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Best Buy Stops Selling Music CDs (cbsnews.com)
Thelasko writes: Best Buy has stopped selling CDs at its stores as of Sunday, CBS Pittsburgh reports. The arrest of CD sales will happen nationwide. Due to digital streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and others, CD sales have been falling in recent years. Best Buy's CD sales have recently only brought in about $40 million annually.
Best Buy executives can See Deez nuts on their chins.
I still buy CD's regularly. Luckily, I've got quite a few local retailers that sell an awesome variety of CD's, at much better prices than Best Buy.
That being said, good for Best Buy. Best Buy customers are the bottom of the market (the poor, the unsophisticated, and the uneducated), and I would imagine that very few of their customers buy CD's any more (as evidenced by their CD sales). I doubt these people are buying CD's anywhere else, either. I agree with them that most of their customers just stream everything, and quit caring about hearing music in the context of albums or sound quality decades ago (if they ever did).
I don't respond to AC's.
People were just stealing them anyway. Good Riddance
TIL Best Buy still sells/sold CDs. I haven't bought a CD from Best Buy since the 90s.
p.s. I just bought 3 CDs online today. I plan to rip them and put them on my personal music server.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format--and not without good reason. They're more durable than cassettes or LP records. They don't have DRM, region codes or ridiculous menus to wade through like DVDs. The audio quality is fantastic without lossy (or otherwise!) digital compression. They were hyped as having "digitally perfect" sound, and although that may not have been strictly technically true, the specifications are actually pretty close to the capabilities of the human ear. It was marketed as a serious audiophile format, and it lived up to that.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I personally put a pretty good portion of blame on the crushing dynamic range compression that so many rock-and-pop CDs are afflicted with. It's infuriating when disc after disc after disc comes out ruined (deliberately, it seems?) with bad mastering. It's got to where I'm afraid to buy any CD pressed after about 2000 or so. I'd rather get the LP release if I can, just because they generally don't lay on the super-compression.
Oh well, makes sense to completely stop doing that particular thing.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
They got their clock cleaned by Walmart that still does sell music CDs and DVDs.
Around 87 million albums sold in the US in 2017. At an average price of $14.99, that's around $1.2 billion in revenue. BestBuy did $40 million? That's a pitifully small number for the industry as a whole, especially given the number of BestBuy stores (1000) - that's about 200 CDs a month per store, at best.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
... still exists?
Considering that CDs were introduced in 1982 and DVDs in 1995, having all that above would have been quite the feat. Don't think video games had any of that at the time.
Games had DRM in the 80s. There were even fairly sophisticated anti-copying schemes for the day.
'Streaming services' are just renting in disguise, if you pay for it. They'd put an expiration date on you memory and make you forget you heard any of it if they thought it was possible and they could get away with it. Eventually people will come back to wanting to own copies of things they like.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I think I can answer that for you.
Greed. Plain and simple. You buy a copy of something, you can listen to it thousands of times for free after that, you can copy it, you can rip it and put it on your PMP -- and they can't insert ads, they don't make another penny off it -- and you can sell the used CD later if you're tired of it, and get some money back. They don't like that. They want you to pay, pay, pay forever. So they start something called 'streaming services', which is just a fancy way of saying 'rent you some music for a monthly fee', and voila, you pay, pay, pay forever. An essential part of this marketing strategy is to indoctrinate the masses that CDs are 'old fashioned', something your grandparents use, uncool, un-hip, something that you should be ridiculed for if you actually buy them. Sadly, people are dumb, dumb, dumb, and they fall for this bait, hook line and sinker. So you have what we've got here today: 'owning' things is considered obsolete and uncool, and having to pay, pay, pay forever is the new hotness. As I said before: people are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Instead of $40 million, bring in $0. Brilliant!
cd's do have DRM, but its very light.
it used to be SCMS (serial copy mgmt system) and when taking the spdif stream from cd players, DAT and other decks would see this as an original, they'd let you make one gen copy of it digitally and then a copy from that would be stopped. easily overcome these days, no one even knows (as your post suggests); but its still there.
once 'ripping' became a thing, no one copied data over spdif.
ripping cd's never had drm, that's true.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Does Walmart still sell only edited CDs?
Tried CD's and Streaming. ..
Good enough only for stuffing something to listen to into a phone when on the go or while driving.
At home. not so good.
Rediscovered vinyl records.
Got an vintage amp and speakers from the early 70's with a turntable.
WoW.. what a difference!
That's how the music was intended to be heard, uncompressed..
Compressed sucks, Retro kicks ass !
This announcement was bound to happen. It's just a shame Best Buy didn't properly position themselves 5 years ago to reap better returns.
They literally seemed to have missed the digital music industry. Soon enough they won't be selling games or movies.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format--and not without good reason. They're more durable than cassettes or LP records. They don't have DRM, region codes or ridiculous menus to wade through like DVDs. The audio quality is fantastic without lossy (or otherwise!) digital compression. They were hyped as having "digitally perfect" sound, and although that may not have been strictly technically true, the specifications are actually pretty close to the capabilities of the human ear. It was marketed as a serious audiophile format, and it lived up to that.
