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When Will CDs Die Out?

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    When Will CDs Die Out?

    I surveyed my 150 US students this week and found that only 4% buy CDs regularly and 57% never do. So how long does this format have left to run?

    #2
    Not long. However I still send out 50+ playlist CDs regularly at Christmas. Last year I asked whether people would prefer thumb-drives, but no one did. This has something to do with age of most recipients for sure, and the CD shelf at Staples gets shorter all the time. I think most cars produced in the past three or so years don't have CD drives, so that will accelerate the decline even among us geriatrics.

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      #3
      Whenever possible I buy CDs. I still love shopping for the physical format, even if it's not the same as vinyl.

      I could buy a turntable, but no.

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        #4
        CDs will die in 2020 but will rise from the dead in 2023. There will be a rack of boutique CDs on sale in Sainsbury's and you will be able to buy David Bowie, The Smiths and Stevie Wonder compact discs at £32.99 a pop. Anyone still listening to vinyl will be laughed out of town.

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          #5
          I think that there is a decent chance that CDs will survive as consumers realise that they don’t actually own a lot of the music that they’ve “purchased” from the likes of Apple and Amazon.

          And that’s before one addresses the needs of Classical and Jazz obsessives, who aren’t well served by streaming services.

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            #6
            Originally posted by lackedpunch View Post
            CDs will die in 2020 but will rise from the dead in 2023. There will be a rack of boutique CDs on sale in Sainsbury's and you will be able to buy David Bowie, The Smiths and Stevie Wonder compact discs at £32.99 a pop. Anyone still listening to vinyl will be laughed out of town.
            This will probably end up being not too far off. But don't expect those Atomic Kitten and Steps CD's (the equivalent of James Last and Mantovani records) at the charity shops to start flying off the shelfs. Apparently the desirability and prices of old cassettes have started to rise due to hipster fuckery. This is with mainstream, commercial artists as well, nothing particularly rare.

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              #7
              I'm in agreement with Ursus on this. Also it's sometimes cheaper to buy the CD and rip it yourself than to buy it digitally.

              Also some secondhand CDs have become mysteriously expensive nowadays. I spent several months tracking down a copy of Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, which I eventually bought for €10 from a bloke in Finland. However, a couple of people are trying to flog it for £75 on Amazon and for about £60 on Discogs.

              See also Punch the Clock by Elvis Costello.

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                #8
                Filled my boots in Saturn yesterday with reduced €5 CDs, including three from the Erased Tapes back catalogue. I too like to own something material - AppleMusic downloads are just too easy. I click, download in seconds, listen once and then mostly forget it's there. Your hard drive has no proper musical consciousness.

                If it's true that hipsters are making tapes valuable again, I'm glad that I've hung on to almost my entire collection, even if my double-sided demo of the Cocteau Twins' 'Four Calendar Café' has heartbreakingly started to warp and wobble.

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                  #9
                  I like to have a physical copy of music and still find that the process of getting up and putting a disc on results in my giving it fuller attention. I like that CDs are currently spared the absurd fetishization that surrounds vinyl. I am quite clumsy and like listening to music after a glass or two, so the durability of CDs is a plus in that respect too.

                  There is still very good value to be had in the second hand market; I bought a copy of James Brown's In The Jungle Groove for three quid the other day. You'd struggle to get it for less than £20 on vinyl. There's a pricier collectors market for CDs as for anything else but, no, there's probably no point going to retrieve those discarded Doves and Kylie albums from the charity shop.

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                    #10
                    I was very late to CDs because I preferred vinyl (esp. at a time when CDs were so expensive). Then I started getting a lot of free CDs while working at a radio station and that sort of tipped the scale for me in terms of what I purchased. And then the big shift was moving across the country (USA), which is not cheap. At that time I left all my vinyl in Los Angeles with my cousin and took all my CDs but removed the CDs from the jewel cases and put them in plastic sleeves to decrease weight and shrink the space. Since then I still continue to buy CDs. I do this for a few reasons. First, only once in my life have I ever bought the same CD twice (a Percy Sledge CD) and the second time was from a library fundraiser sale for $2USD. But I regularly run into situations where I am downloading a free demo from Bandcamp or a live CD from some site and the computer will ask if I want to write over the folder I already have. In other words, I know what I own on CD but don't have a clue what's on my computers. Second, I like to bring CDs to listen to during the rare times when I drive.

                    At work, I tend to just use Spotify but I feel less engaged compared to listening at home or in the car.

                    I don't buy as much as I used to but when I go see bands, I always buy from them if they have CDs (these would be DIY punk bands and a variety of old school sounding country bands). My purchases from stores are either dollar bin or new reggae reissues.

                    All of that is to say that I hope companies continue to manufacture them since I have no plans to go back to vinyl until I can find some way to move back to Los Angeles. BTW word is that CDs are still the main physical format in Asia so there should continue to be Asian exports if other markets start to radically slow production.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by Toby Gymshorts View Post
                      Whenever possible I buy CDs. I still love shopping for the physical format, even if it's not the same as vinyl.

                      I could buy a turntable, but no.
                      Yep, my philosophy too.

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                        #12
                        The other reason I have for still buying CDs and ripping them myself - aside the from the excellent points made above about digital ownership (or lack thereof) and cost - is sound quality.

                        I first heard Soundgarden's final album a handful of years ago on the in-flight entertainment system when flying back from Boston to London, thought it was excellent, and so - encouraged by mrs b, who sees my continued love of physical formats as luddism - bought the mp3 album from amazon.

                        The sound quality was shite - overcompressed, hissy, watery nonsense* - so I immediately deleted the files and bought the CD instead, on which the sound quality is crisp, uncompressed and utterly lovely.

