CD's Gone By 2020?

Vinyl is being sold to Hipsters who have a Crosley suitcase turntable they bought at Pottery Barn and use it as a curiosity to impress their Hipster friends. A fad that is fading fast, FYI.

CD's are being sold to the Walmart crowd who still own 1990's Aiwa boom boxes and the Super Deluxe crowd whose 50th anniversaries of 1960's milestone albums are drying up as we rapidly approach 2020.

You got it right.

 

Great post, and a point that really needs to be repeated:

Those who stream in this forum use it as an expensive, convenient, portable accessory to an existing physical media collection. Those that choose to eschew the convenience, portability, and expense are free to do so but don't have to seem so elitist in the process.

 

Am I a hipster?

 

Great post. Music isn't that important anymore. It's not put up on some pedestal, families are not stopping dead in their tracks and building an entire afternoon about playing the new Styx album because they heard Babe on the radio for a month and just know that Cornerstone is going to blow away Pieces Of Eight. Those days are long, long gone.

Music is background noise. No, it's not irrelevant like elevator music, we still love it. We just listen to it differently now. 1985 Marantz Home Listening Rooms and 2005 Sony Home Theaters just don't exist anymore. Headphones, Car stereos, Smart speakers. That's where its at. Streaming is perfect for those devices.

 

Perhaps. Or an outlier. We have a good amount of those fine people as well.

Hey, I collect vintage wristwatches, you'd be amazed at what I've got on my wrist. Doesn't make me mainstream. Makes me a bit of an oddball who spends a lot of money and time on finding old examples of a dead technology.

 

Only if you grow a beard, wear flannel and listen to Talking Heads while drinking IPA.

 

As I’ve said before, I don’t foresee the CD going anywhere. Even if it did, I have enough music on CD for 100 lifetimes.

 

Respectfully, when it comes to Streaming there are people in this enthusiast form who do not know that:

1. Streaming services offer a paid-tier without commercials and without playback restrictions.
2. Streaming services offer an upper-tier with CD sound quality or better.
3. Streaming services offer the ability to upload ones rarities, boots, mono versions to the platform.
4. Streamers are spending more money annually than physical buyers are.
5. Streamers are using new optimized hardware that compensates for lower quality source material.
6. Streamers already own 95% of what they are listening to on a physical format.
7. Streaming is redefining how music is made and it's for the betterment of the listener and the consumer.

You'd be amazed at some of the conversations I've had here with people who think that Streaming equals Pandora, or who think that plugging a laptop into a Marantz receiver using a headphone jack is a true representation of the quality of streaming audio source material.

 

When a technology designed to be used by every man, woman, and child on the planet is now 35 years later confined to a niche for outliers, it's 'dead'. Doesn't mean its gone forever. Just means it's time has passed. That said, the 50th anniversaries of all the classic 60's albums ended with Woodstock, and we're only a middle-managers' decision away from Walmart and Amazon eliminating CD's entirely, and when that happens its all over. When the new Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift albums are streaming-only, say bye-bye to the compact disc.

 

Genuine question. What is the correct way to stream from apple music or spotify and get the optimum sound quality, then? Appreciating that, of course, doesn't actually matter because it's the 2010s and we don't care about sound quality anyway.

 

I owned the very first CD player in my college of 10,000 students back in 1984, probably the very first one in that whole town. And I remember going to the local record store to ask for CD's to play on it and the guy telling me he didn't have any in stock or on order because no one had any CD players. So I went back to the stereo shop that sold me the CD player and he had a few Windam Hill discs, one was called "December" I think, and it was all I could play on it for a month before he got me a copy of Donald Fegan's "The Nightfly".

So, yes Sonny Jim, I do remember when the CD first started to appear (shakes cane). And ask me about how many days and hours I spent scouring Revolver Records and the other indies in Greenwich Village looking for Prince's Black Album and all the Swingin' Pig Beatles boots, eventually all the Oasis B-sides from the UK ten years later. Good times. Good times.

 

None of those points is grounded in long-term reality. The only point that matters is streamers waive all their rights when joining a service, and the service provider plus the network provider and device provider can change the terms of the service at any time with no good legal recourse for the streamer. All you're really saying is that consumers will happily shed their long-term rights for short-term convenience. But we already knew that.

 

No idea what this response has to do with my post - my comments related to your ever-changing goalposts - but hey, rock on, gramps!

 

Well, that's not a fact. "Enjoyment" is a psychological state. How much enjoyment one person gets out of their music listening experience is entirely between their ears. There's no way for someone else to assess how much enjoyment that other person getting out of listening to any kind of music any way. And the nature of "maximum possible enjoyment" may be different from one person vs. another.