It's not something you think about most days. In fact, it's almost taken for granted: The compact disc's days as a viable medium for music are nearly over...If you want to resell your CDs, it may be best to start now. Remember what happened to the "value" of your old VCR tapes...
Netflix recently hiked the price of its per-month combo streaming and DVD rental fee from $10 to $16. Consumers—mostly those with no sense of what they were (and still are) getting, value-wise—freaked out. But the writing's on the wall: DVD rentals are on the way out, unlimited streaming... is the way forward...
And as DVD demand bottoms out, so will optical-media manufacturing plants. It's the sort of inverse compound interest that piles up at the crossing of thresholds—never neat and tidy or precisely predictable in terms of timelines, but we're well past the event horizon here and simply waiting out the protracted death spin.
In fact for some, the moment's already arrived. Auto manufacturer Ford admitted a few months ago that it would drop CD players from its fleet of vehicles entirely, switching over to—what else?—a USB-based audio interface.
27 September 2011
Music CDs are so yesterday...
Techland says "it's time to kiss them goodbye"...
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I wouldn't mind the demise of CDs so much except that the downloads that are replacing them are crap. MP3 is a dumbed-down format. If you want something that sounds good you need a better format, but it's pretty hard to find downloads in anything except MP3.
ReplyDeleteI'm certainly not going to get rid of my 3000+ cds... Digital music is so... empty. I'm even considering buying LPs now.
ReplyDeleteOf the CDs I own (about 400) less than ten percent are available for purchase in a digital format. I do occasionally buy digital songs, but almost always because either a) that's the only way they are available, as with some independent artists, or 2) they're available in a high-quality format, such as FLAC.
ReplyDeleteAs for DVDs, ISPs are making claims about how streaming is costing them, and charging higher prices for those who stream too much content, or throttling accounts who do too much streaming.
Karl said: "it's pretty hard to find downloads in anything except MP3."
ReplyDeleteLOL, well yes, legally that is true ...
When I am working I have an MP3 player and a cd player that I can rig up to my custom made boom box (car amplifier run from a power supply going into a 2-way speaker in a box).
ReplyDeleteEverytime I start trying to listen to some of my old cd's, that have been taken care of very carefully and they get to skippin...
The one thing that I would really miss about the disappearance of DVD's are the extras. In fact, I have been known to rent DVD's just for the extras. Another problem with streaming videos is when watching TV shows. You only get (or I should say, I only got) the first episode of a whole seasons episodes, and I don't always want to watch just the first episode; usually the best episodes are not the first episode in a season, or series.
ReplyDeleteAren't CDs digital?
ReplyDelete--Swift Loris
And of course you won't really own the downloads, the same way you don't own an e-book. You won't be able to lend or resell it. What you will have bought will have been stripped of over 90% of its original musical value, as all MP3s are.
ReplyDelete@Karl, I agree. It seems to me that technology isn't keeping pace with what people want. New formats keep getting invented to solve the problems of previous formats, but they always come with a new set of unforeseen problems.
ReplyDeletePeople love vinyl because of its rich warm tone, but the records get scratched and warped. Then came cassettes, but the tape jams and you have to fast forward and rewind to get to the track you want. Then CDs and DVDs came along and you could skip to whatever point you wanted, but I don't own a single CD that isn't scratched. MP3s don't get scratched and they're very portable, but the sound quality is abysmal. Now I guess streaming and subscriptions are the wave of the future, but most people I know would prefer to OWN their music and movie collections, and ISPs are capping bandwidth, so that doesn't look promising. What does that leave us? I don't know. I wonder why computer technology is developing by leaps and bounds, and yet these annoying little media problems keep hounding the recording industry.
Those movie torrents have to come from an original DVD or Blu-ray
ReplyDeleteWe'll have physical storage but it will not be the dominant game in town.
ReplyDeleteA physical storage device sitting on the shelf in it's case doesn't crash, works in a blackout (you can't stream in a blackout, sure you need batteries) and can be swapped with others.
Instead of selling your CD's, do what I did.. rip your hundreds of CD's to a nice digital format, then store them in the attic. That way you stay legal, and you don't have to re-buy your favorite music. Plus, you can choose a higher-quality format than what you can buy digitally.
ReplyDeleteNever ever going to let go of my CD's, I still buy them when I get the time and money and I prefer them over MP3 players over time because they seem a little more versitile (like when I doing some housework I'll put on some Boards of Canada). The other reason I like cd's is because like phsyical books and sketchpads, they will never crash or die or be wiped out by an dying computer.
ReplyDeleteBuying CDs used now for a dollar... might sell them in 20 years for 20. In the meantime, I rip them at high res and enjoy them constantly. this industry has noone to blame but themselves
ReplyDeleteI gave up on physical media almost entirely about two years ago. It has bewildered the people who buy me xmas presents. I still got several books and DVDs, despite my request not to. It's just too much clutter. Between my Android, computer, and internet-to-tv box there's no reason to have physical books, CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just clutter that I won't use.
ReplyDeleteThe way I listen to music is difficult to do with CDs. I have an exceedingly short attention span and there are very few bands that I like enough to listen to even 5 of their songs in a row. I like an assortment and it's easier (and cheaper) to have tons of mp3s or listen to streaming radio (which is almost exclusively what I do) than it is to own tons of CDs and a mega-shuffler.
Thinking about it I can't even remember the last time I listened to a CD. It must have been at least 6 months, probably more.
ReplyDeleteMy wife bought me an MP3 player for by 43rd birthday but I took it back; too comlicated. Now I have a small stack of CDs, a boom box and headphones. Bennet, Sinatra, Tayor, Cash, Stephens, Pavoratti... I enjoy them immensely.
ReplyDelete