Best Buy's long, drawn out CD wake

Sad. Went into one the other day to look over their low to mid price earbuds.
All they had was Skull Candy

 

Much of the Best Buy inventory has already ended on the Amazon marketplace via third-party Prime sellers.

 

What is interesting (though neither here nor there) is how much more popular films and TV are relative to music. While both the film and music sections have greatly dwindled, there still remains a "5 rows to 1" ratio in favor of movies at all the Best Buy stores I frequent. And I do actually see some people still buying the blus and DVD's.

As many have pointed out, the great irony is seeing the vinyl now match the inventory of dwindling CD's at Best Buy. At the ones I visit, the vinyl section is now roughly equal to the CD section! Meaning both sections can be browsed within a 2 yard distance.

Who in their wildest dreams would have imagined that when or if the last music item gets removed from Best Buy, it won't be a CD but a vinyl record????

 

Vinyl at Best Buy? I haven't seen any around me. I actually wondered why they hadn't started a vinyl section.

 

Look in the Home Theater section, near the turntables.

 

Yet the number of DVD/Blu Ray releases is dwindling thanks to declining sales and of course streaming. FOX stopped putting out The Simpsons on DVD and Star Trek The Next Generation HD Blu Rays sold so poorly CBS failed to see a return on the cost to produce the HD remaster and won't consider doing similar releases for DS9 or Voyager. I confess I'm one of those people who used to purchase a ton of DVD/Blu Ray/CDs/and books but now am content to stream or download. I still prefer physical content but I've frankly run out of space for a lot of it.

 

They tend to "hide" the section at most the ones I've been to. But the ones I go to have had a semi-fair selection for a year or two now. In fact, I've visited some that now even have a smaller "second section" of vinyl up by the registers. So it's actually growing! Well, if you consider going from maybe 200 titles to 300 as "growing".

 

Best Buy will continue to sell vinyl records.

They will not sell CD's anymore.

 

Will mastering professionals and sound engineers still have job opportunities with Netflix, Hulu, and other content producers?

 

Best Buy also removed movies in some locations in conjunction with removing CDs at all stores.

Everything tells me that Best Buy plans to get out of the physical media business within the next 18-24 months. No movies, no music, no nothing but appliances and cellphones.

 

Last time I was @ bestbuy I bought The Beatles SGT Peppers 50th Anniversary release on CD & Vinyl along with a pack of CD-R Audio CDs. The Cd-R where the main reason I went there, but since they had this Beatles release, where my local record shop didn't have it in stock I bought it at BB. This was the release day of this album & there CD selection was fairly poor. I was surprised to find Vinyl there. It was a small selection of about 50 different albums, over in the audio video section with the genriac Turntable they sell.

I usually I buy Hi rez flac & SACD online from verious sources. I buy my new & used Vinyl & used CDs from my local mom & pop music shop. I rarely buy new Redbook CDs.

 

BORING!

 

I went on Sunday, not to my local Best Buy but one a little farther from me. My local one still had a cd section when I went back in mid June. This one didn't have a CD section at all. What mine and this location did have was a bin of $5.99 and up CDs. I perused through all of them at both locations and it just seemed that they were all $5.99. Both locations had many of the Universal and Sony 11-13 track compilations. Both locations had Black Sabbath's self titled album numbering at two copies each. My location had one copy of Paranoid. This location I visited did not have Paranoid but four copies of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Both locations had one copy each of the Very Best of Dio. Also at this location was one copy of Ozzy Osbourne's Diary of a Madman and Chicago's If You Leave Me Now compilation. I did buy some CDs at $5.99 and they were as follows:

Judas Priest - Screaming for Vengeance
Motorhead - 1916
Metallica - Kill 'Em All
Metallica - Ride The Lightning

 

Supposedly the $5.99 CD bins will be hanging around for the time being.

 

That's good to know.

I totally forgot about the last day they were selling CDs. I wanted to go and try to find something to buy for old times sake.

 

I remember the days (circa 1990) when I used to be able to find Japanese Sony import Miles Davis CD's, of various still-not-as-yet-released-in-the-US titles -- at more than one Best Buy.

 

Not the best example, since as of late last year they are producing them again.

 

They don't seem to have much of anything. I went there yesterday looking for a new monitor for my desktop and they had five of them, none being close to what I was looking for and all overpriced. I did get a few CDs last week though for old time's sake. I have a bunch of other options for used CDs but now the only option for new releases is FYE. Sucks. My favorite pastime is browsing a music section and it's just not the same online.

 

Best Buy's action figure selection is deplorable.
CD & Vinyl>action figures

 

I stopped by a Best Buy just to see what they looked like not too long ago, they had two over stuffed display boxes of vinyl hidden on the last row with the random nick nack type shelves. Talk about over priced! Everything was at least 50% higher if not double the price than most other stores.

 

What's so Compact about Discs?

You can't even get 2 full albums on there!

 

I bought a monitor there last November when my Dell monitor took a dump. I found a pretty decent 27" Acer monitor for $129, and that was $75 off. It has a very good refresh rate. It's not the best, but it does what I need for the price. The picture quality is a helluva lot better than the last one. I'm keeping the old one around because i'm sure it has a bad cap. When I get my hands on a hot air solder gun, i'll try my hand at repairing it.

Anyway, the last time I went to Best Buy to specifically look for CDs was the day The Doors Singles CD came out. They didn't have it, and neither did Target or Walmart. But, Zia's had lots of them all!

 

You must be young. Back in the 80s, sometimes you could, and sometimes you couldn't. What use to frustrate the hell out of me and a lot of other CD buyers is that some labels would leave off a key track. Warner Brothers Initially left "DMSR" off the "1999" CD, one of the most popular tracks, and Motown would leave off, or use an edited version of a track on their two-fers. Polygram initially reissued the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack on two CDs when the album would fit on one.

The reason they did this is because CDs could hold 74 minutes of music, but labels would initially only put on just over 60 minutes. That was because of royalty rates, and it reduced the potential for increased arrows near the edge of the disc. Once the CD standard was modified to allow CDs to run to about 79 minutes, labels were able to fit two albums on one CD. But, then artists and labels started to pad out new releases with filler and jacked up the prices in the 90s.

 

God bless you!

 

And with that goes the last reason I'd ever have to walk into a Best Buy at all.