I completely agree with the above statements and assessments.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I personally put a pretty good portion of blame on the crushing dynamic range compression that so many rock-and-pop CDs are afflicted with. It's infuriating when disc after disc after disc comes out ruined (deliberately, it seems?) with bad mastering. It's got to where I'm afraid to buy any CD pressed after about 2000 or so. I'd rather get the LP release if I can, just because they generally don't lay on the super-compression.
I disagree with this part. It's trivial to refute - it's not that some well-mastered, high dynamic range recordings superseded the CD. On the contrary, the successor has been increasingly-poor-quality digitally compressed audio - MP3, AAC, OGG (courtesy of Spotify), and Youtube Videos (their own special hell of MP3). You may well value a high dynamic range and be willing to purchase 180-gram vinyl, but if that was a mainstream sentiment, iTunes would be selling FLAC and Best Buy would be selling LPs instead of CDs. Neither of these is the case.
The reason CDs fell out of vogue is because of everything except the audio quality aspect. Want to play a specific song while driving? "Hey Siri, play Highway to Hell" or something similar. Boom, it's playing. Have the same impulse with CDs? Open your 200-CD binder, flip through pages, try and find the CD with the song on it based on the corner-eye view of the cover art (good luck if it's all burned CDs, which themselves took hours longer to create than iTunes playlists), eject the CD currently in the stereo, put it somewhere it won't get scratched, insert the other one, and change to the correct track number...all with one hand and half an eye. It was approximately as dangerous as texting and driving.
Driving not the issue for you? Allow Gary Gulman to reminisce about the experience of owning a Discman for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... For the tl;dw crowd, they would only fit in the pocket of someone wearing pants with pockets explicitly sized for them. Battery life was relatively short (a problem greatly exacerbated by the use of the near-required anti-skip), and again, if you wanted more than *maybe* 20 songs, you had to carry around a CD wallet in addition to your CD player. It was a mess.
Oh, and just to put to bed the quality argument, CD players seldom came with headphones that were better than Earpods. I got a set with my first portable CD player (it came from Koss) that was halfway decent for a bundled pair of headband-style headphones, but pretty much everything after that was terrible in one way or another. While Beats inexplicably brought full-ear headphones back into vogue, nobody was wearing them at the time...and earbuds were outright atrocious; I never heard a pair that had anything that vaguely resembled bass until around 2011. Now sure, I'll absolutely agree that even a modestly priced set of bookshelf speakers and a budget Marantz receiver will produce an audible difference between a CD and a Youtube video...but I would say that 95% of CDs were never listened to on hardware that could make the difference audible.
What killed CDs was the evolution of a more convenient means of li
ripping cd's never had drm, that's true.
I seem to recall a particularly ham-fisted attempt by Sony some years ago...
If I get my hands on a well-mastered audio CD that sounds good, I'm happy to rip it to MP3 or (better) AAC/MP4 and add it to my iTunes library. Then it goes on my phone, and then I can play it in my car, everything. The digital compression is very good now, and any difference in sound quality is of no significant consequence to my less-than-perfect ears, even when I listen on high quality headphones.
The problem is, if I get my hands only a badly-mastered CD that sounds like garbage, there's nothing I can do to fix it. And if I go to buy the files online instead, from ITMS or Amazon, or if I stream it or whatever, in most cases the source of those files was the same badly-mastered CD. And the result is that the only way I can get a decent-sounding version of the recording, in many cases, is the buy the LP record, then needle-drop it and process that to AAC files, and then put those tracks into my iTunes library. And you know, that's absolutely bonkers. It's crazy that after all we've been through, and all the technology we have now, that I have to resort to this in order to get music that sounds OK.
DRM is not at all the same thing as copy protection! DRM primary purpose is not about copy protection, but about controlling when, where, and how you play the game. It also locks the game to you so that you cannot resell or give the game away to someone else - game publishers hate this more than they hate pirates. DRM keeps the costs of the games high because there is no longer a used game market.
Seriously, some of these DRM games are extremely easy to crack so that all the DRM does is make it annoying if you are a legitimate paying customer without actually slowing down piracy.
It's not that simple.
I don't care about ownership, because I listen to a massive amount of various artists. I care about availability and portability. I want music on the device on my choice, with a spoken command. The cost is beyond negligible for me, I don't even notice.
And I have a benchmark amp with Ultimate Ear 11s, and Grados, and Sennheisers.
But mostly, I tell my Sonos to play music while I'm cooking.
CDs have some minor copy protection, but that's not the same as DRM. You can play the CD you bought in the USA in any other country in the world with any CD player made anywhere in the world. You can play your CD without verifying permission first with a server. You can sell your CD in a yard sale, give it to a friend, rent one from the library, and so forth.
DVDs have an early form of DRM in that it tries to prevent you from playing DVDs if you're in the wrong "region". BluRay has some stronger DRM, as it will update the revocation list on your player when you insert a new disc (ie, reprogramming the player's memory). There are ways around these restrictions of course, but the whole point there is to control *how* you use the media rather than just preventing copying of the media.
DRM is not at all the same thing as copy protection!
