CD's Gone By 2020?

Well the new laptop I got my wife this year had an optical drive.
It really depends what you buy. When I was working in an electronics store ten years ago there were laptops with no optical drives

 

I did completely miss that Hillary Hahn was releasing a new album. It's likely because I'm a scatter brain and move my focus from month to month or quarter to quarter or half-year to half-year. I have many interests in music. I can't follow them all all the time. So I end up following my musical interests scatterbrain style.

Which means that when an artist I am interested in releases a new album they have to make it very easy and quick for me to buy or else I'll lose focus and move on to the next interest.

Hilary Hahn is one that if I could have been linked to a lossless version of the album right from the Decca web site I would have already bought it without any further consideration. An impulse purchase. But instead I had to go back to Google and do some deep diving on Qobuz, 7Digital, HDTracks, and a few other sites to find that there is a 24/96 download version available and then search a bunch of sites to find who had the best price. It's been 90 minutes since I found out Hillary Hahn has a new album out that I would want. I still haven't managed to buy it yet.

As a comparison. Sunn O))) released a new album this month. I got a Google Discovery alert that they had just release a new album and that it was available in high-res on Bandcamp. It took me less than 5 minutes from that alert to go to Bandcamp and pre-order the new album as a 24/96 download to be released about a week later. And for the Sunn O))) I also ordered the CD and LP at the same time. That was about a $50 impulse music purchase made and completed in about 5 minutes.

And here it is with Hillary Hahn. I didn't find out about it till reading your post in this thread. Google knows I like Hillary Hahn. I've certainly searched on Hillary Hahn often enough for Google to know I like her music. Yet she didn't show up in my Google feed to let me know. And I haven't been following the classical music threads here for the past few months (did I mention that I'm scatter brained). So I didn't know.

If the Hillary Hahn release had been as easy to buy as the Sunn O))) release I would have already bought it.

The difference I see is friction. The Sunn O))) awareness and purchase had very low friction. Once I knew about the release it took me 5 minutes to buy. The Hillary Hahn release has very high friction. I found out about it about 90 minutes ago and I still haven't managed to buy it. Yet I'm actually more interested in Hillary Hahn than Sunn O))).

So far I've found that 7Digital, Qobuz, HDTracks all have the Hillary Hahn album in 24/96. It took some effort and extra searches on each site to find out that it was available in high-res from each of those sites. And for how much. Now I need to find who has the lowest price and who I want to buy from.

An indie release that has the album label web site and Bandcamp as the primary sources took me 5 minutes to make a decision to buy.

A major label release that has everyone and their uncles as the source has taken me over 90 minutes to figure out that it is available in high-res and where to maybe buy it.

The marketing folks may want to take a look at the difference in friction between those two.
More friction means I'm less likely to buy.

 

You're definitely an outlier among music consumers, and outliers don't drive the market. In fact the manufacture of optical disk drives for media is rapidly declining. It's not just the makers of players like Oppo or Samsung. Sony is shut down it's manufacturing unit to make optical drives a few years ago. The Toshiba-Samsung JV announced that it was got out of the business of making optical drives a couple of years ago. The number of companies making these drives is shrinking precipitously. So a day will come when cheap, available ways to play a CD collection may be harder to come buy than CDs themselves.

 

And people who have moaned for years about the price of CD don't mind the ridiculous prices of vinyl these days.

 

I will say, I learned about the Hahn disk through the singles-style releases of each partita starting a couple of months back on my Tidal "recommended for you" list. But yeah, friction free is always important in making a sale. The streaming of the album is pretty friction free. Comparatively, buying it any way you choose to buy it, is not. That said, my advice in this case is: if you're fan of Hilary Hahn, go the extra mile, the music and performances are worth it.

 

Well, I'm sure it will gone by 2050! Along with humanity, though...

