When will "Physical Media" Sales Stabilize?

what "most everyone else" is rapidly migrating to these days, including many, if not most Audiophiles; PC HD/SERVER based digital audio storage/playback...

 

Which is great... until your HD fails and you lose your entire library. What to do then?

 

While vinyl will survive as a small niche market, the writing is on the wall for CDs, and indeed probably all optical media. I predict manufacture of new CDs will completely cease within the next five years if not sooner.

 

You recover from one of your backup drives. Anyone who cares about their library will have backups and at least one backup copy stored off-site. That's safer than any physical collection can be. If my condo burns down I'll lose my CDs and LPs but I'll still have my off-site backup.

But yuck. Digital downloads is such a soulless impersonal way to buy and build a collection. I still buy CDs and will continue to as long as they are around.

 

Although it's not feasible cost-wise today, I have a feeling in a couple years cloud-based storage will work for those of us with big digital collections.

 

The music that counts has more than stabilized and in fact there is more choice than ever. The fact that mass market junk is going going gone is of absolutely no importance. The masses can download to their hearts content...

 

I have 3 harddrive backups of my music server. Luckily I picked up a bunch of 2TB HD back when they were available for $69 each a couple years ago (before the flooding).

If my main server dies, I'll just grab one of my backups, nothing lost.

I'm also planning to backup the whole thing on BD-R at some point. It's really effortless to maintain once you set it up. It's just the process of ripping all your CD's and tagging and scanning artwork that takes years to do Just make sure you use a file integrity verification system (I use md5) to be sure that your backups are alive and well occasionally.

As far as the topic of this thread, I don't think CD sales will stabilize to any great extent or length of time. It's not like vinyl that offers a different listening experience. It's just 1's and 0's that are all too easy to replicate. The cd is a delivery mechanism that will become obsolete as digital delivery over the internet matures. I'd give the CD about 10 years left as a viable format (may be too optimistic), and deep catalog cds will be gone sooner.

For some lesser known artists, CD releases of new albums are already gone.

 

I'll be glad to buy up the cds people no longer want myself. It is a windfall for those who collect them. People are dumping whole collections for pennies a disc.

 

Thanks. I never thought of that (I'm in IT so understand the application of this in other areas).

 

No doubt, it's a great time to be buying CD's, new and used. I've been picking up lots of catalog cds for $5-6 each new lately, and finding boxes of used cds at flea markets for like 25 cents a disc. That's the main thing I don't like about downloads, no used product to pick up on the cheap.

Buying downloads direct from an artist's website feels good though. It's nice to know the artist is getting most or all of what I'm paying, rather than padding the bottom line of a major label. Hopefully internet music sales will continue to become more and more decentralized over to artist websites. But then consistent mastering becomes an issue. For example, the new one from The Swayback "Double Four Time" is available as download only, and suffers from some EQ and volume inconsistencies from track to track. (Great album though) Artist's almost need to become recording and mastering engineers as well.

 

Totally.

Lots of projects think that they have 'backups'....how many have actually tested whether the 'restore' actually works.

Give me physical media for my old fashioned dumb traditional bones....

 

I know I'm repeating what others have written, but I really don't know why this is even brought up as an argument at all. If a consumer is building a digital library, a backup solution should be a part of that. It's like having car insurance - I consider it a requirement and not optional.

Sure you could build it without a backup, but you're just putting your library at risk. As a comparison, you could also build your vinyl library in a basement that's prone to flooding, but why would you do that? That's just dumb.

I do not agree. Lots of great contemporary music out there today, and I'm sure there will be in the future. Music didn't just "stop" in 1975 or 1980 or whatever date you pick.

Granted, it might have for you and that's all fine and good. But that doesn't help those of us who don't agree with you - for us, the loss of physical media might actually be a problem.

For me, I just need a lossless solution in place in case CD's / vinyl truly go completely extinct. Hopefully that will occur in the next few years ie Apple finally gets HD-AAC or whatever they're cooking, and then Amazon follows along to keep up with them. Or maybe HDTracks will expand out heavily.

 

Pretty much every musician I know is all of those things. I like how I control my own productions with no label. I can get my stuff mastered how I want it to be. I actually pay someone else to do mine but you can find people to do it relatively cheap. There are plenty of musicians that stuff sounds as "pro" as it gets that aren't on major labels. Like no volume or eq problems like you mentioned. The sad thing is most musicians think you have to be as loud as possible.

Sorry for OT.

 

Thing is, "collection building" might go the way of the CD. Or it will be relegated entirely to whatever digital-with-a-physical-medium niche format comes about, plus vinyl. Either that, or *gasp* the big labels will finally find a way to create collectible "value added" physical-fetish-material to go along with the music, making the collectible something other than the musical container, which historically only existed because it had to. It's not as if you can really enjoy the media while it's playing anyway (well you can watch the record spin, but if you're doing that you're probably not in the sweet spot).

Concerning hard drive failure, of course everyone should be running with RAID and should be making backups. In a few years solid state drives will be the same price as spinning platter drives of today, and the failure rate will plummet, making catastrophic failures much more rare. Today I ordered a 250 GB solid state hard drive for under $300 - I figure that's roughly what a TB SSD will cost in 2015.

 

There's that word 'should' - sounds great on a post, but how many folks are really truly actually protecting their time consuming effort of ripping all those CDs and LPs to disk to a RAID (which is not really a total backup conops) along with a tested restore routine?

eh?

