New Trend at Amazon.com: Offer the CD-R not the in-print import

Yes, many bands go CD-R, making their stuff on demand, not only on Amazon, but on their sites, etc.

It's a way to save some money short term, but with thre glass master manufacturing being so inexpensive, I always advise bands to go for the pressing solution...

 

I agree completely, I have no idea what the actual bitrate is on mine, they could of formatted the mp3 to cdda format and when i ripped it stated 16/44? could this happen?

 

I don't agree with you, at least not for the short-term. Digital files will be fine for most people. My only real criticism is lossy, as it limits the consumer if another format comes along later. But MP3 / AAC, especially at the higher bitrates, is fine for Joe Consumer. And digital files can be backed up - if you're careful, your files will be safe.

Where I do agree with you is long-term, like many decades from now. What happens to lossless files when people eventually die? Do they just get deleted? Can you transfer them to your kin? How do you re-sell them in a second hand market? All unanswered questions that need to be addressed, eventually.

Some physical products, especially books on good quality paper, can last potentially hundreds of years. Even photos have a decent shelf life (film not so much, and not videotape either). Digital has the advantage of being duplicated easily, but it depends on systems and formatting that may become obsolete in 50 years so it's something that might need to be frequently updated / upgraded.

 

I've been living with digital data since the 1960s....

Try to read punched cards or a magnetic tape today?

Backup? statistics say only 1.5 % of users do any backup....

 

Then they're flirting with disaster. It doesn't make digital content any "worse" than physical - what if you had a flood or fire in your home? There's always risk.

Anyone using digital content who actually cares about their content should have a backup solution of some kind. It's that simple.

 

I think your right - in the short term. It's easy, ect...

However, with any luck, I hope to be enjoying my collection for decades. I would hate to find that my collection was gone because the technology had long-term problems. That could mean a lot of different things. Maybe something we don't see today.

As long as I have a working CD player and turntable, my house is filled with music. I would say this - If something is important to you - IRS or Birth documents, naturalization papers, music...whatever, get and keep a hard copy. IMO.

 

Bought one years ago when Polygram were doing them. No problems, still plays fine. Artwork is ok if a little flimsy. I'd prefer to buy an oop title like that rather than download files.

 

CD-R on demand is a dead-born format. Amazon should offer lossless downloads instead and make the CD-R optional (for grandma).

Everybody now knows how to burn a CD-R from files, and many people prefer to have the music immediately after purchase and play the files on their PC or streaming client. But that is only possible with the Amazon MP3 downloads. It's an outdated concept to offer the choice only between MP3 and CD-R.

 

So Amazon, being an professional outfit, is able to do this because a portion of their proceeds go to the RIAA or whatever?

 

They probably have some sort of licensing deal with the label. I rather doubt they just elect to do this on their own.

 

They need a licensing agreement with the rightholder to sell copies of the recording.

It's not comparable to other uses of the music (not involving making copies), like a radio station who just has to pay a small fee to the royalty collecting society to play records on the air.

BTW, that's what the controversial russian site AllofMP3 did until it was closed (second biggest download site after iTunes back then), paying radio broadcast fees and selling unauthorised MP3 downloads. This was possible because the russian copyright law wasn't clear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllOfMP3

 

Absolutely! This type of option isn't meant for audiophiles or people who want their music now. It's a cheaper alternative for those who want OOP titles on disc, for lower prices than imports.

 

There are still Russian download sites that use the same principle as AllofMP3.

 

We don't usually agree on much BUT , on this , we are in 100% agreement.

 

+1.

I'd rather see the files lossless and let ME burn it if I want it as a back up.

Yeah I accidently bought one not knowing although for one album that was OOP. I should have known better as the price was too good.

 

Amazon tried to sell me a CD-R of an album that was still also available (in print) as a standard CD. The CD-R was about $1 less but I went with the standard CD version.

 

I've noticed this trend last year and it depressed me. I now carefully read the description of every CD I consider. I have no desire to support this with my dollars. I wish they'd give these MOD CDs their own category so they don't pop up if you just want to see/search pressed CDs.

