2012 - Death of the CD/Physical release?

Technocentral

10000maniacs wrote: »

I predict that the only physical media that will be manufactured beyond 2015 will be audiophile de-luxe editions, SACDs, gold CDs and box sets. These box sets won't have standard CDs in them. Dublins HMV and Tower will be gone, because their current stock is worthless. Anything on their shelves can be purchased for less than €3.00 on Amazon.

In HMV's case CD's haven't been their main business for ages, games, movies and electronics are, in Towers case you might be right, though they do a brisk trade in magazines, t shirts, headphones and electronics and vinyl so may hang on a few years beyond 2015.

Rigsby

Irish Guitarist wrote: »

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I'd never pay to download music. Paying for something that I can't see and hold just seems like a waste of money to me. I don't own an iPod and have no intention of ever buying one.

If the amount of box sets on sale lately are anything to go by CDs still have some life left in them. Maybe record companies will stop releasing albums by newer artists on CD but older albums and box sets of unreleased material by older artists will be available for a while yet. The record companies will feel they have to have loads of bonus tracks, fancy packaging and CD booklets the size of a book. The days of a casual music fan buying a greatest hits album with a flimsy booklet are probably gone but anyone that really loves music will always appreciate being able to read liner notes, look at photographs and read details about who wrote and played on a track.

If the only way to obtain music was to pay to download it I'd never buy new music again.

I agree with everything here. Thought I was the only one who felt this way.

Nolanger

I had lots of old vinyl that's yet to get a CD release.

viadah

Back when CDs became more abundant, I swore I'd never abandon cassettes. Evolution has a way of creeping up on you, leaving certain firmly held ideals to nostalgia, no matter how much we may want to be left to our Emotional Crystallisation.

Rigsby

viadah wrote: »

Back when CDs became more abundant, I swore I'd never abandon cassettes. Evolution has a way of creeping up on you, leaving certain firmly held ideals to nostalgia, no matter how much we may want to be left to our Emotional Crystallisation.

Very true, but evolution has not crept up on me yet. I'm not sure how long it is since ipods and being able to download became the norm. I have never used either, so at this stage I doubt if I ever will. IMO, nothing can beat having the actual CD or vinyl in your hand along with the cover art, liner notes, etc. This, quite apart from the superior sound quality. AFAIK, when you download an album, it does not give you the names of the musicians and the instruments they play (correct me if I'm wrong). I have discovered many a good band by taking note of the musicians on a given CD or vinyl that I particularly like, then keeping an eye out to see if they have brought out their own CD with their own band. Then I take a note of these musicians for future reference.

SilverScreen

Rigsby wrote: »

AFAIK, when you download an album, it does not give you the names of the musicians and the instruments they play (correct me if I'm wrong). I have discovered many a good band by taking note of the musicians on a given CD or vinyl that I particularly like, then keeping an eye out to see if they have brought out their own CD with their own band. Then I take a note of these musicians for future reference.

They very rarely do with mp3 files themselves but you can always go online and look up information on the artist yourself. Wikipedia and last.fm are good for this and with last.fm it also recommends similar artists. Also if you are using foobar2000 as your music player you can integrate last.fm information into it such as artist biography.

Technocentral

Nolanger wrote: »

I had lots of old vinyl that's yet to get a CD release.

If anything vinyl is on the up, if you go into Tower you'll notice that the size of their vinyl section has expanded in the last year or so and you'll see loads of younger people perusing and buying stuff not just 40 yr olds plus like me, I think that lots of music fans are realising that you can't feel any real love for a piece of invisible computer code or even in my case CD's.

Technocentral

viadah wrote: »

Back when CDs became more abundant, I swore I'd never abandon cassettes. Evolution has a way of creeping up on you, leaving certain firmly held ideals to nostalgia, no matter how much we may want to be left to our Emotional Crystallisation.

I completely disagree, just because something is new doesn't necessarily mean its better, in the case of Blu ray vs VHS it absolutely is, but in the case of mp3's and other audio downloads it isn't, its not necessarily nostalgia for instance I grew up with cassettes which were a pile of ****e so I don't miss them. I also have had ipods since they came first and love listening to stuff on the move so I'm not a luddite, but at home I'm primarily a vinyl listener.

lordgoat

i hate Cd's, always have. Those plastic jewel cases are just awful.

