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

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Dhreview16, May 29, 2015.

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  1. Dhreview16

    Dhreview16 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    London UK
    There is a good article today on Britain's Guardian newspaper website - www.theguardian.com/music - on the history of the CD, how it rose to prominence from its origins in the early 80s, and how the music industry failed to spot the signals that suggested it would decline, failing to grasp that once music was digitalised through codes it was ripe for takeover by MP3s and the like, and of course the usual short-term ism.

    Quite long, but a good read if you are interested. Hope the link works !
     
  2. The Wanderer

    The Wanderer Seeker of Truth

    Location:
    NYC
    CD still the go-to physical format for me
     
  3. tomd

    tomd Senior Member

    Location:
    Brighton,Colorado
    Thanks for the link-really enjoyed reading it
     
  4. Tim Wilson

    Tim Wilson Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kaneohe, Oahu, HI
    Yes, great stuff! Thanks!
     
  5. Dennis Metz

    Dennis Metz Born In A Motor City south of Detroit

    Location:
    Fonthill, Ontario
    Hasn't lost it's sheen for me. :cheers:
     
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  6. Dreadnought

    Dreadnought I'm a live wire. Look at me burn.

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    Learn something new everyday: “Ryko” is Japanese for “sound from a flash of light”. :cool:

    I always admire the smarter guys:
    "90s executives were too busy worrying about the next quarter to consider the next decade. The status quo was perfect, until it wasn’t. “My biggest bugbear about this industry is that they all think short-term,” says Webster. “Nobody ever thinks long-term. All these executives were sitting there being paid huge bonuses on increased profits and they didn’t care. I don’t think anyone saw it coming. I remember the production guy at Virgin saying, ‘In a few years, you’re going to be able to carry all the music you want around on something the size of a credit card.’ And we all laughed. Don’t be ridiculous! How can you do that?' "

    "Webster remembers one industry Cassandra, Maurice Oberstein – who ran CBS and then Polygram in the UK – making a similar point. “He was the only one who went: ‘We’re making a huge mistake. We’re putting studio-quality masters into the hands of people.’ And he was absolutely right in that respect. Once you made a CD with ones and zeroes it was only a matter of time before that was converted into something that was easily transferable.' "
     
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  7. Interesting article, thanks for the heads up!

    However one thing it neglected to mention that also affected CD sales around 1999/2000 is the advent of DVD. I, for one, left music alone for the best part of a decade to (re)discover my love of movies which hitherto could only be viewed on crappy pan and scan VHS tapes. When DVD came out I became a movie-buff overnight. My film collection is as big as my CD collection. As CD's were beginning to sound poor due to loudness issues I rarely played them at the time and movies on DVD were far more exciting to me, especially rare, old, cult or obscure foreign films that I wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. Today I'm more back on music but DVD definitely dented my CD purchasing, there is no doubt.

    I seem to recall that they said DVD was "the fastest growing home entertainment media of all time"? If everybody was buying DVD's they were potentially spending money that might have otherwise gone towards CD purchases? I never bought films on VHS due to the dismal quality but DVD changed all that. I know everyone I spoke to at the time was hyped up and talking about films and no one ever mentioned music. Listening to music was something you did with the radio in the car. Britpop was dead and there wasn't much "obvious" exciting new music about.
     
    Last edited: May 29, 2015
  8. Jonboy

    Jonboy Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cape Town
    Interesting article - thanks :)

    And I agree with SteveM - I had the same experience.
     
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  9. Good article, but they confuse bootleg cds with pirate/counterfeit cds.
     
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  10. John B Good

    John B Good Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    NS, Canada
    Grassroots.

     
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  11. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    It's not as if Sony/Philips invented binary code and the Internet, though. Had the industry somehow conspired to not digitize consumer music, eventually individuals would have on their own, and needledrops/tape rips would have been exchanged online just as MP3s derived from CDs were.

    To me, it's kind of silly to argue that the music labels should have known that CD would lower barriers to market pirates two decades later. The same pirating would have occurred anyway, and the industry would never have enjoyed its two decades of unprecedented success with the CD format.
     
    Last edited: May 29, 2015
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  12. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member

    Location:
    Bretagne
    Some great quotes in that article:

    In the Tomorrow's World clip: "Whether there's a market for this kind of disc remains to be seen" :D

    "The CD was cheaper than vinyl to manufacture, transport and rack in stores, while selling for up to twice as much. Even as costs fell, prices rose."
    They certainly got punished for all that ripping-off.

