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Is the death of the CD really upon us by the end of 2012?
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Is the death of the CD really upon us by the end of 2012?
This is a secret? If anything, it's amazing CDs have lasted this long, if it weren't for the big label's decade long fight against online distribution this surely would have become commonplace years ago.
Terrible news. Now we can get overpriced low bitrate digital downloads and if you want the decent quality,ie,ones in lossless formats you end up paying more anyway. The sad thing is that CD is still better quality than all of them and is usually cheaper and you get a physical media too. This is why it has lasted.
Crap news for people like me who actually have half decent audio equipment. With higher speed internet now more common how about companies offering the full sized CD,DVD Audio and SACD tracks as downloads at the same price as the lower quality encodes?? Give some of us a choice as we can encode them as we feel fit or play them at full bitrate?? Of course not as the ***** if they offer it will do so as a "premium service" at a premium price. Now they have found addtional ways of segmenting the market. Just ****ing great!
As usual the race to the bottom is continuing and now the record companies have found a way to make even more money by selling lower quality audio. A backwards step.
CAT: Just demand FLAC.
FLAC is not popular though and most of the companies use MP3 which is not even the best encoding algorithm but the most common. The iTunes tracks use AAC which is much better at the same bitrate however last time I checked iTunes does not use Apple lossless.
The cost per album is still rubbish for most of theses stores(unless you get an album on a special deal) and in many cases is comparable to a CD or even worse. You get lower quality encodes and no physical media. This means if you want to use a CD player you need to convert the files and then burn them to a CD which costs additional time and money. On top of writeable CDs by their very nature tend to have a lower physical lifespan than most modern pressed CDs and decent writeable CDs cost more. So in the end for me downloads in the long run are still expensive. Downloads ATM are great for casual listeners. The only reason companies are shifting to downloads is since the fixed costs for hosting are much lower now and the fixed costs for selling CDs are now more than the lower quality stuff most online stores are now selling.
On top of this I actually like owning some of my CDs TBH as quite a few have really nice album work on the CD too(plus album notes). Plonking a burned CD into a reasonable CD player is a bit meh TBH. It looks like costs for pressed CDs are going to increase quite a bit.
However,at least a full CD download would mean we got at least get the same quality as before. On top of this people like me can at least choose the method we want to encode for computer or media server use. In fact I would like even higher quality encodes based on the master tapes to be released. I don't see why even a 2GB to 3GB file size should be an issue.
In my case, I can. Last Monday (i.e. a week ago) I bought a 3 disk hybrid set (2 normal CD's plus one that you had to download tracks and burn yourself) of Alice Cooper's current tour. And on Saturday I got three of the remastered Pink Floyd albums plus Johnny Cash's last album. (yes, I know, weird taste in music!)Quote:
We’re not convinced that this is going to happen for a while yet, not while CDs are still continuing to sell - albeit not in as huge quantities as before. Come to think about it though, we can't even remember the last we bought a CD.
Call me "Mr Cynical", but when the labels say "we're planning to phase out CD's in favour of downloads", I'm not convinced that they mean unprotected MP3's, AAC's, OGG's, etc. It doesn't take much of a stretch to remember the cries from the labels that "digital downloads = piracy". So, personally I'd still prefer - at least for the main bands I follow - to have that shiny plastic circle. On the other hand stuff I'm just trying out I'm more than happy to have on download only.
I'll grudgingly admit that I'm probably just an old geezer living in the past - not up to date with all this MusicCloud, Spotify, need-it-right-this-second style of music consumption. :yucky:
As to HMV phasing out CD's - I remain unsurprised. Apart from the "3 for £10" type deals I've found HMV to be increasingly expensive. E.g. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" is about £16 there, but Amazon'll do it for £12. Speaking of "The Wall" - nice to see that the premium for going for physical media is only 48p on Amazon - a levy I'd be happy to pay.
Couldn't give a damn about the CD format....but unless they start offering music on a lossless format, I will completely stop buying it.
I'll miss cd's. Something to be said for having something in your hands. Same with comic books if they ever move fully to digital.
with flac, ape, shn and other lossless formats you can get not only the exact same quality as CD, but higher quality than cd
whilst many/most "mp3" players may not yet support it, if it was to become a more commonly used format and/or replacement for cd, support would surely increase
if apple allowed flac to play natively on ipods etc it would be great, as i have a large collection of flac and the ipod classic has a decent amount of storage. the problem with most current "mp3" players and phones is the small flash based storage that would be quickly filled with lossless formats
i think few people actually play cds these days compared to digital files. even out of people who do buy cds, many/most will just rip them for playing digitally. so the format itself is unnecessary for many people. it's just a waste of resources and materials that could potentially end up in landfills
it is sad that whilst technology is progressing and enabling higher quality, that the general public is accepting lower quality. brickwalling, lower bitrates, compressed music etc. kids today will be growing up without hearing a decent hifi system
For the most part I agree with this.