I download or stream pretty much everything, and for the real good stuff i'll buy it on vinyl. The only CD's i buy are small/new bands that put them out and don't have a vinyl option.

viadah

New doesn't have to be better or worse, the industry will dictate according to profit rather than preference.

Technocentral

viadah wrote: »

New doesn't have to be better or worse, the industry will dictate according to profit rather than preference.

Of course they will and since the vast majority of people don't care about quality they will concentrate on mp3s unfortunately.

rcaz

I'm surprised format matters so much to people. Good music is good music on plastic or magnets.

Rigsby

El Pr0n wrote: »

I'm surprised format matters so much to people. Good music is good music on plastic or magnets.

The music may be good but the reproduction is not, with MP3's etc. The very fact that it is good music, makes me want to hear it reproduced in the best possible way. Granted MP3's etc have the advantage of handiness, mobility, etc but for me, there is no comparison between the warm sound of vinyl against the cold clinical sound of MP3's.

That's why format matters to me at least..

Rigsby

lordgoat wrote: »

i hate Cd's, always have. Those plastic jewel cases are just awful.

I agree about the jewel cases. If this is your only reason for not liking CD's, you could always throw away the jewel case and get one of the various types of wallets. Makes for more storage space too.

rcaz

Rigsby wrote: »

The music may be good but the reproduction is not, with MP3's etc. The very fact that it is good music, makes me want to hear it reproduced in the best possible way. Granted MP3's etc have the advantage of handiness, mobility, etc but for me, there is no comparison between the warm sound of vinyl against the cold clinical sound of MP3's.

That's why format matters to me at least..

Get it on FLAC then!

And the warm/cold thing... Surely if the reproduction of vinyl is so good, then it shouldn't have any discernable 'sound'?

I like vinyl. It necessarily holds more information than any sort of quantised digital media. But you can get very high resolution digital media, where the quantisation is so infinitesimally small that humans can't notice anymore.

The real reason I like vinyl is because it looks impressive and it makes you do a bit of work before you can listen to the music, it imparts a kind of ritual on listening.

Oasis_Dublin

Hoepfully the CD doesn't die. I like having a collection of CDs on display. It's a bit of a statement really! Far better than only having downloaded versions on a pc or ipod.

I've never legally downloaded but it seems like a nothing experience. Where is the effort in it?!

rcaz

Oasis_Dublin wrote: »

Where is the effort in it?!

I think the idea is that it's really easy

Scubadevils

Just reading the below article in the Irish Times which certainly indicates the CD is here to stay for now... its a pity the reference points are the like of Susan Boyle etc but I suppose I can't expect it to be Autechre :pac:

The disc versus the download: is the CD really set to disappear?

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/1217/1224309200893.html

You can download a huge music library without ever leaving home, but reports of the compact disc’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, writes BRIAN BOYD
IT WAS INEVITABLE. The report went like this. By the end of next year the major record labels are planning to have abandoned the CD and replaced it with downloads and streams through iTunes and similar music services. That’s because the CD is an anachronism from a pre-online era, according to the online music magazine Side-Line. CDs won’t disappear completely, the report continued, but the format will occupy as small a niche as vinyl does now. Its end not only makes economic sense, as downloads are cheaper than a physical product to provide, but is also in tune with how we consume music in these days of the smartphone and the tablet.

The story was widely blogged and tweeted, and almost everyone accepted that technological progress had lapped the physical CD and that we were going to live our cultural life happily ever after in the cloud.

There’s just one problem with the Side-Line story: it’s wrong. At first it looked solid: more and more people are opting for downloads, and CDs have the drawback, when they don’t sell as well as expected, of leaving retailers and record labels with return and storage costs. Downloads, on the other hand, incur no packaging, transport or storage costs and minimal distribution costs.

Music stores have been giving CDs less and less floor space in recent years, as video games are now the big sellers on the high street. More people are getting their music from iTunes and other digital services, and a whole generation of music consumers each own hundreds of albums but have never touched a CD.

After Side-Line published its story, people started to wonder about magazines, books and films. Surely, the argument ran, if it’s cheaper, easier and more convenient to acquire music, books and films online, we’re looking at the end not only of the CD but also of physical copies of books and films as well.

BUT WHAT IF THE END is not nigh for the CD? And what if that means our cultural future will not be entirely digital? Side-Line contacted three major labels – Universal, EMI and Sony – about its story, but all declined to comment. That probably fuelled a grassy-knoll theory that the majors had privately decided to kill off the CD next year but didn’t want the news to be reported too soon.

