Owned physical media and/or downloaded music vs streaming services.

Agree about vinyl but that time frame for cds feels long to me. I think within three years the overwhelming majority of acts in whatever chart you read - including Country - won't have a cd option, and by five years they're gone.

 

I know streaming isn't going away, but for what I want to have available to listen to may not be there on Tidal. Already, i'm noticing lots of things it doesn't have compared to the download vendors or my own collection. Tidal also doesn't tend to have many compilations.

 

Why limit yourself to Tidal?

 

It's $19.99/mo?

 

Well, when Quiboz debuts in October, they will also (supposedly) have hi-rez streaming. Who knows if it will be cheaper? It may have the same, or larger catalogs. Doesn't really matter. I want it for buying downloads.

 

That's doubtful. CDs will have a few more years mostly due to the other things played on optical drives, movies. The studios plan to keep UHD alive for at least five more years, which helps keep the entire physical media ecosystem alive. This forum sometimes paints an inaccurate portrait of current music consumption. You have the vinyl lovers and high-end people that have gone to digital streaming solutions, but there's still a middle market probably not captured by this forum's userbase.

Running off 1000 CDs costs virtually nothing, even for small-time acts. Any musician whose fans are primarily over 40 will continue to issue CDs over the coming decade, albeit in reduced numbers. I do expect certain genres of new music to more or less abandon CD fairly soon, mostly because their target audience is all under 20.

 

This makes sense. Also, as a previous poster mentions, streaming might not be ready yet in all countries and that would support an extended CD market, too, perhaps.

 

Imo it's more like the over 50 or 55 crowd,.

Anecdotal : was a local outdoor event yesterday, local band with a demographic of my age / older. Band did the usual CD sales pitch although the made it a point to mention streaming / iTunes also. My wife actually turned to me as she realized she had no easy way to listen to a CD anymore (of course I could rip it for her, but she meant those portable CD boomboxes that used to be ubiquitous and have been replaced with phones and BT speakers now).

I think my generation is around the cutoff point as we were the video console and early PC generation here in the US, and most people I deal with simply don't buy CD's anymore, it's been iTunes for a decade now and since Apple's migration to Apple Music it's essentially been replaced with streaming. Especially as unlimited data plans drop in price.

Interesting to watch all this in real time and wonder where things will be in three to five years time.

 

My own guess is that many bands will still have limited runs, not unlike what happens with vinyl releases.

I don't think we'll see the format disappear completely for many artists, especially the older demographic. But I could certainly see it disappear for "tween" bands.

 

New streamer here and it’s great. Any music you want on demand. I’m tired of collecting and spending a lot of money on physical media and cd’s. I’ll only buy specific things that aren’t on streaming sites like the Beatles In Mono. Otherwise I’m happy to have Apple Music as it’s a steal at $5 a month.

 

I believe that is a student price, no? Otherwise $9.95 a month - not so great.

 

South African monthly fee.

 

In my 30s and people in my age range laugh at the very mention of cds now. From what I've gathered, most people my age are listening to music from their phone, streaming or straight off of Youtube. I was part of the iPod generation and the days of people walking around with portable cd players or driving around with a visor full of cds in the car is something that mostly disappeared in the early 2000s. The demographic browsing the used bins these days appears to be mostly over 50 males. The vinyl bins have started to skew towards older males as well and more in tune with the demographics I remember when collecting in college a little over a decade ago. Most releases now are just too expensive for the average person - $19.99 is pretty much considered a 'budget' starting price these days for even a mainstream album on a major studio label whereas specialty/boutique releases can be double or triple etc in price.

 

Hey Kids… Buying Movies? Buy Them on Disc, Not Digital. Here’s Why...

 

Right on!

Besides if you want to watch your own movie, who besides you needs to know, besides you?

 

Or download them and rip out the DRM. Assuming these companies are still doing that.

Breaks the DCMA in the US but they can go take a flying leap. If I bought the movie, I'm going to remove the damn locks.

 

Once I downloaded all my CDs to iTunes and sold them off, I felt totally liberated. Its all about the music for me, not the jewel case.

 

And the crappy quality too?

I don't feel the need to be a slave to Apple and their hosted server crap that can vanish in the wink of an eye along with the inferior hard drives that are magnet driven. NO THANKS!

 

I've become more accustomed to streaming since that last post of mine and the convenience certainly is nice. That being said, even though I stream on Apple now and have all my cds on iTunes too, I love my cd collection, especially the box sets.

 

I’m seeing more “eco-jackets” on those limited runs. Essentially cardboard envelopes not unlike vinyl record jackets, but matte surface and kind of minimal-looking. At least there’s no plastic to break.

 

My inferior magnet driven [sic] drives have served me well for over twenty years.

 

Was I responding to you? How about we just ignore each other considering our history? You enjoy those sector errors all you want.

P.S.

DRIVEN
ˈdrivən/

1. 1.
   past participle of drive.

adjective
suffix: -driven; adjective: driven

1. 1.
   operated, moved, or controlled by a specified person or SOURCE OF POWER.

The word (set of words) was used correctly so why the "sic"?

 

No one "owns" their digital purchases from a corporate perspective. You are merely licensing the content from its owner and you have almost no rights over it if the corporation changes its mind.

 

Yep, for me, the only need for streaming somebody else's library, is the same reason you used to borrow LP's from your public library back in tha day: try out stuff you might want to end up buying for yourself.

Remember, no matter how many months of how-ever-little-charges you pay to stay on the service...this is all created to satisfy the media's fondest fever-dream: you not owning something you pay them for.
Look around you, in video, film, software, books, and music, naturally: all they have ever wanted, was to get you to give them money, and not give you the thing you "bought", but only get to hold it in your hands until they say no.
That, and to clone Michael Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven King, Steve Jobs and JJ Abrams.

I just looked down in the basement, over in the store room, behind me in this office, and all around me I see music which I gladly paid for...and they can never take away from me.
They can't even stop me from replacing my disc players., because I buy them from somebody else.

I win. It's all mine.

 

I couldn't have said it any better than that.