Says you. Your opinion is not universally shared. If copy protection is not DRM then why does nearly every form of DRM employ some form of anti-copying scheme?
I think it is pretty simple what happened: The Internet happened and cheap streaming. For most people, it doesn't make sense to buy CDs when the vast majority of music is available online for a relatively low fee. Many of the audiophiles have gone back to vinyl, tho given that much of modern music is recorded digitally, it is probably missing the point.
For me, I still buy CDs, but most of the time they get ripped once and gather dust as I listen to my music on more convenient mediums.
DRM can be as simple as water-marking, which helps rights-owners pursue pirates without affecting legitimate use.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format
You keep using that word ...
"ultimate" does not mean best. it means final, that nobody will ever create a better one. Stop ruining the language with ignorance.
Younger consumers stupidly prefer to buy something over and over again (streaming), with DRM (facepalm).
Those of us with functional brains love a CD which we buy once and can easily rip since there's no DRM. we also get to be more "green" since we can listen to audio tracks without requiring server farms and lots of internet infrastructure humming along sucking electricity.
Oh well, I guess the generation that cannot figure out its own gender, snorts cinnamon, sucks condoms through their noses, and eats Tide pods (yet wants us to listen to them about socialism and gun control) has a few more important things to figure out before they get to the stupidity of streaming audio...
Don't be silly. iPod killed CDs, it just took some time. Who wants such a low density medium. I can fit every song I own in a volume smaller than a few CDs. And when I want to buy a new one I can get it delivered instantaneously. That's progress.
Last implies best under the naive conception that improvment necessarily drives replacement.
It's pretty trivial to activate Spotify for a month and rip all the albums you want at the bitrate you want through Audacity.
..I come to slashdot. I find people here who also buy plastic discs and rip to digital format, for many of the same reasons I do. And others who reject this for also good reason. My tribe, I guess..
This is no longer true.
Sites and services like iTunes and such have guidelines,on how to properly encode the audio for their services (see "Mastered for iTunes"). For a good chunk of iTunes' catalog, this means the studios went back to the original studio masters and re-mastered and encoded them.
In the early days of digital services, yes, they ripped the CDs and encoded those, but this hasn't been true for nearly a decade when digital became "a thing".
It's also why there is no longer anything known as "studio master" - the same album will be mastered 6 or 7 times - you have the CD release, the LP release (both of which are mastered differently), there is also a high-res release, and also an iTunes and other digital release as well. Granted, some mastering engineers are lazy and reuse the same master (this is especially true for high-res releases, which lack provenance and can be upscaled CD releases), and often there's a mastering for PDM (aka DSD) releases versus PCM releases.
And nevermind the crap that is MQA that despite its promises, is actually a lossy encoding that does worse than FLAC. (MQA encoding has two parts - first is downsampling to 44.1/16 or 48/16 from the original source which may be anything up to 192/24, then it's taking that CD-friendlier stream and "encoding" it with a proprietary algorithm to make it smaller, but you can use FLAC and do better. The downsampling is special but you lose 3 or so bits to the "MQA" data, making it sound like crap when played back in "compatible" mode).
DIE Sony! BURN IN HELL! DIE!
Ahem.
Sorry.
Flashback.
"... Interestingly, though, Best Buy will continue to sell vinyl records for the next two years. Vinyl has seen a resurgence lately, with vinyl album sales last year at a 27-year-high, according to Billboard..." from that article link.
I am surprised that is doing better than CDs for Best Buy!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Guess what, bro. Your car has a shitty noise floor, so sound quality is pointless. Even if you have a more sound proofed german car, you are still listening to an overly compensated EQ that I'm betting you don't have control over (no the bass/mid/treble settings is not control).
When I shop for music, it is a "Shopping" thing; I want the assistance of knowledgeable sales staff, just like a woman wants knowledgeable staff to help them find the right makeup, and for the same reason.
Most Best Buys I've been in in the last decade have been dingy, poorly laid out, some with utterly hideously stained and ripped carpeting and store fixtures that look like GoodWill rejects. If you can find store help you're lucky if they can point you to the registers ior the restrooms. Nobody knows anything about anything they sell because there isn't anybody on the floor who's an actual adult; they've fired all the competent/experienced staff for sub-minimum-wage college kids who'd rather be cramming for finals.
Seriously; I can't WAIT for Best Buy to go the way of Circuit City and CompUSA... they WON the race to the bottom and they deserve their ignominious end.
mnem
Social Darwinism at it's best.
I remember in the 90s they stocked obscure techno CDs among other things.
Suppose you have 160 square feet of space in your store that isn't uses yet. You can use that 160sq feet to sell something that'll make a $10 million profit, or something that will make a $50 million profit. Which would you choose?
"Not profitable enough" means "not as profitable as the other thing we can do with the same resources."
This is an issue I am continually reminded of at work. My company is growing fast. There are a LOT of things we can that are good ideas - we can spend $100 and get $125 return. We don't do a lot of them because we can instead spend our time doing something with an even greater return.