The problem with digital formats is that at some point the physical media becomes defunct. There isn't any real need for physical CDs as such, for starters they get scratched. Having said that there's a nice simplicity about having a disc and not needing a computer with an operating system to play a piece of music
i have thousands of records and cds. they take up a large percentage of space at home, whilst i have most of it on 4 HDD's (2 drives of material with one backup each), that take up the space of about 10 cd cases. i rarely play the cds so they are just dust gathering and in the way. if i had a loft or basement or space i would box them up. i'm not yet read to let them go, and as prices have dropped due to piracy, ebay and internet sales, they aren't worth selling to get only 10% or 20% of the original price back. if i'm only going to get £1 or £2 for a cd i'd rather keep them
While there are benefits to higher than CD resolution formats for the most part CD is already very good, the benefits are felt more in the production and mastering stage as effectively you want to introduce as little rounding error as possible propogating. The benefits of higher sampling rates and bit depths probably don't outweigh the negatives that come with it, mostly that is a massive file size, a 24/96 pcm uses 3 times the amount of data to encode a second of music compared to cd 16/44 yet the effect of a well mastered record will far outstrip any benefit of using a high res, potentially it could sound worse due to the extra processing required and all sorts of things like that! Not an issue for most of the people on forums like this but considering most people wouldn't be able to notice might not be the best idea quite yet. There are a few places offering these types of files, but they are expensive and quite limited in number.
Not got many cds myself but hope they dont faze them out
I understand what you are getting at as production and mastering is just as important in many ways even when stocking with the same format. OTH,I have listened to SACD,decent quality turntables and even a decent quality reel to reel system. These sounded fantastic even when compared to their CD equivalent. However,at least offering downloads as the full CD file(around 700MB to 800MB) or a lossless format at a price 30% to 40% less than the equivalent CD would be a start.
I only buy CDs. If they stop making them, I will probably stop buying music.
In that event, the only music I'll be getting will be a) lossless and b) free.
Hi,
can't remember the last time I bought a CD, I tend to download legit material but in FLAC format so I get full quality rather than compressed mp3, but I suppose the death of CD was/is inevitable especially with the iPod generation taking over.
Mike.
ffs. so now my cd stereo im my car will be useless soon. pants
http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/1..._breakdown.jpg
that's not going to happen, as the manufacturing costs of a cd are a relatively small percentage. i'm not sure how online hosting costs stack up, but just because they aren't offering a physical item doesn't mean it costs nothing to distribute
You wouldn't catch me buying an album on MP3 format for much the same reason as other posters - yeah you may hear something similar but it lacks all the depth you get with a quality recording. I might buy the odd track in MP3, if I don't want the whole album - I'd much rather it was .flac though.
I recently tried listening to music on Grooveshark since We7 has gone pants and it reminded me of a 90's mono car stereo while driving on a motorway. Well OK maybe not that bad, but you can tell a lot of what's on there has been re-encoded a few times at low bitrates. Unfortunately though, a lot of people seem to think listening to their favourite band through the microscopic mono speaker system on their phone is acceptable, even a friend who claims to be a musician.
And as for iPod etc supporting .flac, it's a bit pointless really - you're not going to get great quality audio out of a £100 'mp3' player even if you fill it with studio masters, so you're just wasting storage space. But providing people with .flac and having it as a supported input for software like itunes would be a decent solution; then you could re-encode it for devices much like you do now with CDs.
Using HMV as a comparison is sooo flawed, they've always been pretty useless in my mind! CD's will go, of course they will, but I doubt they'll disappear quite that soon. People will buy larger amounts of the albums available on cd for example, against downloads. I feel the bigger picture here is the falling sales of music full stop, not just cd's. People are simply buying less and less music year on year
This is probably off-topic, but are there any decent audio players available for <£200 (never mind £100!) that would do justice to the uncompressed file formats? I had an old first generation iPod Touch - and to be frank the sound quality was abysmal - even with a decent pair of earphones.
Got an A-series Sony Walkman - the one with the OLED screen - and it's got quite a pleasing sound, a bit better than the 5th Gen iPod Video that I thought was previously the best, and light years ahead of that 'Touch.
Folks seem to rave online about Cowon players - having not owned one I'm not sure. Similarly, other folks are saying the new Galaxy Player's are really quite good.
At the risk of alienating some here, it's not going to be worth lobbying for "fancy" formats if there's no hardware that'll do 'em justice. Suspect that the best we could hope for is that the labels offer 320kbps MP3.
Same here.
I didn't spend rather a lot on audio equipment to play MP3 files through it. I've no doubt I'm in a minority, and probably a fairly small one, but I'm not paying to download inferior quality files. Period. If I want it, I'll buy the CD. If I don't want it, well, it doesn't much matter either way, as I don't want it. And if I want it on a portable player, well, that's where audio encoders come in as far as I'm concerned.
So, like you Jim, if they stop making CD's, I will stop buying music, only there's no "probably" about it, with me.
Having said that, I doubt the music industry will care much, because I don't buy much anyway. I'm not that much of a fan of most modern music, and even for "modern" music, I'm more of a fan of the rock age. than contemporary stuff. But most of my taste goes in the direction of classical anyway. Add to that that I've got a pretty substantial CD collection as it is, and I find I've got virtually all of the stuff I really want already, so I don't buy much anyway.
