wastch DIGITAL video now!" "Hey, I read DIGITAL text now" when they download books?
Basically if it has the name of Saunders on it you know that it is the crap of which you speak.
You're referring to Sauder Woodworking, correct?
They'll close their pet dinosaur food shops?
Non-DRMed, but still lossy.
Here's a hint: Everything is lossy. CDs are lossy; they have only about 93 dB of SNR and lose all audio above 22 kHz. So I settle for the smallest representation of the recording where I can't tell the difference from the original. And in mobile listening environments, even 96 kbps Vorbis qualifies.
And prices are generally low enough that a lot of folks wouldn't even balk at re-purchasing something if they lost the file.
Unless the work has been taken out of print. The Walt Disney Company does this routinely.
Have you ABX-tested 256 kbit AAC against a plain uncompressed rip of a CD?
I still prefer a cd as it will last for 20 or 30 years and I can rip it to any format I want.
"In other news... Sony have planned further plant closures to focus on a more competitive online music digital delivery system to combat a growing piracy problem. A company source has leaked Sony plans to allow customers to download INDIVIDUAL songs at only $5.00 each. The "OMDDS" website is rumoured to be ready for go live in Summer 2014. Sony were unavailable for official comment, however industry insiders have told us internal Sony market research indicates a possible change in customer desire for more flexibility in their music purchases."
I had a job offer at the newly minted Sony CD plant in Eugene, OR right after college...something told me that I wouldn't have been there for the long haul, so I didn't take it. Got laid of from Symantec instead, but got rehired as soon as demand for anti-virus stuff spiked correlating with the release of Win95 ;-)
Worldwide, over 21.5 billion jobs have been lost due to piracy. PIracy is the reason that everyone in the world is homeless and starving.
>>>Nothing to stop you from downloading lossless audio files
From where? iTunes doesn't sell them and I'm not aware of anybody who does. Once CDs are dead, lossless files will be impossible to get.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yes.
The CD has surround-sound encoding which the 256k AAC lacks.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Ouch, the curse of having good ears. To me, 112k mp3 sounds terrible but it quickly becomes transparent at higher bitrates.
For me, it's the eyes that are the problem: I'm thankful for the end of CRTs as computer monitors. No more 60hz refresh rates to explode my brain.
a CD making machine is 90% identical to a blu-ray making machine.
well, not single machines, but lines of different ones.
you'd be shocked at how lo-tech the principles of it are. it's just a matter of tighter tolerances on each denser generation of media, but it's all make the same way with tweaks.
I still use CD's for smaller amounts of data storage (when I want something distinct from everything else, and there isn't enough stuff to waste a DVD). CD's are also good if you lose your MP3 collection, although DVD's hold a lot more MP3's than a CD.
Troll? Or have you never been laid off in an economy with a 10% unemployment rate.
Interestingly enough Sony has not closed any of its Japanese factories for any kind of media lately. Just goes to show that no matter where you are, it is better politically to protect your domestic labor force.
very rarely you will see a download release that is better than the CD
Actually, it appears to be fairly common for the level compression on keysounded rhythm games (Beatmania, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Rock Band) not to be as intense as that on Compact Disc Digital Audio and MP3 releases. See, for example, Guitar Hero: Metallica . This follows from the fact that the game consoles don't perform compression on the mixed output.
There is no longer a need for CDs. Check this absolutely remarkable device that Sony has created for this purpose!
I'm not sure how much of an analogy can be drawn between very different industries, but I'll expand upon the Coca-Cola example.
Looking at their investor documents, they spent about $3 billion on advertising , out of about $30 billion revenue, or out of about $20 billion after cost of goods sold.
http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/investors/pdfs/10-K_2009/12_Coca-Cola_Item8.pdf
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The only advantage digital music downloads have is in the ability to purchase single tracks
And that's the big one. When making a mix CD for my grandmother, I don't want to have to buy the whole album for each track that she requests.
There is a big difference between having a specified noise floor/frequency response and lossy compression.