Debt is a particularly important example of an alternative way to spend money and make a guaranteed profit. Suppose you can invest $1 million today and get back $1.15 million next year. Should you do it? Not if you have debt at 15% interest or higher - you're better off using that $1 million to pay off debt. The interest saved, interest you don't have to pay, is effectively profit. It's also a *guaranteed* profit percentage, no risk. If you have debt with a 15% interest rate, you know for certain that paying it off will earn you 15% avoided interest. Guaranteed profits are the best kind.
> cd's do have DRM, but its very light.
> it used to be SCMS (serial copy mgmt system)
IIRC CDs never had SCMS. The Red Book spec didn't allow for it.
There were other attempts at copy protection, but they required pressing non-standard discs.
Guess what, bro. Your car has a shitty noise floor, so sound quality is pointless.
The noise stops when I stop the car. And being an electric, it is not too bad while rolling either.
I remember looking through the selection of CDs at Best Buy and finding on one of them, in small print, a warning that it may not play on some CD players because of it's "special features" or some nonsense. I picked up another and found a similar warning. I picked up a third, and now knowing I might have to look closely this time I didn't see a warning but I also didn't see the "Compact Disc-Digital Audio" emblem I've seen on older music CDs I've bought.
I've lost all confidence that any "CD" I could buy at Best Buy would in fact be disc that met the standards of an audio CD. I haven't bought a CD from Best Buy since that day I saw that warning on the label of one of their discs years ago. I've bought music CDs since, but only after reviewing the store return policy, assuring the media is in fact CDDA, or it's cheap enough that I'd be willing to eat the cost if it won't play on my older gear I keep around.
Had Best Buy not bought crap discs for sale that day I'd probably be still buying CDs from them. I know that this is not solely the fault of Best Buy, they can offer for sale only what the music industry is willing to produce. We've seen stores put pressure on the makers of products before, and Best Buy could have insisted to not sell anything but CDDA. After all if the CD I bought did not play on my gear, and they didn't allow a return by their store policy, then that still reflects on them. I've read their policy and they will replace a "defective" CD with another CD but if the product itself is defective by not meeting the CDDA standard then replacing like with like does not solve my problem. I'd want my money back because I was supposed to get an audio CD but that's not what was in the package.
Oh, I'm sure someone might ask why I don't just download my music. It's simple really, because I'm an audio snob. I'm not a fan of compressed music from downloads, at least not if I'm paying money for it. I listen to streamed music often, for the stuff I really like I want it high quality and on a medium that I can expect to last a long time. That means CDs.
I'm just old enough to remember a time when music was still offered on 1/4 inch tape. I'd see these tape players on TV and movies from that time and I wondered just how much better that was than the fragile LPs and crappy cassettes that I could afford from mail order catalogs. I don't remember how much these hi-fi tapes cost, or how much the players cost, only that it was a lot of money and that I wanted it. The introduction of the CD killed off most any demand for the hi-fi tapes that remained, including my own.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Did you stop taking your meds?
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
No, DRM is a superset that involves copy protection as part of it. They are not different. One is a component of the other. CDs definitely do have DRM, just that the DRM they have is horribly broken and was rendered ineffective shortly after release.
DVDs have weak DRM, CDs don't have any as far as I know.
Don't be sorry, I had the same reaction.
I never quite understood why it is that Sony takes such a grip on the media they've introduced over the years. I can recall a couple examples with mini-disc and memory-stick. Both were introduced by Sony and never released for others to license. My only guess is that they'd gamble on keeping the technology to themselves and make bundles or just allow it to die and eat the cost of development. They had success with this tactic from Trinitron having a near monopoly on CRT displays and TVs for something like 30 or 40 years. Other people produced CRT tubes in this time, and often for much lower prices, but few met the quality of Trinitron. The patents on the technology expired at about the same time the CRT "expired" through competition from other technology. I still use a Sony Trinitron screen nearly every day because it just won't die. So long as it keeps working I see no need to replace it.
For everything other than Trinitron it seems that Sony produced crap products that I bought and got bit by the incompatibilities or I was wise enough to see the compatibility failure early on and avoided it in the first place.
I've developed a reflex of cursing when Sony is mentioned since most everything I got from Sony after Trinitron has been crap.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
Simple: they're physically inconvenient.
That's relative to current formats and delivery methods, of course, but all things are relative. Fact is that MP3 is good enough for most listeners most of the time, and allows tiny players that never skip while you jog, or storage on devices people are already carrying. The fall of CD isn't about its audio quality in any way. It's about a 4" platter that holds 12-14 songs and requires a laser read-head that isn't tolerant of mishandling.
"Oh no... he found the
See https://gizmodo.com/no-best-bu...> No, Best Buy Has Not Completely Stopped Selling CDs—Yet, Anyway
Back in the early days of CD-ROM drives, many of the mainstream drives could not directly read Redbook audio data from a misic CD. There used to be web pages that listed the 'good' CD-ROM drives that could rip CD audio. The restrictions were built into the drive firmware. There was a little analog cable to route between your drive and the sound card to listen to CD music on your PC speakers.