    The CD: “…a maximalist repository of irrelevant information, most of which was ignored by the human ear,”
    Lossless :biglaugh:
     
  13. daveidmarx

    daveidmarx Forem Residunt

    Location:
    Astoria, NY USA
    Maybe realize their mistake about putting "studio-quality masters in the hands of people" is what led to current music new releases sounding as crappy as they do? With the idea that they can re-sell "improved quality" reissues of say 'Memory Almost Full' by Paul McCartney (a notoriously bad sounding release that is ear-splittingly loud) where they improve the sound quality in increments. So with each reissue, the record companies could milk the same catalog at least a few more times.
     
    Last edited: May 29, 2015
  14. Burning Tires

    Burning Tires Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atlanta, GA
    Agreed. This one caught my attention the most:

    “[Labels] would cut backroom deals with retailers not to let the price drop. The average price was $14 and the cost had gotten down almost to a dollar, so the rest was pure profit.”

    That right there soured me on the record labels. We had been promised when CD's first came out that the prices would drop over time. As a teenager, every dollar mattered to me and I noticed that the prices never dropped. It became more and more obvious when you could buy and burn your own CD-R's. So when the opportunity finally came to get all the music I always wanted - for free - I took it! At least for a little while...
     
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  15. Dreadnought

    Dreadnought I'm a live wire. Look at me burn.

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    A sidebar but I'm fascinated by the fitting of what may have been a new idea into a single word. That's compression! Sorry, carry on. :)
     
    Last edited: May 29, 2015
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  16. Jasonb

    Jasonb Forum Resident

    And with streaming and downloading the demise of the DVD is next.
     
  17. Burning Tires

    Burning Tires Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atlanta, GA
    "Jon Webster bristles at this claim. “What’s fair? The public says. Supply-and-demand says. There were ignorant campaigns by the likes of the Sun and the Independent on Sunday saying that these things cost a pound to make. Well, that’s like saying a newspaper costs 3p to produce. That doesn’t include the creativity and the marketing and the money it costs to make the actual recordings.”

    Ignorant campaigns? How about calling out greed when they saw it? Hey Jon Webster, how are the recording and newspaper industries doing now that the public has decided what's fair to pay?
     
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  18. Very true, but it's going to be a slower decline that even CD IMHO. Blu-ray hasn't even killed it off after 8 years and the demise of BD has even been predicted to happen BEFORE DVD
     
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  19. alylemoss

    alylemoss Forum Resident

    Me too. And while I don't turn my nose up at downloads or vinyl, I still find CDs to be the perfect marriage of tangible aesthetics (lyrics, liner notes, art) and portability.
     
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  20. Dubmart

    Dubmart Senior Member

    Location:
    Bristol, England
    Lots of reasons for CDs decline were obvious to lots of people; artificially high prices, they could of and should have dropped the retail price years earlier, not supporting independent shops, but instead putting a lot of their eggs into the chain and supermarket basket, that really didn't work out well did it, giving CDs away with newspapers in the UK, not as bad an effect as giving away DVDs, but it's hard to convince people your product is worth money when you've totally devalued it, going after the whole lowest common denominator reality/talent show market rather than supporting real talent, poor products in general, the concentration of power into just four and then three major label groups, not embracing legal downloading which led to the growth of piracy, if they'd embraced downloading straight away piracy wouldn't have been so rampant and wouldn't have hit CD sales so greatly or quickly.
     
  21. danner

    danner Forum Resident

    Location:
    Birmingham, AL
    It's funny how it's just been in the last few years that CDs have seen a significant drop in price. In contrast, DVD and Blu-ray prices started dropping considerably after just a few years of being on the market.
     
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  22. zebop

    zebop Well Known Stranger

    The record labels made their money, they killed records by making increasingly inferior product. They also made more because they wouldn't lower the CD prices and years later didn't seem to care how bad a lot of them sounded, I can't feel bad for them.

    Even at their very best, CD's often can't come close to a record, even 40 plus years old in good condition. Depending on the title, there's probably a bunch of them available--and you don't have to get a boring compilation to get the songs...
     
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  23. Keith V

    Keith V Forum Resident

    Location:
    Secaucus, NJ
    great article thank you
     
  24. carrolls

    carrolls Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dublin
    Why did there need to be labels like MFSL and Audio Fidelity if the record companies did their job correctly in the first place.
     
  25. Stone Turntable

    Stone Turntable Independent Head

    Location:
    New Mexico USA
    Stephen Witt, author of How Music Got Free:

    “What was the audio experience before the compact disc? It was cheap vinyl or an AM transistor radio on the beach, and MP3 sounds better than either of those.”

    Uh huh.
     
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