 

You may be right. I may have been looking at 4K numbers as I quickly tried to gather data, that does seem low -- though in truth, in my personal circle no one owns a Blu ray player. Market penetration of players is particularly what I'm curious about. An ever greater percentage of media on optical disk is probably being purchased by fewer and fewer individuals, and possibly typically the enthusiast hold out for whom higher res is more attractive, where the general market moves on first chasing convenience. Still, I wouldn't hold out for Blu ray to be the savior of music on CD. Companies are getting out of the business of making Blu ray players. Sales of video on optical disc are shrinking. The same dynamics that are driving the decline of music on CD are driving the decline of video media on optical disk, thought that does seem to be hanging on more than CD. Music has always been ahead of movies/TV in terms of the impact of and adapting to the network media revolution -- the bandwidth and storage needs are just so much less.

 

No way cd's disappear. How the hell would people with quality rigs listen to their music? I'm not hauling a computer into my music room to listen to downloads.

 

I certainly hope not!

 

They could buy quality server

Every big digital company has media server in their portfolio... dCS, emmLabs, Wadax, Wadia etc.

I'm done with buying new CDs.... I have enough CDs, SACDs, Blu-rays for the rest of my life

 

Today I learned that if you read the words Hillary Hahn often enough they simply lose all meaning.

 

Because most people don't demand them and don't use them and would rather have a product that's light, slim and stylish as a trade off.

These things are largely demand driven. If consumers demanded it, manufacturers would provide it.

 

Vinyl is older but they can't seem to drive the stake into its heart either.

 

This!

 

We should end predictions like that. Remember, vinyl was 'dead' many years ago and look how it survived (and became kinda big again).
I'm sure the CD will survive as well, and maybe gets more attention again when the internet dies by accident.^^

 

Or maybe not, because anti-aging pills.^^

 

I really hope this is not happening!
I absolutely need a physical format for my music, and vinyl is not what I have in mind...
The world is going crazy, there's not contact with the art anymore, and I don't like this.
I want to touch my music, feel it, read the cover papers and put the disc in my machine to play it.
Long life to CD!

 

For non-portable units I always buy them with an integrated optical drive; for portable ones I always prefer to skip it to save on weight, because I have a couple of standalone pluggable units at hand whenever I need them.

Nowadays it is a standard policy in local hardware stores: optical drive is by default included in most desktop set-ups, while they are not built in most laptops. However, you can easily buy them everywhere as a standalone USB-connected device.

 

Infographic: The Rise and Fall of the Compact Disc

 

lol. 2000 was when I just started buying CDs! Right on time during the highest sales.

 

If you follow Hilary Hahn on Instagram or Twitter there's no way you would have missed her new release, or that she is taking a sabbatical next year.

It was the contemporary composer that stopped me from buying her new release on vinyl, as much as I love hearing her play I also need music I want to hear.

 

So, in short: the general advertising about hi-res audio is lacking. No wonder why this (sadly) stays as a niche thing.

 

Infographic: The Surprising Comeback of Vinyl Records

 

You are aware of iPods, right? Fits in the palm of your hand. Try hauling all your CDs in in the palm of your hand!

 

Fear, fear and more fear. If cd's disappear, I save a ton of money.
The bands who are already getting screwed, because of downloads/streaming, get even less, and eventually nobody wants to make music anymore, and all we will get are corporate shills employed like retail checkout clerks singing the latest pop tune to a digital track, with pitch correction.
The music industry collapses because nobody wants to do it anymore. Bands/artists give up, and move into normal jobs, even the shills are tired of the drudgery .... music becomes a long lost art ... Due to this mass depression, as the thing that redirected and lifted so many millions of folks over the decades has now gone, there is mass unrest.
People riot in the streets , and they don't know why. There is a complete breakdown of society. The mega-rich that manipulated the whole scenario, think they are safe from harm, as they already have panic rooms and safe houses that they feel will protect them from the rioting serfs, but they are wrong, and it is all to no avail....
After all of this goes down, society is returned to a pastoral existence, as most everything was destroyed in the rebellion of 2027..... People speak of those dark ages as the turning of the world.... those who still remember are left in a ptsd situation and the only therapy available is the the local folk singer. Using primitive acoustic instruments, the folk singers are the backbone of society. Singing tales of warning from the pages of history. Singing soothing words to calm the lost and hurting .....
and the cycle begins again