My Sony Discman fits into any jeans pocket I have put it into.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I think I can answer that for you. Greed. Plain and simple. You buy a copy of something, you can listen to it thousands of times for free after that, you can copy it, you can rip it and put it on your PMP -- and they can't insert ads, they don't make another penny off it -- and you can sell the used CD later if you're tired of it, and get some money back. They don't like that. They want you to pay, pay, pay forever. So they start something called 'streaming services', which is just a fancy way of saying 'rent you some music for a monthly fee', and voila, you pay, pay, pay forever. An essential part of this marketing strategy is to indoctrinate the masses that CDs are 'old fashioned', something your grandparents use, uncool, un-hip, something that you should be ridiculed for if you actually buy them. Sadly, people are dumb, dumb, dumb, and they fall for this bait, hook line and sinker. So you have what we've got here today: 'owning' things is considered obsolete and uncool, and having to pay, pay, pay forever is the new hotness. As I said before: people are dumb, dumb, dumb.
And some people make rational decisions; just not the ones that you would make.
9.99/mo is way less than I ever spent on CDs, for access to way more than I could ever buy. I could capture the streaming audio if I really wanted to, which I don't, because I don't want a huge file library to manage and backup.
Yes, I could scour used music stores and rip everything and have my own disk arrays and it could mine, all mine my precious ... or I could just pay a small monthly fee and not worry about any of that. Just not my thing. Maybe it's yours.
I want to own the art and hold it. Just like any other art form. I want to have the album, and read the liner notes. I also want to be able to rip the audio to any format I see fit. I don't stream and I hate most lossy compressed formats (even SiriusXM).
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Yeah, they just want to keep that revenue stream flowing.
cd's do have DRM, but its very light.
it used to be SCMS (serial copy mgmt system) ....
You are showing a North American bias. Europe and Asia both for a while used true copy protection where common rippers like iTunes couldn't rip the CD at all. Not all CDs had this, but some did. I've got a Spanish CD of the old group Ketama that had a really difficult to crack version of this copy protection and even Exact Audio Copy couldn't fully break it. I had to resort to doing an analog copy of the first track using a mini disc recorder if I remember correctly but I was able to rip the rest of the CD to my PC. I remember this one being really nasty because the ripped files had several songs lumped together into one large file and I had to use an audio editor to separate the tracks. However, those copy protection mechanisms didn't download anything to your PC to stop you. I vaguely remember the copy protection had some kind of data placed after the audio part of the CD (this meant that you couldn't fill up the CD with audio if you were going to copy protect it - every example I saw was under 70 minutes long) in such a way that a CD player would never attempt to read it but a PC would find it first and the ripper would have no idea what to do with it because it wasn't CD audio.
I think I've only run into a CD that couldn't be ripped once, and it was paired with an audio DVD that ripped and converted to MP3 just fine, so I don't think you need to worry too much. The only hardware with CD readers in them these days are probably off-the-shelf CDROMs inside anyway.
Check the packaging, I suspect you'll find that technically these aren't CDs. IIRC, Philips (correctly, IMHO) refused permission to display the 'compact disc' logo on discs which had abused the audio format to defeat rippers sufficiently that the disc no longer met the Red Book standard.
A company sticking up for having the technology *work* rather than extracting maximum dollars and control from consumers? Must be an old story...
9.99/mo is way less than I ever spent on CDs, for access to way more than I could ever buy.
So there's an important difference between us. I never spent that much on music. An occasional CD for a birthday or Christmas is about it. My entire music collection fits on the SD card in my phone with plenty to spare. Paying $10/mo for music, month after month after month, sounds terribly wasteful to me.
Also, I guess you streamers must have a constant Internet connection. I go lots of places, and that's not true for me. Maybe it's an urban vs. rural thing.
FLAC is not "nearly identical". It is "identical", just like every other lossless scheme (eg ALAC). That is the meaning of lossless.
Who is they? I thought the recording industry was fighting services like Spotify and Pandora? I think the reality is that technology has evolved and services have come along to capitalize on that. It's not a conspiracy designed to dupe the public.
One problem with purchasing a CD (aside from the relative inconvenience of the format) is that most of the music consumed is modern pop or hip hop, and it's largely about singles, - not albums. This really is not something that's changed. Buying a CD means you get 2 or 3 songs that you like and 8 or 10 that you don't particularly care for. And people would prefer to listen a lower quality version of a song they like than a high quality version of a song they don't.
Again, this is not something new. This is why people bought 45s in the 50s and early 60s rather than albums. 45s far outsold albums. It's also why people recorded music off the radio once technology made that fairly easy to do that. How good was the quality? Terrible, compared to buying the album or any streaming service available today. But it was cheap, the quality was good enough, and people could choose the songs they wanted individually rather than packaged as an album.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this?
I'll tell you why.
Britney Spears.
Once that happened, there was no longer anything worthwhile to put on a CD. Then Metallica came along and taught us that we can get all the free music we wanted on P2P. And that was the end of CDs.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
Because for most people it became a really annoying way to get music on their MP3 player/iPod? Where you could have your playlists, not just in-order or shuffle. It was too much effort to change CDs to hear just the hits, so you listened through a lot of filler. Maybe a few albums were solid start to finish, but they were the exception.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Best Buy would be selling LPs instead of CDs.
Actually they are. BB ditched CDs but still has a vinyl section.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Wow, "Buy" all means, close this business lest it goes bankrupt!
