The compact disc’s last stand
Yesterday, I got a text message from my cousin asking if my son wanted any CD shelves, because he was getting rid of his. I texted him back “LOL CDs.”
Our CDs – thousands of them – are stacked on a floor to ceiling shelf unit in the garage. All those compact discs have been ripped onto the various computers in our house, shrunk down to invisible little bytes that take up no space in the house. All of our subsequent music has been bought in digital form (save for my occasional vinyl purchases).
If there was any doubt that the compact disc is dying, look no further than Universal’s announcement that they will start selling most CDs for ten dollars or less.
The Universal Music Group could rewrite U.S. music pricing when it tests a new frontline pricing structure, which is designed to get single CDs in stores at $10, or below.
Beginning in the second quarter and continuing through most of the year, the company’s Velocity program will test lower CD prices. Single CDs will have the suggested list prices of $10, $9, $8, $7 and $6.
[…]
“We think [the new pricing program] will really bring new life into the physical format,” Universal Music Group Distribution president/CEO Jim Urie said.
I think Universal is wrong in thinking that the problem is pricing. We live in an age of instant gratification. You hear a song you like, you plug in your iPod, go to the iTunes store or whatever the Zune equivalent is and that song is yours ten seconds later. Who wants to go to a store to buy music? Or even order a CD online? Sure, you never have to leave your computer chair to do that, but then there’s the waiting for it to be delivered. Digital music purchase is the ultimate in home delivery.
Way back in some year I don’t care to remember – let’s call it 1981 – I was working in a video rental store. It was one of the first of its kind on Long Island. For just $75.00 a year, you got the privilege of paying $3.95 a night to rent a limited selection of movies, mostly MGM classics, low budget horror movies and tons of porn. My boss may have not had a lot of foresight when it came to stocking movies, but he was smart enough to know when a gig was going to run out. He saw the prices for VHS movies coming down and knew it wouldn’t be long before he couldn’t charge ridiculous prices to pillars of community who called ahead for their copies of Bad Girls and Debbie Does Dallas to be slipped into brown paper bags.
So he sent me to a trade show, where I was to listen to talks on the future of home entertainment. I spent an entire Saturday afternoon in a hotel conference room at JFK Airport watching haggard salespeople talk about the future.
That’s where I saw my first compact disc. The salesman held the disc up for all to see and proclaimed it be the Next Big Thing. He talked about the bulkiness of vinyl, the scratches and skips on our records, the difficulty in storing large collections of music. He held the CD up to the light and made it shine for us. It was like magic. How could all that music fit on one little disc? We were mesmerized.
My boss didn’t think CDs would ever become a thing. He cited the tiny little album art and liner notes as the main reason compact discs would never catch on. I’d call him shortsighted, but a year or so after that he turned the video rental store into a video game store and made a boatload of money. Most of it off of me.
Later in the 80s I was working in a record store when we had to clear a small space next to the classical records for the arrival of compact discs. Everyone dismissed them. The jewel boxes came housed in cardboard boxes the size of a small child. The prices were exorbitant. We called them novelties. They’d never catch on. Even though the big name artists were all latching on to the new technology, touting the cleaner sounds, we were all “Yea, call me when the Butthole Surfers release something on CD. We’ll stick to our scratchy vinyl.”
Six months later, half the record wall was replaced by new shelving for CDs. A year or less after that, the cassette department was gone.
CDs had a nice, long run but it was only a matter of time before something came along to push them off the shelves. Turns out it was a thing that needs no shelf space. The ease of buying digital music – and, of course, the pirating of – have done to the CDs what Georgetown did to my NCAA bracket: made it damn near obsolete.
Universal can throw as many life preservers as they want to the drowning medium. Fact is, compact discs will some day be looked upon with the same curiosity as today’s teenagers look at cassettes.
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Vinyl is making quite a come-back as a collectable, and because it’s not bytes of information with holes inbetween, it sounds better than digital. Maybe CDs will make a comeback too someday. A better marketplace for buying and selling, especially one that’s been created for buying and selling music, will help keep the vinyl, and the CDs, around. Luckily, one already exists at GEMM.com and it’s been around since 1994.
I still buy CDs. In fact, I don’t like only owning something in a digital format (though, it’ll do in a pinch). I’ll tell you why:
What happens if all that digital music, for one reason or another, gets deleted? That’s why. I need a hard copy, a place to go back to when something goes wrong. No matter how many times you might back up your music online or on other drives, data is pretty damned fragile. One wrong click, one crash too many, or if the place you’re storing your music online doesn’t like what you’re uploading… Well, Bye Bye Love.