 

RAID and CnR testing nothwithstanding, those with no backups at all are taking a nice big risk. I hope they are aware of that.

 

Look at it this way: if you only own CDs and LPs, you have no backup of this collection, should you get hit with a fire, a flood, or an earthquake. I've dealt with two out of those three, and trust me, they're no fun.

At least with hard drives, You can grab them, throw 'em under your arm, and head for ze hills. It's not the same as physical media, but at least it's something. Off-site backups are also highly recommended for this very reason.
BTW, just to beat a dead horse , people who want to know why physical media is going away should read this book:

Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
by Steve Knoppler
published by the Free Press [ISBN #1416552154]

It's quite illuminating, and reveals that this trend had already been going on for at least 20 years before people started noticing it.

 

And those that think physical media is dead...it ain't..cuz 'the industry' is not at a point where the end to end operation is 'user friendly' commodity based. It is still fraught with SME (subject matter expertise) knowledge of f/w updates, compatibility setup, kernel optimizations, individual configuration quirks, etc, to make downloads on the same footing as buy a disc, put it in the player and it works.....

 

Are you from 1997? When's the last time you had to do "kernel optimizations" to get music to play properly on any OS?

Plus, most DAPs just.... work.

A friend just bought a new car - Ford Focus. It can play stuff off your iPod via Bluetooth - and you can control it from the dash (and voice control) as well. The future is here.

 

Just saying based on the numerous posts of 'I can't get "x" to work with my (fill in the blank for sound card, O/S, DAC, etc).....the wonderous joyous world of click and play ain't here....

 

This is speculation on my part because I don't know enough people in their 20s to offer an informed opinion, but I wonder whether a generational trend toward minimalism in all things, not just physical media, is at play here.

For me the disc has become nothing more than a data carrier to which I have no attachment. It's the music I care about not the media. I haven't used my CD/SACD player in months and never plan to again.

As for blu-rays, ripping a good-sized collection of discs that average 35 GB each to .iso is still time-intensive and storage-intensive enough that I'm not in a rush because in the end, it's not clear to me that what I would gain would justify the expense of time and money. And the expense doesn't end with the ripping but would require ensuring the integrity of hard drives containing ~10 TB of files year after year.

 

"Collection" isn't how I think of my CDs. I'm not a collector. I tend to view my CDs as a connection. A connection to the music and the experience. Lose that connection and part of the listening experience becomes less special, more generic. For example, hunting for and finding a used copy of a CD creates a connection. I can remember where I bought many of my CDs. I can remember what was special about it. Handling the CD creates a connection. Playing a CD from start to finish creates a connection by having a beginning and and end. Digital downloads miss out on most of that. There is little to create a connection. Playing music as a playlist, especially a playlist that is created for you by a "genius", has no connection or beginning or end. How do you connect with something that has no distinct beginning or end?

I'm going to hang on to the physical as long as possible. Even though I'm mostly doing computer as source. Digital download only is not the way I want to experience recorded music. If the music business goes digital download only I'll be buying a lot less music both in quantity and dollars spent. I'll also be missing the used buying and selling experiences.

If the music industry can figure out how to make digital downloads have a connection to the buyer they may have a chance to grow, or at least pull out of the nosedive. The music industry doesn't need MBAs, they need psychologists figuring out how to deliver a product that has physical and emotional connections.

 

I wouldn't go on that metric, if there even is one to compile.

What I would go on are the sales numbers, and they are showing a very clear trend with CD's - there's really no disputing that.

A question for you, in all seriousness -- do you own an iPod or MP3 player? Have you actually purchased anything from iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store? Imo, it's very simple to do, and it's like that specifically because they want it to be easy for Joe iPod. It's easier than ripping a CD (except on the wallet of course).

For you and I and others here, it's different because they might be setting up a DAC or a Squeezebox or some other ad-hoc solution that's outside the norm. And of course we generally prefer lossless over lossy purchases. But for Joe iPod, it's a different story. They may not even have a stereo anymore - their iPod IS their stereo. This is the state of audio electronics today, for better or worse.

Imo, if you think physical music isn't going anywhere, I would disagree. It won't happen tomorrow and it won't become extinct, but direct to MP3/AAC is going to slowly become more commonplace and, imo 5 to 7 years time, CD's will be niche product just vinyl is today. I give it three years and all the major retailers like Walmart / Target / BestBuy will start shutting down their CD aisles, maybe relegating them to a very small section for only the Top 10 stuff, next to the reading glasses and nail clippers. B&M stores will be first, and then the online retailers will follow soon after.

 

Pretty soon there will be nothing left but grocery stores. Although I hear Amazon actually has a service in some parts of the US where people can order groceries online and have them delivered, so perhaps those will be gone too eventually. People are even buying clothes online now; if it doesn't fit right they just send it on back. It just seems like every brick-and-mortar business is closing out or losing money. While I do love online shopping I also love being able to drive to an actual store and pick up what I want. I still do my best to support my favourite B&M businesses.

I should note though, when I go to record stores, it's almost always younger people shopping and purchasing things in there (mostly from about 18-30 year olds it seems).

 

I've always wondered if I'm really successfully cloning when I do routine backups. I've reviewed them on rare occasions, but certainly no one actually does that.

Can someone point me to plain-language explanations of file verification and how to go about employing it? Search terms would be good enough; I'm quasi-computer-savvy.

This would be for Mac, if it matters. Thanks.

Sorry for the thread drift. We now return you to The Impending Doom Of Everything.