Much music in any day hasn't been worth owning.
Streaming is a waste. CDs are a waste. Golf is a waste. Every thing, every service, every product that i personally don't need are a terrible waste. Those resources should be spent making wax replicas of Gundam robots at 1/100 scale so that I can lay waste to them with my beefed up Artic Laser array.
You people are such idiots, wasting time on things that don't directly align 1:1 with my preferences. /s
I think I can answer that for you.
Greed. Plain and simple. ... As I said before: people are dumb, dumb, dumb.
and that's being kind ...
As most of them on Amazon have free "auto-rip". So I effectively get both an digital copy and physical copy. Often the CDs are no more expensive, and once in a while they are cheaper than the digital album.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
meanwhile over the past 20 years, the RIAA was busying suing single mothers to convince everyone that the decline in CD sales was due to copy write infringement and piracy..
THAT'S why it's compressed. Nothing to do with loss.
The problem with streaming is that, just like Netflix, there is so much that isn't there.
I tell friends all the time about music I'm into and the first response I get is "Thats not on Spotify", or whatever streaming service they use.
Streaming music is designed to get people to listen to the same 1000 or so songs, over and over again.
I can tell how good someones taste in music is by whether they stream a lot or not.
Streaming music is like fast food.
Your comments are absolutely correct.
But you left out a couple of things.
1. People go fucking crazy if they have to "do anything" to get their music. That is one of the primary reasons streaming is so popular. It is easy. But the devil is in the details, as you so eloquently explained. Convenience, like Good Intentions, paved the way to Hell.
2. Streaming services are designed to encourage people to all congregate and listen to the same pool of songs. Music Streaming services, just like Netflix, have a very poor selection. The Hits is what they want you to listen to. Obscure bands or genres, live, B sides, etc, etc are all much more difficult to find in a streaming format. Of course there are exceptions to this for fans of the Grateful Dead and other cult-status bands or musicians that have a community to support them. However, your average Spotify or other streaming consumer will again and again be subtly herded towards the same shit everybody else listens to.
> When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format
No, they weren't.
In theory it should be sufficient, but in practice 2-channel, 16-bit @ 44 KHz is NOT the ultimate format -- it was simply "good enough" and "cheap enough".
Not all Hi-Fi audio is equal, as Malcolm Hawksford, emeritus professor of electronic systems engineering at Essex University, and author of more than 250 papers on music reproduction, points out:
I have about 50 albums on my phone to losten to. I can listen to sevetal 100000 more online.why would I need to buy a CD? Taking the same with me would be a burden.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
pretty much same with me, i ripped all my CDs years and years ago. and have not looked back, as music got easier to get via streaming etc i no longer bought CDs.
with a few exceptions.
now for 14.99 per month, the entire family gets anything the want. which to me is a good deal.
It's not a rational decision, it's a short-sighted one that will bite you all in the ass.
There is an anti-copy bit on the audio CD disc, which some machines would ignore and others would honor. For CD-ROM there were several schemes to add copy protection but they weren't standard and not meant for audio. Sony tried to add a scheme, XCP, that met with a lot of consumer resistance (after all, ripping your CD to listen to it on your ipod is 100% legal, ethical, and moral no matter how loudly Sony whines).
Does it matter who it is? They're sucking more money out of your wallet, that's all you need to focus on.
When CDs were introduced in the 1990s they cost more than records ($15 CD vs $9 records, with regular record sales of $6, in the US). The CD industry said the high price was because there was only one pressing plant in the world, and as they scaled up the price would drop. But the price never dropped; it remained around $15 for most CDs. So people got used to paying 50-150% more for albums and became resentful. That didn't cause the unauthorized-download revolution but it exacerbated it. And then when iPods and streaming services came out, many people found they were satisfied listening to a genre of internet radio or on-demand specific songs rather than owning albums. That also has to do with AM/FM radio at the time: local stations and quirky music disappeared in the 1980s as the station owners consolidated into large conglomerates. Internet radio gave people back their choice of music.
Doesn't Really Care
You are full of shit, because a) CDs were introduced in the early 80s, b) American producers ramped up CD production once CD players got cheap enough for most people to afford, and c) prices DID drop - Imported CDs were initially around $30-$40 and in the late 80s most popular discs were selling for as little as $11. I was there, I bought the discs.
Yup, it's all streaming fun and games ... until Streaming Site gets into yet another fight with BigMusicCo or BigVideoCo. Then it's "This title is not available" or words to that effect. Or my other favorite: "This title is no longer in print" (yes, I've seen that applied to audio and video discs). Funny how that doesn't happen with my CD drive in my computer ...
And don't forget, it there'd been recordable discs back in the 60s, we wouldn't today be trying to find the lost Dr Who episodes -- somebody would've recorded them.
We Americans are so, so quick to discard what we're told is "obsolete technology". It's rarely us who get to decide what's "obsolete" (miss your headphone jack yet?) ...
Yeah, but the "anti-copy bit" was in the subcode and most players ignore the subcode completely. It wasn't an attempt to skirt DRM, it was just not that useful (except maybe for karaoke CD+G discs).
