Are CD's coming back?

Yes classical boxes, Grateful Dead and King Crimson boxes. Of course the classical boxes are the cheapest now as you point out. Hard to believe that all those 18.98 CDs are now $1-2 each and some now are cased in very premium containers with hard cover books and historic ephemera!

 

This.

 

I also fear for the long term availabilty of CD/DVD drives for ripping CDs. I was looking online at the weekend for a USB DVD drive for my partners new laptop. (Which of course does not have one). Most were cheap and flimsy looking no-name things that I wouldn't have much confidence in lasting more than a year or so.
Similarly, the options for desktop computers seem very limited now, with seemingly only about 3 manufacturers still in the game. A lot of the bigger names like Philips and Sony seemed to have ducked out now. (Though given that you can buy an internal CD/DVD writer for £13, it's probably not worth their while).

 

CD’s? What were they?

 

You'd have to look at the percentage of Tidal subscribers who are Tidal HiFi subscribers to get a sense of that (I'm one), but I don't know that Tidal or Project Panther Bidco, have ever published that info.

 

‘In Soviet Russia, CD spins you.’
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Reminds me of posts that declare they only spend $2-5 on an lp. I can do that too but then I'd wind up with a bunch of stuff I already have.

Of course common stuff will be cheap and also easier to find but many of the CDs I look for are never going to come up locally and even online can be difficult to source or costly.

 

I spoke to Cyrus today. They tell me that they are continuing with their current range of CDPs for the time being but will indeed be develpoing players in the future. I love my Cyrus CDi. Best player i have ever heard. Anyway they arnt giving up at the moment so i am not going to worry about it for now. There are far too many folk like me who love cds and lps for either format to die. I was told in the late 80s that TTs will soon be hard to come by. Wrong

 

Well..the Beatles 50th Anniversary White album super deluxe edition is only available on cd...enuf said!

 

But how many times do you need to listen to Dear Prudence? I don't get the buying and rebuying of the same albums in different packages. The original is how the lads wanted it and all that came after is profiteering. IMO, of course.

 

CDs are doomed now that Amazon 2 day shipping takes 4 days.

 

Another aspect of all the 50th anniversary issues of recorded music is to retain the copyright of this material.

 

I didn't really think they went away ? I buy an average of 24 to 30 CDs each year. Any of my favorite performers have a new release, I buy the best CD version I can (mostly, with added tracks or special packaging).
I've gone back to by the vinyl versions of old CDs that I've always thought had great production value just to hear the sonic differences.
I don't stream music at home, it's all CD or vinyl. At the office, it's Apple Music.
I'm old (55) and like to have the physical source of the music in my hands, so I'll always buy the artist's "hard copy".

 

While I wish they were, they arent. Streaming Media is King in 2018 and aint going away any time soon, if ever.

 

That's quite a lot. I usually buy a CD only when I can't download the HiRes version and that's probably sum to 3-4 a year.

This is probably only a fraction of what I used to buy when I was a teenager.

 

These are the type CDs I get from Half Price here for 80 cents each...just in case you don't have one in your area and are curious about what we pull. My last haul, not all junk.

The Cramps - Flamejob
Jimi Hendrix - Valleys Of Neptune
Jason Falkner - Can You Still Feel?
Elliott Smith - New Moon
Low - Drums And Guns
The Young Rascals - The Young Rascals
XTC - Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2)
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Nocturama
Marconi Union - A Lost Connection
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Party - Dust To Gold
Various - Invocation
The Mars Volta - De-Loused In The Comatorium
The Mars Volta - Frances The Mute
Various - Music From And Inspired By The Pianist
The Style Council - The Singular Adventures Of The Style Council - Greatest Hits Vol. 1
Mr. Mister - Welcome To The Real World
Hardcore Superstar - Bad Sneakers And A Piña Colada
Various - Deadicated
Stanley Jordan - Magic Touch
The Horrors - Strange House
Elmore James / John Brim - Whose Muddy Shoes
Freddie King - Freddie King (1934-1976)
J.S. Bach, Hans Otto - Die Grosse Silbermannorgel Des Domes Zu Freiberg
Us3 - Cantaloop Remix EP

 

I think (new) CD is still ‘big in Japan’, if almost nowhere else?
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They can at any time remove any piece of music you listen to from their servers. If the streaming companies ultimately go bust you will have nothing.

 

I have purchased a crazy number of CDs in the last year. The number of low cost new (old catalog) CDs is astounding. The used market is great. And the number of hard to find titles and never before on CD re-issues is amazing.

The biggest decline is in the R&B/Hip Hop and Pop, and honestly, I don't care much. You can have all the auto-tune junk I will stick with classic R&B and Funk. As for Pop that is a 1% proposition, so I wait for all the garbage to filter out.

There are however a number of newer releases that I could only get as downloads or Vinyl, with CDs either being limited and sold out, coming much later, or even not at all. If you don't listen to music that is from this decade, you will not have an issue, for now.

