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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.
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.
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.
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!
'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.
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.
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.
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).
We went through our CD collection a couple of years ago and realized that much of our tastes in music had changed. Kept around 30 of 500 disks. Did the same with vinyl 15 years ago. Threw all ~2-300 and bought a very few of them on CD.
Not much of an investment, I would say.
Now, for the cost of one full-price CD per month, the entire family can listen to whichever music each member likes, change tastes with trends and maturity, explore new artists and music styles, rediscover old ones, etc. When I was a kid spending my pocket money buying the latest records, I would have been ecstatic if I could have payed for one record per month (about what I could afford back then) but gotten *all* of the latest and all of the old music.
I get *far* more value from Spotify than CD:s, both short-term and long-term. Even if they pull the plug tomorrow.
I am not saying that my use case is more valid than yours, or the reverse. But you may find it rewarding to try to see things through the eyes of others before calling them stupid.
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
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...
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.
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.
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 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.