Until sites like iTunes and Amazon start offering their customers free and easy re-downloads of the music they’ve purchased, I will never be able to fully commit to the digital format. As far as I know, iTunes only allows limited re-downloads and Amazon (which is otherwise superior to iTunes) doesn’t offer it at all. We conquered DRM. Now, in my opinion, this is the last major hurdle consumers have to get past, and I shouldn’t think it would be a difficult one.
The thing is I love vinyl and with a lot of new pressings of vinyl you get a high quality download too. So why buy a cheap, small and fragile CD when you can get the same music on a rich, substantial format like vinyl and a download for your computer?
It’s interesting – if/when the price of CDs goes below that of a digital album, then:
(IF I happen to be in a music store and
IF I happen to find an album I want)
or
(IF I feel like waiting until I can go to a record store instead of buying something on impulse via iTunes/Amazon MP3 Store)
THEN
I’d definitely buy the CD.
Otherwise, the price change doesn’t matter at all to me.
I am with “sharpless”: So an EMP takes out your equipment. Let’s say it’s a freak electrical storm near your house. Let’s say it’s some other kind of activity. Well, all your electronic files stored in digital format are erased.
Guess what? I still have my physical copy. I continue to buy CDs. In fact, I still listen to vinyl. I enjoy listening to it, even though I have, like most, transferred a lot of my vinyl and CDs to digital format so I can listen to them on the computer, through the TV, on the iPod, etc.
Still, call me old-fashioned, I like owning the physical media. At least then there should be no debate as to whether I own the rights to a copy of that music…! Oh, and yeah, I still listen to cassettes too!
I gotta disagree with you to a degree. Music as a cultural form is one that seems to promote a fetishism of the object. It would, in part, explain the recent resurgence of vinyl as not only a popularly accepted form of listening to music, but consumption as well as many box stores have begun to sell vinyl. And then there’s the cassette revival, which has been in the works some time now in a number of subcultures (most notably in noise/ambient sound circles):
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/116282-reconsidering-the-revival-of-cassette-tape-culture/
http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7764-this-is-not-a-mixtape/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/jan/22/eighties-revival-decade
Though both have been promoted as something of a beloved art form/music format, I will give you that CDs seem to bare the brunt of music consumption disdain. Though I know somewhere out there there are folks who love the format of the CD, even when countless could care less about the format. But, as long as special edition vinyl and small-run cassettes send music nerds in a tizzy (and music nerds are, arguably, the ones who drive music as an industry as they tend to throw down hundreds of dollars on music in a physical format), soon enough there will be a niche market of people vying for rare CD-Rs and any number of CD-R labels. And then there’s Spiritualized’s artistic take on CDs:
http://www.prefixmag.com/news/spiritualized-reissue-ladies-and-gentlemen/32753/
And that is an art unto itself.
[...] True/Slant Six months later, half the record wall was replaced by new shelving for CDs. A year or less after that, the cassette department was gone. CDs had a nice, … See all stories on this topic This entry was posted on Mar 23rd, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Home Shelving.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can Leave a response. [...]
I think it’s a personal thing with me. I just don’t love CDs the way I love other forms of music. Vinyl, cassettes, even 8tracks all have a personality inherent in their form. CDs to me seem cold, I can’t feel anything for them like I feel for my vinyl copy of Husker Du’s New Day Rising or my Guns n Roses cassette. Hell, I recently searched eBay for Boston’s first album on 8track, just for the sake of nostalgia. I will never have any emotion attached to a CD the way I do to my records.
IT’s still essential to keep hard copies of things on your pc/mac. If you get a virus (and yes, macs CAN get viruses) and your computer crashes, all of that music- and the money put into it- gets trashed.
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I enjoy music by listening to music; not by fondling a disc, vinyl or otherwise.
I’m with you with the personal thing. CD was the first digital compression of music. It’s hard to attach any emotion to something digital, something you can’t feel a texture to when you handle it. Sure you can be emotionally touched by what is stored… but CD was essentially a storage medium rather than the thing that made the sound.
I just said “was”… CD was. I guess I’m over it.
Someone commented it’s still important to keep hard copies… and that’s garbage. A CD is basically a disk holding ones and zero’s. It’s a storage medium for files.
It’s important to keep BACK ups. Doesn’t matter where or on what. Wether it’s a detachable HD or spread over burnable DVD’s or on a server somewhere.
Also, Macs don’t have any virus’s. I can say that with some authority, I know them inside out. It is possible to install malware of sorts but you really have to be downloading it from somewhere dodgy (Only reports are from pirated software) then physically allowing it access to your system.
The real threat, unless you are dumb enough to be virus prone, is that hard drives die. Randomly. They are physical moving piece of machinery, and therefore prone to malfunction.
Backup, backup, back up… and keep it in a different building.
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