People will need time to discover just how horrible streaming really is. As the catalogs age and disappear, are changed to match modern tastes interpretations or political correctness, people will have that epiphany. That first time you listen to a song or album and realize something big has changed, something is missing, something was left out... I have already experienced this numerous times, and can now say without hesitation that streaming stinks. Also a surprising number of titles I own and consider essential, are not available on the streaming services.

Artists that avoided physical media will find they disappear from history faster then ever before. People will not browse their old hard disk or dead phone to check out long lost music. No one will discover their parents or siblings digital catalog in the garage. You wont browse the discount digital download bin. And even though it seems like the catalogs should never go away, because after all they are digital, they will.

Disputes over rights and payments, nagging law suits, and limited rewards, will cause numerous catalogs to drift away and disappear over time. Why would the streamers want the hassle of supporting catalogs that generate insignificant revenue.

The exciting sales pitch of millions of songs, will be replaced with the songs you want (limited pop catalogs programmed by the music service itself). By then who cares, the listeners won't know any better as there exploration of music will mostly limited to the streamers algorithms suggesting "if you like that, you will like this".

Streaming services will be able to work out great revenue generating deals were they use their digital might to push an even smaller group of products; sounds like big box shelving of the past. And if you think that 5-10 a month will prevent commercial advertising from soiling your experience, just wait. With only the big 3 music services left you will take what they choose to give you.

Finally people will re-discover how amazing CDs really are. I can buy CDs that where treated like garbage, trashed and scratched, but if they are not de-laminating I can get a perfect copy of the music. You don't have to hesitate to buy a used CD (if what you want is the music). It's not like vinyl, where careful inspection under bright lights can still often fail to reveal flaws. I have CDs that I purchased in the early 80s (when CDs were new) and they still play perfectly. Hard drives, USB sticks and magnetic storage are not as resilient. Not that I spend much time playing my CDs. CD is the medium I prefer to purchase music on, not the medium I prefer to listen to.

Eventually some other physical media will become the new standard, but not before a generation of music blows away in the wind.

On the other side I love BandCamp and other delivery methods removing big industry form the whole process. You can find some amazing music, and you can be much more reasonably assured that the people making the music are the people getting paid. It also lets bands find out what thier fans really want.

But again, I don't really have much of an opinion on any of this.

 

Where did you come up with that? I normally get items in one day rather than two days.

 

Hmm. My music orders almost always take 3-4 days. Other items arrive in 2 days more often than not. But the part about CDs being doomed was a joke.

 

I own two Onkyo Integra 6 CD changers. Pretty soon I will load one of them with my wife’s Christmas discs. The other will be my normal CDs.

 

Better than that. I think that they charge about $2 or $2.50 for DVD's Blue-ray's and CD's. Small books are $2 and large books are $4. Records are $4.

Once a month, the hold a sale. They send out an email notification to their customers who are are on their mailing list. Over the sale weekend, any single item in the store is $2 each!

You walk into the used bookstore. It is located directly on US1. The store is clean and with the product that they sell, it looks like you are shopping in a book store that sells new books.

I operate a small motel. I did something several years back. I put DVD player's in most of the rooms and have a DVD lending library in my office. I allow my customer come in during office hours to pick out what ever DVD's that they want to watch in their rooms. No check out, check in, they just can take a few movies and bring them back when they are finished with them.

Here is part of the lending library that has replaced book shelves that were built into the front desk.



I have several hundred DVD's and change out the selection on a regular basis.

 

I think that downloading, be it albums or single tracks is just about dead.

There are physical media people and there are streaming media people, but why pay prices for physical media and you only get a download?

With most people out there preferring one or the other, downloads are in no man's land.

I can buy a used CD for the price of two downloaded tracks.

For $200, I can buy 100 used CD's and rip them to digital storage for playback on my player.

For that same $200, I could download 100 single tracks.

For $120 a year, I can have a streaming service to allow me to listen to almost anything that I want for a year.

If I buy a used CD for $2 and then rip it to a digital storage, then I have both physical media and what would be a complete digital download of an album.

I'm guessing that other's have already came to these same conclusions?

 

You’d think so, but... nope.

Check out the RIAA sales report I linked to back in post #48. Downloads are still 12% of the market, i.e. more than CD and vinyl combined.

Admittedly, dloads are on a downward trajectory... revenues for it dropped 26 percent, year-on-year. But that still compares favorably to CD, which dropped 41 percent(!) year-on-year.

Of the three, only vinyl was on the uptick, increasing 13 percent Y-on-Y.

Dloads may eventually die out, but the (new) CD market will probably beat it to the grave by a fair margin.

But the used CD market? That should be around for a long time to come.

Edit- Speaking of which, what does this mean the market will be like for us in 5-10 years? Just streaming, new and used vinyl, and used CDs? Hmm.
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