 

I've never had a single CDR fail, I still have the very first compilation disc I burned in 1998. No CD rot, no skips, no issues.

 

Recently I've been going through the CD-Rs I've made in the past of some of my albums and a number of them were unplayable.

 

I have gotten a couple CD-Rs from Amazon -- the Turtles' Turtle Soup and a Three Stooges compilation. Both have very generic artwork. The design format is basically a black background with a sky blue stripe across the top. For the Turtles CD, there is a reduced-size version of the front cover with this standard background behind it. Back cover just says "Turtle Soup" and "The Turtles" with a 1969 copyright notice for "Flo & Eddie, Inc." The front cover has a very distinctive "plus 8 bonus tracks" in the lower right corner which I recognize from an international reissue label (Line in Germany IIRC). I am guessing they just scanned the bookelt from the Line reissue. Inside booklet is blue with a drawing of some flowers running across the bottom. Track listing is on the inside left and nowhere else. It has 20 tracks. IIRC this seems to be copied from the German Line label reissue rather than the Sundazed, as far as bonus tracks etc.

There is a "compact disc digital audio" logo but it is a different one from the one that used to be on CDs all the time. The words "compact disc" are in black block letters on a white background and then underneath (in extremely small print) it says "digital audio -- CD-R format."

I haven't listened to the Turtles CD yet and I am not sure my computer has the capability to do any of that "waveform stuff." But I only took the plunge and ordered it after I read that Amazon explanation of their CD-Rs and how they aren't sourced from MP3s. But I haven't verified that personally.

 

I just had one of those sneak through on me, which I found annoying. A recent Danny Elfman soundtrack was available only as an import, and I didn't realize that until amazon's cdr arrived. I was annoyed but the listing did mention (in standard print) they would be sending a cdr. So, lesson learned to watch out for amazon to drop a cdr on you. You can't assume even with a new release they aren't going to just burn one rather than send a real CD any more.

 

When you buy the CDrs can you legally sell them under 1st sale doctrine, or is it considered a license like itunes?

 

Type of licensing agreement.

 

You can resell them as any physical product or a regular CD.

But if the CD-R labeling and booklet printing is poorly done by Amazon, you will be suspected of selling copies you made yourself. Anyway, the resale value will be low, independently of the original Amazon price, which is too high for a CD-R.

 

There's no reason for that when Amazon has a storage solution for your entire collection right there on their site, essentially for free. I've got 30,000+ songs stored on Amazon right now, done for the price of an mp3 album last year. I use iTunes Match to upgrade my old stuff to better quality rather than spend months (or years, most likely) re-ripping CDs and then upload to Amazon for permanent safe keeping, deleting out of iTunes so I don't bump into the 25,000 song limit. It's easy to swap stuff in and out this way - if I need something that isn't on iTunes, I head over to Amazon and use the downloader, and in a minute or two my album is back. Then I can delete it later if I need space. It's a near perfect solution. I'm really not sure why others aren't doing this.

As for the CDR issue, I'd go out of my way for a CD if it's available, and I have - picked up a legit CD copy of The Bad Plus' Suspicious Behavior a couple years back from a Brazillian reseller rather than the Amazon CDR. I simply don't want it, it feels cheap. I don't mind buying CDRs directly from an artist because I know the money's going directly to them, but I'll only do so from Amazon as a last resort.

It should be obvious why they're not selling lossless - price (besides licensing issues from the labels themselves, of course.) How would they price that? It would be awful hard to sell that at a price higher than mp3s, which it would likely need to be to justify its larger space/bandwidth usage. And how much lossless product would they really move? I bet very little. Most people don't know what it is, and even if they do, they still don't care. They've heard their CDs and the mp3s sound the same. Amazon would be at a loss to make lossless make business sense. They'll sell lossless when Apple makes it viable because they convert everything over to it. People still won't really know why they like it, but they will, and then Amazon will have to follow suit.