Are Music CDs Dying? Best Buy Stops Selling CDs (complex.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Complex magazine: The future of physical music isn't looking good. According to Billboard, consumer electronics company Best Buy will no longer carry physical CDs and Target may be following suit in the near future. Best Buy notified music suppliers that they will cease selling CDs at stores beginning July 1. The move is sure to hurt the already declining sales of CDs as consumers are switching to streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal in large numbers. CD sales have already dropped by a sizable 18.5 percent in the past year, Billboard reports.
Billboard also reports Target has given an "ultimatum" to music and video suppliers. "Currently, Target takes the inventory risk by agreeing to pay for any goods it is shipped within 60 days, and must pay to ship back unsold CDs for credit... Target has demanded to music suppliers that it wants CDs to be sold on what amounts to a consignment basis..."

"If the majors don't play ball and give in to the new sale terms, it could considerably hasten the phase down of the CD format."

Comments

Last DRM free media

[jawtheshark]

Last DRM free media: there are music executives opening bottles of champagne...

Re:Last DRM free media

[cayenne8]

just have no need to drive to a store to hope they have a CD I want and pay more for. I'll buy on-line. I don't need to hold it in my hand before purchasing. I'll buy on line.

Yeah, I tend to buy online too....BUT I don't want to see CDs go away....

How else will I get my music in a DRM free, lossless format?

Streaming just doesn't provide high enough quality for my home stereo system, which I've built over the years for real listening times.

mp3's are fine for the gym or car which provide horrible listening environments, but for my good system when I want to really sit and listen and enjoy....I want that higher quality format.

Re: Last DRM free media

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically CDs have DRM itâ(TM)s just shitty and horribly broken, and old enough the DCMA can't be used to prevent ripping.

And while itâ(TM)s a "lossless" format, itâ(TM)s also got a limit in terms of audio fidelity. Audiophiles already prefer other mediums which allow for a much greater depth of sound, and there are digital formats which are not DRM encumbered.

Since laptops and new computers does not...

[MindPrison]

...come with a CD drive anymore, this is to be expected.

Let's face it, you don't see anyone with a CD (Discman) anymore, unless it's the obscure retro-freak that just likes to show off old toys (like me), but seriously - most people have their music on their cellphone today, just look at all the hi-fi equipment in the store, those that are regularly sold - has a "iPhone" or some other cellphone docking feature to them. At the very least - their own streaming services and possibilities.

It's just an impractical format today. It had 30 good years, now it's all memory - literally. CD is dead - long live the CD

Even Blu-ray kinda died because of that, no one wants that clunky old format when you can store it all on an harddisk or simply stream it from the cloud. I gotta say - I do miss collecting DVD's for the sake of always having a hardcopy of my favorite movies, and yes - I still do have them, and a few players just in case they're unavailable in the future.

There's both a good and bad side to this. I like services like Netflix where you can basically just browse trough a huge library of movies, no need to physically find them there and then, and just select it for viewing here and wherever I want to play them. It's very convenient, especially when it's AD free. It's not even expensive for that kind of access.

What is sad tho, is that they can remove our favorite movies at will, some months these movies just aren't available, in cases like that - a good private collection can't be beat.

As for music CD's, since we have perfectly good streaming services available, with pretty much every tune on the planet available on those services, the CD as a musical medium is pretty much gone.

Re:Since laptops and new computers does not...

[geekmux]

...come with a CD drive anymore, this is to be expected.

Let's face it, you don't see anyone with a CD (Discman) anymore, unless it's the obscure retro-freak that just likes to show off old toys (like me), but seriously - most people have their music on their cellphone today, just look at all the hi-fi equipment in the store, those that are regularly sold - has a "iPhone" or some other cellphone docking feature to them. At the very least - their own streaming services and possibilities.

It's just an impractical format today. It had 30 good years, now it's all memory - literally. CD is dead - long live the CD

Even Blu-ray kinda died because of that, no one wants that clunky old format when you can store it all on an harddisk or simply stream it from the cloud. I gotta say - I do miss collecting DVD's for the sake of always having a hardcopy of my favorite movies, and yes - I still do have them, and a few players just in case they're unavailable in the future.

