How the CD lost its sheen - a 30 year tale of rise and fall

Great point. CD's didn't seem so precious after you'd thrown out a dozen or so free ones - with full color graphics - that kept coming whether you liked it or not.

 

I've really never understood the pricing issue. CDs at about $20 were being marketed as luxury audiophile products (if you didn't care about audio, the cassette copies were plentiful at about $6) alongside Japanese LPs at $25 and European pressings at about $18. MFSL LPs were, what, $30 at the time?

Cut to 30 years later and CDs are now between $15-$20. With inflation factored in, that's a huge price drop from when they were first introduced.

 

Cassettes were the top selling format when CDs were introduced and continued to be for five or six more years after introduction...CDs were never intended to replace vinyl as a format.

 

And thanks to Amazon-CDs now are worth next to nothing.Bad if your selling or trading them in great if you want to build up a collection!

 

I've bought more CD's in the past 3 years than the previous 25 years put together. I'm having a ball and the price drop is fantastic for me, no complaints here! I only wish film scores were also available on CD at sensible prices. What's with everything being a "Limited Edition of 3000" these days? Make them bigger productions and lower the prices please.

 

Thanks this is perfect for a rainy slow work day and a Friday to boot. Cheers

 

I disagree. You can't compete with "free," no matter how hard you try. Lowering prices, promoting quality musicians -- as determined by who, exactly, middle-aged men on a music discussion board? -- supporting indies instead of chains: None of this would have changed the earthquake of Napster and its ilk on the industry landscape.

I've made this comparison many times before, but if you could hit a couple buttons on your computer and have it spit out a working facsimile of a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord for a small fraction of the cost of an original, would the immediate decline of the automotive industry mean that all the auto companies, engineers and executives were ignorant, greedy, short-sighted fools? Because that's essentially what happened to the record labels. The music industry was just the canary in the coalmine of Internet commerce.

 

I certainly agree that they were worried about putting studio master quality in the consumers hands (I think they still are), I doubt it according to any sort of plan.

Nothing can help "Memory Almost Full". The compression was built into the recording and mix.

This was already detailed in the excellent book "Appetite For Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Recording Industry in the Digital Age".

 

Amazon has also made books almost worthless, so I was able to bite on your recommendation and order Appetite for Self-Destruction for about $1.75 + shipping.

 

Sadly, it never seems to be the titles that I want that go for next to nothing. The ones I want only ever seem to be available at Discogs for around $100.

 

Perhaps yes, if it turned out that all auto manufacturers conspired for a decade or so to keep auto prices artificially (very) high, even while people knew the real costs. And they had switched to spitting out cars from their computers already.

 

If frontline CDs had been $5.00, that still would have been $5.00 more than Free.

To continue with the comparison, if people could download free Accords and Camrys, it wouldn't matter if a genuine Accord or Camry were $5000 instead of $25,000.

 

Although I love my vinyl, I still love my CD's just as much. I think the vinyl resurgence is the music industries method of propaganda to get control back of the manufacture and distribution of recorded music. I have no problem with this as all the lemmings are going to ditch their CD's for vinyl and I will be there to take it off of their hands for pennies on the dollar. It is a win/win situation for me.

 

Maybe not at first, but that became the intention for sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

"The CD was planned to be the successor of the gramophone record for playing music, rather than primarily as a data storage medium."

 

I know exactly how you feel. Whenever I discover some music through reviews or links / recommendations on the web, I'm usually too late to the party. The item has been deleted and only currently selling used on Ebay, Amazon Marketplace or Discogs for silly money. When you've worked yourself up to acquire something it's a tough call to drop it at the last minute due to inflated prices.

 

30 years is a pretty good run. Not a lot of early 80s technology lasted as long.

I love CDs and will miss them when they finally stop being made!

 

If the new CD's I bought throughout the 90's had been $5, I'd have a lot more CD's and have a lot better opinion of the labels and the RIAA. iTunes finally proved that people will still pay for music if it is priced right and convenient. By the time the MP3 came around, I was already feeling ripped off and ready for the next thing. MP3's were free because the labels chose to ignore that technology (after making it entirely possible), as the article in the top post points out.

 

Thanks for sharing! Fun article. I cringed when I read the part about most consumers not being able to tell the difference between a CD and an MP3.

 

The music labels tried to kill the "single" by taking advantage of the rise of album-oriented rock in the 70s. They make more money by selling whole albums. The 80s saw a rise of the singles market again (thanks to the Brits). They died again in the 90s with the rise of CDs. By 2000, CD prices were high and the quality was low (pop albums only having a few good tunes). With the advent of iTunes, we now have the ultimate singles market which is what most fans really want. This and the competition from other forms of personal entertainment (Video Games, DVD, Cable, Internet, Social Media) is the decline of the CD.

 

I can't tell the difference between a high quality MP3 and CD.

 

Most folks are glorified radio listeners (not a bad thing...just an observation). That is why streaming will be the ultimate for them. We enthusiasts will have LPs, CDs, Hi-Res files, etc. to fulfill our hobby. The end result is CDs will only be sold to those who really "need" them. The environment will be all the better for it (less waste).

 

I'm so totally un-engulfed with the demise of cd's. So long as I can still have a functioning cd player, cd's will still be just as, or even moreso, important to me for all time to come.

I've found just about everything I've wanted on cd. And there's a vast selection still awaiting my acquisition.

I remain detached from the need for a 'new', to me, wholesale changeover.

I don't mind occasionally playing with new tools, but I'll keep my wood handled hammer at my side.

 

Except that the record labels are responsible for NONE of the creativity that goes into the music, the artwork and packaging, etc. They are simply the funding for most of it (at least early in a band's career) and the marketing. They're so concerned with what goes into an album yet had no problem taking $14 out of every $15 a CD sold for as pure profit for themselves. Greedy SOBs. I still buy physical music and always will, but the industry and labels got what they deserved, of that I've never had a doubt.

 

Nah-I'm not an expert, but I've read up on this one a little. It has to do with a niche market of film lovers. We do tend to be perfectionist, want those booklets, commentaries and trailers. Moreover, we love movie collectibles and memorabilia. It may be only supra deluxe imprints like Criterion and Arrow which survive, but survive they probably will. Just not like in the "Boom" era.

Tangible media, because sometimes your IP shuts down. I don't want everything online; why would anyone else?

 

I just found the deluxe DVD of 'Cold Mountain' in great shape for $3.25 shipping included, on eBay. I like the movie a lot, but I really like the 'words and music' of Cold Mountain, 90 minutes long, on the extra disc.

I mean really....if you want something like this...for only $3.25 and that included shipping...how could anyone let it go ?