CDs Are Dying Three Times as Fast as Vinyl Is Growing

At some stage it will be really super uncool to only have a streaming account as your music collection and then the jump back into physical formats will escalate. I think thats whats driving vinyl as its cool and trendy and set you apart you from the uncool with only a streaming account and limited knowledge of music.Vinyl is unwieldy though and needs constant attention to keep away the crackles so I would see the bandwagoners jumping back off and maybe thats where the CD revival will begin. Who really knows though how things will pan out down the tracks.

 

Remember that early MP3 recordings were highly compressed and recorded at low streaming bit rates.

I really hated MP3's with a passion back then.

Once they corrected the compression and moved to higher bit rates, they didn't sound so bad any more.

 

That's my theory as well. I do think that sales are declining due to streaming but I do think that they will reach a plateau. Some use it to preview or listen to music on the go, some make it their primary means of listening.

There's also more of a ritual with LPs that many people enjoy as well. It's all a bit different for each person. Heck, there's that to a degree with CDs as well.

 

I'm not making any assertions about your in-car system, but my recent experience tells me that the chief thing wrong with sound reproduction in newer models isn't so much the streaming format, such as AAC-HE, but the pretty awful signal processing that modern in-car systems like to do to supposedly improve the sound for occupants wherever they are sitting in the cabin. I turned it off for our Audi's Bose system and Sirius started sounding quite a bit better. YMMV.

 

Well, let's put it into perspective, they may be useless for you because you won't be using them but you could. You've made a choice not to. Generally, I stream stuff that I don't have or want to investigate. I wouldn't get rid of them though (at least for me they are still a touch point and there are various masterings that I prefer to what's on streaming).

 

My sister-in-laws father had a unique solution for the enormous amount of books in his office. He put a shelf about tweleve inches below the ceiling all the way around the room even over the door. It may not seem like it would create much space, but it does. It gets them up off the floor. Same could be done for CD's or albums, just make sure the shelves are anchored really well to the studs in the wall, lol.

 

CD's will become super cool again. In time, they will become vintage and antique artifacts. Imagine in 2050, picking up a CD that is 65 years old and still pristine.
When we find a record that is pristine from the far and distant past we get excited. That collecting instinct is not going to go away.

 

They were never super cool to begin with.

 

I think there is a self-fulfilling prophecy. CD sales are getting lower because we're constantly told that "no-one" is buying them. We've had this constantly in the press in the last few weeks after the possible demise of HMV. "HMV is in administration because no-one is buying CDs" is the constant message from columnists in newspapers and reporters on the TV. But 32 million Cds were sold last year in the UK. It's clearly not a case that "no-one" is buying them - but it will be if people keep getting told they are the only people buying physical formats.

 

Odd. Every one of mine are ultra cool!

 

Yet another medium to misuse.

 

What a coincidence......mine are too!

 

Physical music (CD) all the way for me. All backed up on iTunes as use iPod a lot when out of the house & in the car. I have never been remotely interested in streaming. Using the internet to play albums does not interest me whatsoever.

I hate the thought of ditching physical media, fully embracing a site such as Spotify & finding that more obscure stuff isn’t even on there, stuff that is on there gets randomly removed for no apparent reason, or that some artists don’t even have their music on it at all. Or my internet craps out and thus I can’t listen to anything. I buy music and thus own it. I don’t want to rent it. I know people who even find it hard to believe that I still use an iPod. Why wouldn’t I, when I can have a large chunk of my collection on the move without needing to rely on the internet? Long live the CD!

 

I'm waiting for all my MFSL CDs to go up in value and then I can offload them for 3x what I paid. I don't have to have a CD, iTunes is good enough for me. But I'd rather own the music files, not pay a subscription to access them.

 

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The people they're talking about in that article are likely older people and that's who I was really referring to. I figured that a newer, younger fanbase would be unlikely to own any cds at all.

 

Fair play to you. My main use of iTunes is to transfer CD content onto it for my iPod. One of my complaints about the Apple store is how overpriced back catalogue albums can be. For example if I’ve just discovered an older band, and want to pick up their albums, the chances are they will be £7.99 on iTunes, whilst I will find them in a second hand record shop for £3-5 or on eBay (Music Magpie) for even less and with free postage.

