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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."
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."
Last DRM free media: there are music executives opening bottles of champagne...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
...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.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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.
Personally, I go to lots of live stuff instead of buying crap CDs that die quick.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
No, not another shiny disk. Perhaps retail store purchases of music albums, books, films, computer games and other digital content could come on a cheap-to-manufacture read-only memory (ROM) card that holds the relevant data and is about the size of an SD card, or larger, if that is cheaper to manufacture (data-density et cetera). You would get the feeling of "buying and owning something physical" that you can take home with you, loan to others, sell second-hand and so forth. But it would be a little ROM card, not a larger CD, DVD or Bluray disk that takes up a lot of shelf space and packaging. Of course you could just as easily put digital kiosks into a store that you insert a USB thumbdrive into to get your content data when you have paid for it. But a small ROM card would allow you to pick up the product, pay and leave like in the old days. It would also be kind of cool to collect such ROMs, like we used to collect floppies, especially if they are built to last - say - 50 years without losing the data. A major bonus would be PC and console game distribution in developing countries. Internet connections are seriously slow in developing countries, and many people have internet with a 25 - 50 GB a month data download cap. Downloading 30 - 50 GB games in such countries takes many hours - sometimes more than a day - and often results in blowing your monthly download cap, causing the ISP to throttle your internet speed until the beginning of the next month, leaving you with slow internet. So if somebody COULD make cheap ROMs that hold 20 - 30 GB of data a piece, game buyers in a lot of countries would definitely go for that. Another bonus could be games that don't require installing at all - just pop the ROM card into your laptop's card slot and play the game immediately. Steam downloads are horrendously painful if you have 2 - 8 MBPS internet only. ROMs would be a much quicker way to play the game you have bought. What would you rather do? Wait 22 hours for DOOM to download on a slow connection, or pop over to the local game store to get it on Mini-ROM, taking perhaps an hour and a half of your time? ROMs also solve the problem of buying an ever-growing quantity of digital content data for your home. After a few years of digital games, digital films, digital photos and smartphone video, you wind up having to keep Terabytes of data somewhere - on multiple USB harddrives for example. It might be neat to instead have a little plastic box with all your game, music, film, TV show and other ROMs in it, just as we used to have for Amiga disks or PC floppy disks for example. What you want on your PC, you copy from ROM. What you only access occasionally, you just keep in ROM form, and pop the ROM card in when needed.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
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.
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.
Considering the fact that our governments eavesdrops on us and can easily steal our property, I would say that yes, privacy and ownership are an illusion. Might as well get something in return, even if it is just a music rental service.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
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.
I've never met anyone this passionate about their floppy disc collection. You are a dying breed.
There is nothing quite like a good well-structured album. That's one of many things that is missing from the top 40 today. Artists make collections of songs. They don't make albums.
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WalMart is likely the targets CD retailer in the US (I saw likely as I cannot find hard data but they have been in the past IIRC) what they decide is likely to have a major impact on CDs in the US. At any rate, CD sales are declining along with overall album sales in any media. Digital represented about 505 of sales in 2016 vs. 34% for physical media. Of digital, 59% was streaming, the first time it was greater than 50% and drove the 18% increase in digital sales. It seems buyers are more interested in buying songs rather than albums in most cases; with album purchase dominated by older titles; which makes sense if you look t US retailers shelves you see a lot of older albums and a few new ones, mostly from big names.
What's old is new again, as buyers have streamed to single songs, harkening back to the old days of 45's.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
MP3s tend to have inferior sound quality to a CD. It is noticeable. The heavy compression throws out a lot of data. You have lossless formats such as FLAC or Wavpac which never caught on. Wavpack is nice because you can split the file into a lossy file you can copy to a device and an additional smaller file that contains additional data for lossless play. As others have mentioned the decline of CD has other problems relating to DRM. Will audiophiles keep CDs alive. Lets hope so.
There was a resurgence in record sales due to perceived characteristics of that platform, hopefully audiophiles will also keep the CD alive in a similar manner.
The other factor in all of this is that there is not much, I would say, no music that comes out of Hollywood these days that even warrants a poorly encoded MP3, not to mention CD, since such music is not worth listening to at all. Nearly all mass market music produced out of hollywood belongs in the trash, or the recycle bin directory to make room for more valuable data. Of course, there is still older music such as classical music, jazz, beatles etc where the use of CDs is still very important for people being able to get a quality recording of such masterpieces.
Some have said vinyl doesnt have the same nostalgia of CD. But the fact is CD has long been an audiophile choice because of the high fidelity and the resistance to mechanical abrasion and wear. A stamped CD will last for decades of continuous use whereas a record will suffer from wear and tear. Remember that audiophiles have invested big bucks, we are talking a thousand dollars, in high end CD players such as Pioneer Elite and Marantz for high end CD play. Even on an el cheapo $30 player, the difference in CD quality from vinyl and MP3 is real and noticeable. You dont get the same dynamic range and the same lossless, artifact free play back from an MP3 to drive your tweeters and subwoofers.
No, they're not "dead". I buy them regularly. I've never bought a CD at "Best Buy", so I really couldn't care less what they sell or don't sell. Best Buy is clearly a poorly run business run by people who make poor decisions.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.....
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
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.
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
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
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.
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.)
There's a difference. Floppy disks became obsolete because of lack of storage capacity. CDs are becoming obsolete because music listeners these days value convenience over quality and actually owning their music.