It can be rational, depends on what you value. If you fear losing access to the music you like, then it might not be for you. If you prefer to just have access to lots of new music for no additional cost, then it might be.
Can streaming be cancelled with out notice, yes, but that is a risk that many might be willing to take for something as trivial as music.
no, because my current phone and tablet have one.
Sony not licensing their formats to others goes at least as far as I'm aware, back to Beta. I think that's one of the reasons VHS won over Beta back in the 1980s when VCRs were becoming popular, JVC who owned the VHS format was willing to let anyone who paid a fee the rights to use the format while sony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
it's a short-sighted one that will bite you all in the ass.
No, it won't.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I had ripped most of my 2000+ CD collection into iTunes and stored it on a G5 tower I used as a media center. Then one day the power supply died.
I pulled the hard drive and put it in an enclosure so I could copy it to another machine, then I realized probably 95% of what I wanted to listen to was availabe on YouTube.
There was no need to keep a 100GB iTunes library at home. I copied over maybe 10GB of the local artists and rare stuff, then I shelved the drive,
Except the OP was being honest and open in a polite way.
He didn't come across the way you portrayed him at all. I guess that's because you disagree with him. You can't argue based off merit because you have none.
Where is this no additional cost coming from?
They're sucking more money out of your wallet, that's all you need to focus on.
Let me see if I can correct your thinking on this.
I have a family spotify account that I pay $15 a month for. For that I have 5 separate accounts for each member of my family that cost me $3 a month. But that is splitting hairs so lets just say I'm paying $15 a month for access to over 30 million tracks.
To keep it simple lets just say a cd costs $10. Now then my son and daughter would usually buy about 4 cd's a month, give or take. That is $40 bucks roughly. I myself, would buy about 6 jazz, blues, and classical cd's a month. A good 60% of these cd's I would play once or twice and then I would put on a shelf till I hauled them down to the used CD store. Of the remaining 40% they would have 1 or 2 tracks on it that I liked. 1 or 2 tracks out of say 10. That comes out to $5 to $10 a track.
Now lets say I wanted to play that CD in my car, or at my office. I would ether have to carry around the CD's that I think I might want to hear or buy 2 or 3 copies at $10 each. I could of course make copies of them to a inferior CD-R for $3. I buy only good CD-R's.
Since a CD is good for about 2 to 5 years, give or take, before it becomes unplayable, which means I will have to buy it all over again. Be we won't count that.
So you are saying its better for my family to spend over a $100 a month for CDs that I might or might not play that it is for me to spend $15 a month for access to a virtually unlimited library? A library that includes all past tracks by an artist, all future tracks, not to mention millions of unknown artist that I would never find if all I did was buy cd's?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I think I've only run into a CD that couldn't be ripped once, and it was paired with an audio DVD that ripped and converted to MP3 just fine, so I don't think you need to worry too much.
Sure, but why bother when I'm looking for music that I'm already buying on an impulse? I'll peruse the offerings of the music in a brick and mortar store with the intent to listen to it on my truck stereo on my drive. I'll rip it when I get home so I'll have it in lossless format on my desktop and loaded as a high bit rate compressed audio to fit on my cheap iPhone. (Cheap is relative, the iPhone cost a lot of money but I saved quite a bit by getting one with less storage knowing I'll be listening to it from cheap headphones most of the time and therefore the lossy compression is tolerable.)
The only hardware with CD readers in them these days are probably off-the-shelf CDROMs inside anyway.
I don't know what is in my truck dash, or in my cheap CD player I bought at the base PX, or even what my Mac on my desk uses. What I do know is that CDDA works in all three. I'm not willing to argue with a know-nothing jobsworth at the Best Buy over the CD I bought there was not playable when I tried to play it in my truck and was trying to get cash back on it before I even left the parking lot.
No CDDA emblem means no sale. If Best Buy had a cash back policy for opened CDs that don't work, instead of like-for-like, then I'd be willing to shop there. If they wanted to keep my business then they'd need reasonable policy on returns, or stock products that met the expectations of their buyers.
I will agree that most CD players sold today, and for many years, are often really just small computers with a CD-ROM but that's not what I own. What I own are CDDA players, not computers with CD-ROM drives. Therefore I will purchase media that meets CDDA because I've read enough about the failures of non-spec CD media and Best Buy return policy that I've not bought anything at Best Buy for a very long time.
I will say that my policy on not shopping at Best Buy has changed recently. I've found Best Buy changed their attitude on the premium they can charge for the convenience of brick and mortar shopping, the prices are more reasonable now. They also have the convenience of buying online for same day pickup in a store. My policy on not buying music there has remained though.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Yes it does have a copy protect bit that can be set for audio tracks. Here is what the Nero help file says about it.
Sets the copy protection bit for the corresponding track on the Audio CD. As most CD recording applications simply ignore this bit, copy protection cannot be ensured. A warning message will be opened in Nero Burning ROM while copying an Audio CD with copy protected tracks.
Also, I guess you streamers must have a constant Internet connection. I go lots of places, and that's not true for me. Maybe it's an urban vs. rural thing.
Most streaming services offer a way to download content to your phone which can be good for something like 30 days, allowing you to save data charges, and listen to music outside of cell / wifi coverage.
