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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the stores-vs-storage-media dept.

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."

7 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Last DRM free media by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I 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.

    But I tend to buy used CDs, rip and stash. So I'm only only indirect support for the new CD market.

  2. Heh, not in Japan... by theNetImp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That really depends on where in the world you're talking about. It still thrives in Japan because people still want the psychical medial . We still have Tower Records here and CD rentals as well.

  3. Its the content, stupid! by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The reason CD sales are declining is cos because most of the content is rubbish. People are not going to buy music, if, after listening to it once, they never want to hear it again. If you look at the comments on Youtube, the 50's and 60's music gets tons of comments saying "This is amazing - I which I had been around in those days" while the new stuff has loads of views but few comments.

    Personally, I go to lots of live stuff instead of buying crap CDs that die quick.

    --
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    1. Re:Its the content, stupid! by gtall · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Maybe I'm an old timer, but I think part of the reason for the decline in modern music is the insistence by the media companies of the solo artist, and I use the term "artist" quite loosely. A band has several personalities and they contributed to a more interesting form of music because of the different takes they had on their instruments. Modern solo artists are mainly backed by machine, who cares about machines. A band like Deep Purple (only finally finishing up, by the way, albeit with personnel changes) were masters of their instruments. Not all the old groups who lasted should have, the Rolling Stones are still a garage band.

      Even solo artists were better back in the 60's. Take someone like Sammy Davis, Jr. He could dance, sing, well he wasn't a great actor but he could get by, he played drums, he could play piano. He was a multi-talented person who was interesting because of it. Now we have Lady Gaga...who can, well I'm sure she does something, and I even like one of her songs. But she's basically boring. Any of the hip-hop "artists" are interchangeable, singing the same rhyming verse of something we are to take to be social commentary. Nothing special, it had been done to death 20 years ago.

      The only music mediums that are still interesting producing new music are progressive rock and jazz.

  4. Re:Last DRM free media = Online Radio by jenningsthecat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Streamtuner and Streamripper is the answer for music on USB memory sticks and SD cards. For the extremely lazy with 24/7 online capability, there is https://www.internet-radio.com...

    Sure - if you have tin ears and the crappy audio systems that usually go along with them. But some of us actually listen to music as a primary activity, rather than just having it on as party music or background noise. For that kind of listening, streaming quality just doesn't cut it.

    And for those of you who insist that 320K mp3's are indistinguishable from lossless, I can short-circuit that whole conversation with one word - "gapless". Unless the mp3 is a single file containing a whole album, then classical music, live albums, and other albums in which the music plays continuously across track boundaries, sound like shit no matter how good the inherent sound quality is. Flac files play as gapless, and mp3 files don't - unless you're talking about some cheesy crossfade that actually makes things worse. So for a lot of the music some of us listen to, mp3 would be unacceptable even if the inherent sound quality was indistinguishable from lossless.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  5. CD == cable bundle 500-channel universe by knorthern+knight · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The rock/pop music market was dominated into the late 1970's / early 1980's by kids buying "hit singles" on 45-rpm format, for approximately $1. Then the corporations got effing greedy and told you that you could only get the one popular track by paying $20 or $25 for a CD that had that track... plus a dozen other pieces of crap you didn't care about. "Music sales" cratered. Well... like... dohhhh. Let's blame piracy.

    It wasn't until Apple came out with 99-cent single tracks that music-buying picked up again, beacuse kids with limited allowances could buy a song, rather than having to purchase "the bundle".

    This is very similar to cable TV today. Try getting just your favourite channels, without paying for a bunch of crap that you don't want. That's the CD equivalant. Specialized streaming services are the equivalant of single tracks on Itunes or Google Play.

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
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  6. Last perpetual license by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unless something has changed recently, MP3 doesn't support DRM. In fact most of the audio sound formats I've encountered don't support DRM. It's not like the case with movies, where the "video file" format is actually a container containing a video file, audio file, subtitle files, chapter index, etc, and you can insert all sorts of funny ways and conditions to play it. Pretty much all the music audio file formats I've encountered are just straight audio files - compressed, but not encrypted.

    The bigger loss is that CDs, being a physical format, carried with them a perpetual license. You could bequeath your CD collection to your children upon your death. The license agreement terms for most online music/movie purchase services grant you a non-transferable license. That is, your "ownership" of the content you've "purchased" expires upon your death. The only way to allow your heirs to inherit your music or movie or ebook or game collection is to break the EULA and share your login and password with them before you expire.

    I expect this will be hashed out in court over the next 40 years, as the "loss" of a loved one's or relative's online media collection upon their death becomes more commonplace. People will challenge it, and the courts will have to decide if that's really how we want online "purchases" of copyrighted media to work. In the meantime, you can completely bypass the content industry's attempts to erode our ownership rights of things we've paid money for by purchasing CDs. (Or by pirating stuff - though "pirating" is probably not the right word when it's done to take back rights we should have had from the beginning.)