There's both a good and bad side to this. I like services like Netflix where you can basically just browse trough a huge library of movies, no need to physically find them there and then, and just select it for viewing here and wherever I want to play them. It's very convenient, especially when it's AD free. It's not even expensive for that kind of access.

What is sad tho, is that they can remove our favorite movies at will, some months these movies just aren't available, in cases like that - a good private collection can't be beat.

As for music CD's, since we have perfectly good streaming services available, with pretty much every tune on the planet available on those services, the CD as a musical medium is pretty much gone.

Let me sum up what all of this really means.

No one likes privacy anymore. The only people who want to watch or listen to their form of entertainment while not being tracked, profiled, packaged and sold are those retro-freaks who still care about privacy and maintaining the concept of ownership.

And "not expensive"? The death of physical medium is just another cut out of 1,000 cuts. In the end, this will be converted to yet another monthly rental cost that you will be forced to pay in order to access another form of entertainment. $9.99/month is cheap, right up until you realize you're paying that out to a dozen content owners every month.

Re:Since laptops and new computers does not...

[JaredOfEuropa]

DVD's and Blurays are still convenient for stuff (especially series) that aren't available on streaming services here. But that's more of a shortcoming of the streaming services... or rather, of the outdated regional licensing model. And that's where we need to go back to our (Dutch) old law: pirating content was allowed if there was no reasonable legal way to obtain it. "Reasonable" meaning on prevailing formats at comparable prices and conditions. Not selling your content here or holding out? Too bad, citizens may avail themselves of the material as they please. Now I don't condone piracy, but I do think it is a legitimate form of pressure on distributors to get their act together.

Re:Since laptops and new computers does not...

[nine-times]

No one likes privacy anymore.

Plenty of people still like privacy. There's a big difference between, "I don't care if a particular company knows what music I listen to," and "I don't care if my emails are public."

If you buy your MP3s from Amazon or you buy the physical CDs from Amazon, they still know what music you own. The medium doesn't make a big difference in that case. Even when people bought their albums at brick-and-mortar stores, going to the same Tower Records and buying CDs with your credit card meant that the store could be tracking what music you'd purchased. People weren't only paying in cash or avoiding patronizing the same store twice out of fear that the store might compile a list of what albums they owned. People didn't care.

And that's all it is. People don't care if Amazon or Apple or Spotify know what music they like. They want those services to know, in fact, because one of the services they offer is music recommendation-- if they know what music you like, they can tell you what other music you might like. But there's still a wide chasm between that and "not liking privacy".

Re: Since laptops and new computers does not...

[Miamicanes]

And for approximately $25, you can buy a USB3.0 BD-ROM + DVD+/-RW drive the approximate size of a CD jewelbox that can also do CD-R(W).

You don't buy CDs to listen to directly... you buy them to get a clean source that can't be arbitrarily taken away from you {n} years from now because some company decided that "for life" means "the life of our product, as we define it" (e.g., Zune), shuts down their DRM servers, and leaves you with either nothing at all, or (at best) one final, fragile copy that'll be gone forever when the shit electrolytic capacitors (or glued-in battery) dies 2 or 3 years later.

This past Christmas, I spent a day playing with my old C64 & Vic-20. Both worked perfectly, and so did my old 1702 monitor. My old Odyssey2 (Videopac, in Europe) and RCA Studio II worked, too. It was a sobering experience when it sank in that there's probably not a single goddamn computer or game console you could buy today, put (shrinkwrapped) in a closet for ~35 years, and have ANY reasonable hope that it will actually WORK (and be usable "for real") when you power it up for the first time. Even a goddamn Nintendo 3DS refuses to let you do anything with most games until it connects to the internet & updates... once Nintendo shuts the servers down someday (like they're doing with the Wii's e-store this year), bye-bye system. Try doing anything useful with a Logitech Revue, a Zune, or a "WMV-HD" disc from ~10 years ago (Microsoft shut down their DRM servers & said 'fuck you' to customers, so they're now unplayable). This is why I'll NEVER spend money on full-priced content tied to Microsoft devices or services again, and why Google will probably never convince me to take their future media devices seriously. I'll throw down $7.99 for a used game, maybe, but never more than $29.99 (very rarely, more than $19.99), because I now assume anything I buy will be taken away 3-5 years from now & devalue it accordingly.