Converting 96 kHz 24-bit PCM to 44.1 kHz 16-bit (Red Book spec) PCM is a data reduction method that preserves some perceivable components of the signal. Therefore, it counts as lossy compression, as I understand the lead of the Wikipedia article. From later in the article: "A general kind of lossy compression is to lower the resolution of an image, as in image scaling, particularly decimation." Conversion among sampling rates even introduces generation loss as the interpolated samples are requantized each time. But I do understand that conversion to Red Book spec is transparent to most listeners' ears (including mine) and is therefore OK.
The article you linked only mentions compression in the context of volume compression.
The second half is about level compression. The first half is about choice of sampling rate and depth, which fits the definition of lossy compression as I mention above. Is there a more widely used definition?
The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years
^in Pitman NJ,
was that so hard?
the tech industry is not green. it never has been green. if you want to make it green, you have to deal with reality.
What makes you think that downloading is greener?
But stupid record labels are killing the media using ancient business models and really bad business skills.
Most labels sit on a valuable back catalog, and surprisingly many just let it sit there. No re-issues. So, if you discover a new band, chances are that you might be able to find the latest release in your local record store, maybe one more title as well. Sometimes an online store might sit on an additional title. The rest? - Well, you're out of luck. That is... until you Google for it. Pirated copies are usually available on the net of every title ever released. So people end up downloading illegally - because they have no choice. They simply have no way of paying for it.
There's also the issue of geo-discrimination, i.e. releasing stuff in one territory only. The issue is less of a bother with physical media because you can buy it over the net and have it shipped. But electronic-only releases? - You're out of luck. For instance, I wanted a certain EP that was released electronic-only and only in the US. I can see it in iTunes but cannot buy it because I'm in the wrong country. It's been two years now but it's still not out anywhere else. It's a Christmas thing so every year in November or December (2008 and 2009) I searched for it unsuccessfully, but this year (2010) I found it pirated and grabbed it. The artist is on twitter so I asked her how I could compensate her and instead of me sending her a dollar (about twice what she'd get from a sale) she suggested sending the money to 'her' charity which I did. I actually sent ten dollars because one dollar is rather pathetic. So the biggest loser is... the label. They didn't want the sale and so they didn't get it. Kinda stupid business practice, huh?
But new titles also often end up being pirated, here mostly due to the stupid practice of 'boosting' through prereleasing new titles weeks or months in advance to radio stations and reviewers. The idea is to create a 'feeding frenzy' leading up to the general release so that it'll sell massively in the first few days, sending it to the top of the sales charts, something that often leads to even more sales. It used to work but today people won't wait. The hits quickly gets recorded or copied and put online, and people don't have to wait for the general release. They can just grab it (illegally) off the net and that's what they do. Then they listen to the track again and again until they tire of it. Some time later, the song gets released officially and nobody buys it because they've all 'been there, done that'. Then the label cry "piracy kills the business!" and shut down CD plants. But it's the prerelease concept that's killing the business. Piracy just fills the void where the labels fail.
But give me a CD any day. I love the physical media. But I usually already have the music when I buy the CD - because I've also downloaded it days/weeks prior to the general release, usually to test it, but also because I grow tired of waiting.
Oh, and listening posts at the record shops are also going out of fashion; the only way to 'test' an album before buying is to either listen to super-crappy worse-than-a-bad-phone-connection 30-second samples of unrepresentative parts of the songs online, or to download a full pirated copy from the net. Guess what most people choose to do? - Right. There's really no choice. Again the labels have an epic fail because most people don't bother buying it afterwards (I do though but it's because I'm conscious about it).
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Said 20$ per 20 or so musics is not going to go off the price of said musics, though - it's just going to add a bit of extra lining to some already fat pockets.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
At 18 million months per CD, I am not surprised that they needed to shut it down.
But then, I don't expect much in ways of actual submission quality by someone spamming slashdot with his personal blog so he can make money: http://slashdot.org/~coondoggie/submissions
My most recent upgrade (from a Sempron 3000 with an ATI 9600Pro) was to be able to play 1080p h.264 encoded music videos without stuttering. Funny enough, that computer came about because a K6-2 just wasn't good enough to handle DVD quality Xvid/DivX music video files. And the K6-2 came about because the 6x86 I had before it sucked at playing MP3's (terrible FPU on those chips).
Now I'm waiting to see what a Phenom II X4 can't handle.