Along with the seasonal fireworks sale at our local Walmart was a not-half-bad selection of LPs ---- strategically positioned near the bleeding edge 4K UHD HDR brand name TVs, sound bars, steaming media boxes, video game consoles and so on, You can sell CDs, if you where and how to place them.
The appeal of subscription audio is straight-forward: Instant access to some twenty-five to thirty million tracks, ideally supplemented with subtly animated graphics and text, as an integrated part of a home theater system, this can work very well. Playlists are easy to build and easy to share. No junk files or viral payloads, no time wasted on the P2P nets.
I've seen some documents on the "Mastered for iTunes" program, and they look good in theory. In practice I believe they are only guidelines offered by Apple, but they are not enforced in any way whatsoever. I'm not aware of any incentive for music studios to actually master their online tracks any differently from their CD tracks. And frankly I don't understand *why* studios routinely ruin their CDs to begin with. Given that they do, I don't understand *why* they wouldn't ruin the files they distribute to digital services in exactly the same way.
Ultimate also means "being the best or most extreme example of its kind" and when CDs were introduced, they definitely were that.
Ultimate also means "being the best or most extreme example of its kind" and when CDs were introduced, they definitely were that.
We already have plenty of words for that.
I know language changes, but it's sad how people devalue it by misusing words they heard but did not think enough to understand.
The same happened to so many words, e.g. "awesome". Once it had a useful place in the English language, real meaning. Now it is just another synonym for "very good" due to dumb people. Dumb used to have a particular meaning too. I think we already had enough words for stupid.
Try looking in a dictionary, you anal-retentive jerk.
Yes.
Or just learn to use a radio for free.
Yes, I am. You can copy CDs, it's 'fair use', you only have to buy ONE copy, and you can listen to it as many times as you want for FREE, with no internet connection, no dataplan usage, and no tracking and logging of what you're listening to from nosy corporations and ISPs. All of your 'calculations' are either worst-case scenarios cherrypicked to make your 'point' or are flat out imaginary. Your'e lighting money on fire every month; stop that.
..and since I've run into you before on here, it's highly likely that you don't use streaming-anything, and maybe don't have a family or even listen to any music, ever; TROLLOLOLOLOL. Bugger off.
Hehe. Still hurting over that are we? I don't blame you. I probably should apologize for that. I'm not going to but I probably should. :) Since I'm a regular poster you can assume that you will run into me many more times. But you have my word that I will not deliberately be trolling you again. Once you've been trolled by me, you are pretty much immune to being trolled again. I mean, since I already picked you up and played you like a fiddle, there is no challenge to it. Doing so again would just be sad on my part.
The scenarios I picked out are rough estimates over the years of collecting music. I pulled up a report how much money I have spent the past 10 years. It averages out to about $26 a month. Sometimes, I would spend nothing and sometimes much more. My peek was in 2013 when I bought several boxed sets for $250 and some change.
You really don't know much about Spotify do you? Spotify, like most streaming services, has a offline mode. This is where the music you like the most is saved locally on your device just like any other mp3 you would load is. You save it once and no data is used at all when you play it locally. You can just listen to it over and over. Once your tired of it just remove it and off you go. Spotify plays on just about everything too. I even think there might be app so I can run it on my cat. So instead of having to copy a cd or carry them around, I just install Spotify there and not worry about it any more.
I actually don't mind Spotify tracking what music I listen too. The service is very good at recommending artist based on what I listen too. Have you ever heard of Michael Tomlinson? Me ether till Spotify recommended him. There are hundreds of other artist that I have "discovered" based on what Spotify and my contacts on there recommend. Artist that I would never have discovered just listening to the radio and browsing music stores.
And best part. When I find a artist that i really like I go to their website and buy the music right from the artist. Where all the money that I spend goes right to artist and not to Big Music where the artist only gets pennies. Support your artist, that is really what its all about, is it not?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I tried it, a couple times. It's no better than radio and less convenient. I can't see why anyone would pay, pay, pay ad infinitum for it. I'll stick to having local copies of what I like to hear, and I'll keep pointing and laughing at people who think they're 'cutting the cord' or using 'streaming services' when all they're doing is trading one monthly bill for another one, and giving away more Personally Identifiable Information about their lives. /subject
I doubt you really actually tried it. You may have played it but you didn't really try it. It is far superior to radio in virtually every way imaginable. But that is just my option. For all I know you may like listening to the same tired songs picked for you by the RIAA, delivered over a sub par medium filled with static, interlaced with long stretches of advertisements, and topped off with the pathetic ramblings of something called a "dj." You may even enjoy that abhorrent spectacle called a "morning show."
I really can't comment your choice to listen to your local music. For all I know you probably listen to the same 3 cd's over and over. But you shouldn't point and laugh at people with wider and more vibrant musical tastes than you. That is just rude.
As for me, I'm happy to pay a small service fee every month to have access to 30 million tracks of music with more being added every month. From all around the world. Reggie from Caribbean, Blues from the Netherlands. I'm sure you won't agree, but put simply streaming, services are the best thing to ever happen to independent artists.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.