Just another cut out of 1,000.

[geekmux]

Unfortunately, there are some of us who despise renting access to music via (yet another) never-ending subscription, and don't wish to have our entire listening activities measured, tracked, profiled, and sold to any bidder, which is exactly what happens with every other form of digital music. This is just another cut out of 1,000, leading to the Death of Privacy.

I do find it odd that we managed to bring back to life a medium that people now pay 3x what it should cost, and often with no ability to play it (vinyl), and yet we're talking about killing CDs.

Re:Good

[geekmux]

Music CDs is like the Floppy disc, who buys that crap other than a few hardcore dedicated fans.

Privacy is like ownership, who buys into that crap other than a few hardcore dedicated fans.

The owner overlords in the world are celebrating yet another win. They're going to make trillions with this infectious attitude towards renting everything, along with selling your every click.

The ownership model

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one good reason to always buy physical media - it can be transferred.

I can rip my own MP3s, move them from device to device, and leave the original media to my children. When people subscribe to music services, they lose all of these rights that come with ownership.

Re:Perhaps It Is Time For A Physical Replacement

[nine-times]

That totally makes sense. If you really want physical media, CDs are pretty outdated. These days, you can fit an entire collection with several hundred albums on a single micro-SD card. And that's with a lossless codec. CDs are a waste of material and space.

Part of the appeal of CDs once upon a time was that they would last a long time. They scratch easily, but if you took care of them, they were supposed to last hundreds of years. However, things didn't really work that way. Instead the industry made cheaper CDs that only lasted a handful of years.

If we were going to stick with physical media, it'd be nice if someone were to produce a standard for cheap, compact, durable, long-lasting media that would be suitable for archival purposes. It seems to me that ideally there would be no moving parts, but also no physical connectors to wear out or break. Having enormous capacity and quick write speeds could take a back seat to redundancy and durability.

Basically, if I'm going to pay for data on a physical medium, I want a medium that you could throw out the window of a moving car, go swimming with it in your pocket, or just stick it in a drawer for 20 years, and still have a reasonable expectation that it wouldn't lose a bit of data.

There are lots of places

[rsilvergun]

to get DRM free MP3s. eMusic comes to mind. Hell, didn't Apple remove DRM? They might have added it back. And besides, CDs aren't going away, but you won't be able to buy them at Best Buy, Target and Walmart. Good. That'll drive people to independent record stores and to concerts. Folks still want physical media. If only for the collectability. Hell, it probably won't even raise prices given the amount of profit built into a CD.

Physical media is useful for libraries

[rjnagle]

I hear you that cds are a technology past its due date.

But public libraries can buy, store and lend physical media easily and not have to deal with DRM or licensing restrictions.

Patrons can check out CDs and then decide to rip from them in the privacy of their own homes. Totally legal too.

Ironically, the ripping habit (which I admit I have) leads me to buy a lot of digital music that I never would have learned about otherwise.

Even if CDs stopped being sold tomorrow, there are still lots of indie/fringe CDs out there which aren't being sold digitally anywhere. Don't believe me? Go to a garage sale or used CD/DVD store and count the number of CDs still unknown to most of the musical world.....

There are still music stores, screw BB

[Rick Schumann]

There are still music stores around, they sell CDs, why would you go to Best Buy for that anyway?

However I have been and will continue to be of the opinion that all of you who pay for 'streaming' services are fools. You're encouraging a world where you OWN NOTHING. It's not just media, if you haven't noticed: Barriers to owning a home, and not just financial; things like HOAs making it difficult to impossible for the average person. Car 'leasing' instead of purchasing (and you're still paying for maintenance). Shit companies like Microsoft, pushing 'subscriptions' instead of letting you own a copy of software. And so on. Don't deny it's happening like so many of you deny so many other things that you said would never happen, only to find a few years later they did.