                        I've subsequently noticed on the few items I've bought via digial music (usually one-offs where I don't want to buy a whole album, but just want one track) that it's roughly a 50-50 split between sound quality that's good, and sound quality that's poor.

                        *A lot of streaming television suffers from this problem too, I've noticed. Cheap bastards trying to save bandwidth that I've already paid for. Grrrr.

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                          #13
                          That's pretty much the whole point. You buy the CD because the sound quality will always be fairly high.

                          You burn or download albums for convenience only.

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                            #14
                            My entire collection fits perfectly (with room to add) into a lovely old metal trunk that my dad used to lug all his kit when he in the merchant navy but I keep toying with the idea of ditching all the jewel cases and putting my CDs in one of those Case Logic things. Has anyone tried that and is it really worth the effort?

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                              #15
                              US CD sales down alarmingly, due to retailers scaling back support and a weak release schedule:

                              https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.c...l-in-cd-sales/

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                                #16
                                I still love owning the physical thing, so my music is entirely CD-based. I'm too young to have 'got' vinyl the first time around so merely looked on perplexed at its re-fetishisation in recent years. I only ever bought a handful of albums on cassette but have a few hundred on compact disc. I've always looked after my CDs (never left them out of the cases, never handled the face of the disc, etc.) and indeed still have my original Samsung stereo from 1995, so they should be good for a long while yet I hope. I play them on average a lot less than I used to, partly because I don't listen to music in the obsessive way I used to and partly because I've ripped a lot of music off them onto the computer then saved it onto my phone for ease of listening on the go – something that gives the 'best of both worlds', I always feel.

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                                  #17
                                  I never buy music, on any format, at all any more. Spotify is $12 a month. Why would I spend that much or more on a single album? My playlist has over 6,000 songs.

                                  I prefer not to own it. Everything I own has to be stored somewhere and then someday someone will have to carry it all out and do something with it.

                                  I still have all my CDs and DVDs, but I haven’t bought a new one in about a decade and I might just donate them.

                                  If, somehow, the current situation collapses and the only way to listen to all this music is to buy it in physical media, then I’ll deal with that then. But why would I spend all that money before that?

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                                    #18
                                    To support independent artists so that they can buy equipment, make new recordings and fund tours?

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                                      #19
                                      I’d gladly pay more for it Spotify or participate in kickstarters to help bands record music, but either way, I still don’t want to store physical media or have songs take up space on my hard drive. I just want to listen to songs, not possess them.

                                      Concert tickets are expensive. They don’t need to CD sales to pay for their touring expenses, do they? It’s the other way around, I thought.

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post

                                        Concert tickets are expensive. They don’t need to CD sales to pay for their touring expenses, do they? It’s the other way around, I thought.
                                        Since 2001 (Napster is ground zero for a major shift in the business of music), there has been a shift in the role of touring and selling music. In the past bands would tour to help sell more records. Now bands release records to help gain attention that will lead to selling tickets. Minus the booking agent fee if a band is using a booking agent, the ticket sales go directly to the band. But record sales/CD sales go to the label. If the band was paid an advance (either personal advance or recording advance), the label must first make back that money before earning royalties.

                                        But if you're seeing an independent band then they make money from the ticket sales/door and they make money from any records or CDs that people purchase. Of course, ticket sales/door money is pure profit minus the gas/time away from another job is they have another job, but the CDs were paid for up front. In general, someone who sees the band live and buys a CD/record is really helping an independent artist. Streaming services pay crap to most bands. What most people don't understand is that bands have always received royalties for public performances of recorded music. So spotify might pay more than those previous payments, but not much. And what is gone now are sales of CDs/records.

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                                          #21
                                          I'd gladly pay for Spotify if they would get their shit together, tech-wise. I'm working on a collaborative playlist across platforms and account types, and it is a royal pain in the ass. Basic functionality that is available in the spotify app is not available on the in-browser version for the same fucking account. Also, non-paying users not being able to reorder a playlist? Getthefuckouttahere.

                                          CD won't die out while I am alive. I'm planning with the year 2240.

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                                            #22
                                            I'm old school too when it comes to wanting physical copies.

                                            A couple of weeks ago I was about to pay £0.99 for one particular MP3 track, before I realized that it was on a 3x CD set with 60+ tracks for about £5 that included at least 8 other tracks I quite liked.
                                            In fact, having listened through, it garnered about 25 tracks for a driving playlist that my other half really likes when we're on a long journey.

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                                              #23
                                              I still own more than 200 cassettes. And play them.

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                                                #24
                                                I reckon it's got to be pretty soon that they'll be pretty much dead, right? I mean, my family still believe in them, but they are amazingly old-fashioned.

                                                I'd pay more for Spotify, probably. Not a lot more, though. I don't really care that much about music, I'm afraid. I just like to hear old songs I can sing along to in the car.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Also one only needs to check in with http://www.superdeluxeedition.com/ to see that less reissues seem to be CD specific but every week there are a lot of new reissues. It's hard for me to tell if companies will continue to do this. The cost is miminal since the personal and recording advances were paid in the past. The art production is probably minimal. Even if less retail outlets exist, it's easy for companies to sell direct or rely on large on-line retailers.

                                                  I have a mixed sense of things when talking with people in music. Someone from Digikiller, a Reggae reissue label, told me they were done with CDs because they can't sell the CDs. Yet, Dub Store in Japan continues to press reggae reissues on CD. And almost every country band I have seen in the past year has CDs and vinyl for sale. These are DIY old school sounding bands (think Gram Parsons, honky tonk, Hank Williams Sr). CDs have always been cheap to manufacture but greedy corporate labels gouged consumers.

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