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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
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.
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.