 

There is never going to be a CD revival. I'll put money on it. It's the exact same 1's and 0's on streaming, and the list of major titles that aren't on streaming decreases every month. it offers nothing unique from a sound perspective. (Keep in mind 99% of listeners don't care about different masterings, and the vast majority of titles released in the last 20-25 years only have one digital mastering anyways)

I wish i could find it on youtube, but I remember seeing an old MTV News clip from around 1988 talking about the music retail transition from LP to CD and Duff McKagan in so many words says "vinyl is cool...CD's...they're not cool." CD's won out of convenience and practicality, but never had any kind of cool factor. If anything, the iPod boom showed how eager people were to abandon the format as a portable, mobile music source, and people aren't going back. The current smart speaker wave is just adding to it, and honestly, Sonos stuff and (from what I understand) the HomePod provide better audio than most of the stereos we had in our bedrooms as kids.

Vinyl is there for stuff people really love, but I really think most listeners, whether casual or fanatical, have a small subset of music they truly love, and a bigger pile of music they like, either a few songs by a bunch of artists they aren't otherwise passionate about, or just stuff they feel compelled to listen to every once in awhile but isn't a big part of their musical consciousness. The vinyl revival is driven by the former, CD's were an insanely profitable product largely catering to the latter. They aren't going to make a comeback.

 

I think what's driving "vinyl" sales is that the cover art is big - therefore making it cool and sexy. Many who are buying it are putting on their shelves but not playing it. They stream the album but keep the physical LP on their shelves. They'll even pull it out and look at it while streaming it. I've actually seen many do it first-hand.

Ed

 

The entire world is going to be drastically changed due to automation and advanced AI technology, but a disc you put into a drive is going to make a comeback? They're going to be in a museum or a place like Colonial Williamsburg maybe, but nobody in the near future is going to be using them.

 

Whilst I am sure this is different for independent record stores, I have never seen one person in HMV or a supermarket take an LP to the counter and buy it. I’ve seen people pick one up, look at the sleeve, and put it back, time and time again. When I go to the queue, people are buying CDs and DVDs, not LPs. Yet the CD is supposedly in terminal decline. Really? I get that sales have dropped with the advent of streaming, but some people are talking like nobody buys CDs at all and their time on the shelves is almost at an end. Can you really envisage a time when record stores will ONLY stock LPs? I can’t see it ever happening.

 

You wouldn't know it from what the way many post on this forum - but LP sales are still a tiny tiny fraction of CD sales.

Of course record labels are pushing vinyl ahead of CDs - they're making more money per unit and they don't have to distribute tens or hundreds of thousands of them. Record companies actively want to get out of the physical media game and have everyone downloading so there are no manufacturing or distribution costs. Their attempts to destroy the CD market is obviously taking a lot of longer than they'd like, but they'll get their. I don't know whether it's the same anywhere else, but in the UK record labels killed off vinyl for just a few years, then brought it back and successfully marketed it as a limited edition collectable format. I remember when HMV couldn't get rid of their records and were selling them for less than a fiver in their sales..... the market now is no bigger than it was then. Go figure.

 

Not the discs themselves, I'm sure you are right. But the ripped files, especially from earlier CDs, might just be the best digital representation of some recordings that there will ever be. The audio format, 16/44.1, is perfectly adequate for high fidelity listening, and when they were produced, the master tapes were in better condition than decades later, when remastered editions, or HD formats, began to take over.

 

I don't know what it's like in other countries, but around me, the big stores - the Targets and Safeways and Fred Meyers - places that used to have isles and isles of dvds and cds - in 2019 they have a few copies of whatever was released this week and a few copies of whatever phenomenon is happening like The Greatest Showman.

Except for that the space used for physical media is smaller than the space used for tofu and soymilk.

 

Maybe, but 99.9 % of the world's ears don't care.

 

I remember the launch of CDs differently than you do apparently. They were pretty cool.