This week, at least, it was easy to find music-industry people who will talk about the future of the compact disc. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide, and CD sales are its lifeblood. “This story was first written back in October, and as far as I can see it hasn’t gained any credibility at all,” says Adrian Strain, the federation’s director of communications. “CDs still account for more than 60 per cent of industry revenues globally – more than 70 per cent in some markets, such as Germany – and there is still healthy consumer demand for the physical product. This is despite the rapid growth we have seen in the industry’s digital revenues.”

Gennaro Castlado, a spokesman for HMV, says, “I don’t think we should write off the CD just yet, as there are still a huge number of people who like the idea of owning and collecting music in physical formats, especially when they can make their own digital copies to get the best of both worlds. There will be a viable market for CDs for quite a while to come.”

Universal, the world’s biggest record label, says it has no intention of stopping production of CDs, pointing out that discs have made up 72 per cent of album sales in the UK and Ireland this year. If you look at last week’s Irish album chart, you will find that the number-one album, Christmas by Michael Bublé, sold 10,610 copies, of which only 654 were digital copies.

DOMINO RECORDS, HOME to artists such as Arctic Monkeys and King Creosote, is one of the biggest independent labels. Its director, John Dyer, says, “I’ve just been looking at the digital sales for Susan Boyle. They amount to 0.5 per cent of her total sales. The other 99.5 per cent is for CD sales. What you get with a lot of these stories about new technology killing off old formats is an incredibly American- and UK-centric view of the world. I know of certain European territories where the people are just culturally averse to using their credit card online to buy a download. Spain, to take just one example, doesn’t really go for the digital format.”

Susan Boyle illustrates where the story about the supposed demise of the CD was right. The people who buy her music tend not to use smartphones or iTunes. The same is broadly true for classical recordings and for country music and rock’n’roll, all of which appeal to an older, CD-buying audience.

With more contemporary genres, the gap between digital and physical sales is narrowing. Over the next few years, CDs will become less important in sales of pop, hip hop, urban, and r’n’b, as teenage music fans are already used to the one-click model of getting music.

Age alone isn’t the defining factor. Certain types of consumers demand the physical album, book or film. They enjoy the tactile sensation, the artwork and the way the objects are presented. People also like to look at and organise their collections, not just move them around a desktop with a mouse.

The CD-is-dead theory also assumes that people can afford high-speed broadband or that they can easily spend €500 on new devices. The drift to digital will continue because of its convenience and its generally more competitive prices. But the CD is safe for now. A large section of us, for whatever reason – economic, social or personal taste – will always prefer the tangible product.
Why CDs still rock

They look great Granted, they are made of unlovely plastic, but they are shiny and, even after three decades, look futuristic. And the music they hold is read by lasers. Which is still very Tomorrow’s World.

The sonic experience Yes, audiophile anoraks might think music should be listened to only on a beach at midnight surrounded by scented candles and only on vinyl. But, for the rest of us, the CD does the job just fine.

You can freeze them Apparently, if you put your CDs into a freezer for a few days the result is superior sound quality. It can also remove scratches.

The album sleeves Never as big as with vinyl, but with a CD at least there’s a bit of art to it. Downloads have made the album cover almost invisible.

Arts and crafts You can make sculptures from them. I once made a beautiful shiny fish from a Westlife CD.

viadah

http://www.side-line.com/news_comments.php?id=46980_0_2_0_C

Worth noting that this original article takes its quotes from an indie label, Side-Line is a largely underground 'zine, and the article came after, if I'm correct, the riots in England that burned out a lot of physical stock of CDs from indie labels. From an underground point of view then, it makes sense to dispense of the cost of production and storage of CDs, and would therefore be easier for such indie labels to talk about the shift from CD to digital. A note at the end of the article has been added, claiming they've received unofficial reports from major labels that the CD is planned to be phased out, but no official confirmation or even unofficial timescale, since the controversial article was printed. The only official comment is from an indie label, the rest of the article is largely conjecture. The question of printed media is also raised briefly.

In my opinion, the matter has most definitely been raised and will happen eventually. One gets the impression that Side-Line may have just jumped the gun a little since its strongest ties are to indie labels.

Oasis_Dublin

Scubadevils wrote: »

Just reading the below article in the Irish Times which certainly indicates the CD is here to stay for now... its a pity the reference points are the like of Susan Boyle etc but I suppose I can't expect it to be Autechre :pac:

That really sounds like an NME blog I read recently.