So, it doesn't matter much to me if they do stop making CDs, because by and large, I've either already got it or probably wouldn't buy it anyway.
Yours may get scratched, buy I've had a CD collection since, well, pretty much since CDs came out, so what, 30 years, give or take a bit? In that time, I've not had a single disc fail me. Any scratches they may have acquired have not affected their usability, and as far as I can hear, not affected audio performance either. Maybe this is because I treat them carefully, store them properly, don't leave them laying around outside of their cases, only use them in a good quality domestic player, and with one or two very carefully selected exceptions (whose care is equal to mine), never lend them to anyone. Or maybe I've been lucky. I certainly never believed the cobblers about them being virtually indestructible, but if treated properly, my experience is that they're pretty close to it.Quote:
Originally Posted by krazy_olie
Just because you listen to a track on a £40 MP3 player, does not mean you don't listen to that same track on a £5000 home setup.Quote:
At the risk of alienating some here, it's not going to be worth lobbying for "fancy" formats if there's no hardware that'll do 'em justice. Suspect that the best we could hope for is that the labels offer 320kbps MP3.
I can even enjoy FLAC on my iPod video.....thanks to Rockbox
I thought to myself.....30 years? Get out of here...and checked wiki.....damn, it really has been.....makes me feel old but I still have my first CD (Borthers in Arms) and can confirm it is ~26 years old!Quote:
I've had a CD collection since, well, pretty much since CDs came out, so what, 30 years, give or take a bit?
.flac is nothing fancy, just a lossless codec that will offer you the same audio quality in less space. It really isn't fair to offer solely mp3, a not insignificant amount of people spend thousands of pounds on high-end audio gear on which you can easily tell the difference between mp3 and CD audio. I mean the best sound system I have ATM comprises of a decent PC sound card and some Sennheiser headphones (sound quality being way better than any mp3 player/ipod I've tried) and I find anything below about 256k mp3 noticeable and below 192k quite uncomfortable. It'd bad enough most audio now seems to be mastered to play best on small, low-quality speakers.
Edit: Missed a few posts there, and I agree. About CDs getting scratched, I'm yet to lose one through damage and some of them are pretty old - the first one I picked up is from 1995 and you'd think it was brand new if you didn't check.
I could, given some time, put an exact date on my first CD purchase, 'cos it'll be in my accounts records. And yes, I have then going back that far. And yes, I know .... I need to get a life. :D
But I've got enough of a life to not be willing to trawl through those records looking for it ... unless it's in my post-computerisation days, which would be early to mid 80's, based on Systematics software running on an Apple II. And yes, I still have the Apple II and it still works. Sad, innit. :D
But without looking up the date, it'll be a little while after CDs were released in the UK, but not that long after. From memory, probably something between 12 and 24 months. If I had to guess, I'd say '83, but it could have been '84 or even the tail end of '82. So not quite 30 years, but rapidly getting there.
The issue with phasing out the CD is that is also phases out the concept of albums.
Shame for the music world.
From where?
I highly doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between a 320, and probably even 256 kb/s with a player like that. Not that there's anything wrong with that, you can get good sound but when we are talking lossless the extra quality you get is more in imaging and depth, things you can't really appreciate on the move anyway.
However in my opinion you should rip lossless and if you want to put it on an mp3 player then encode it to mp3 or whatever.
What subject? - "Music labels secretly planning to phase-out CDs?"
what's missing? VAT, which comprises of 20% of the price of goods in the UK, including CDs. that should have been pretty aparent to anyone, whether they knew the music business or not
so do you have anything useful to offer the conversation, such as the cost of hosting an album online? it doesn't sound like it. i've worked in the music industry before, so have an idea of the costs involved in retailing cds at least. do you have any insight into the costs of online sales of music to compare against the costs of retailling a cd? or are you just trying to provoke an argument? if you are, it's not welcome
Had you bothered to read the thread you'd know I do know a few things about the subject.
How is that at all relevant to FLAC/mp3 v.s. CD?
Yes, because trying to play the appeal to authority and appeal to ridicule cards isn't at all hostile/argumentative. As for your question (which you only have to ask once, coherently), fractions of a penny, and if you can't get it down to fractions of a penny, then you're incompetent. Hence:
Quote:
Originally Posted by aidanjt
the VAT is relevant to the overall costs which is what we are discussing
on the topic of costs, what are the costs of hosting the files online, or don't you know, as i suggested in my original post? you've posted a lot since, but not the costs. you've tried to rubbish my post, but have produced nothing to back what you say
the reality is that the manufacturing costs play only about 5% in the retail cost of a cd. thus removing the physical item, you aren't going to get a reduction of 30% or 40% in price. even if you include the shipping charges, which aren't transparent in the pie chart, again it's only going to be a tiny percentage due to the volumes involved
you can also see that both the record company and retailers are making relatively small profits from each item, so have to rely on volume sales, but these sales are being knocked by piracy. the artists can obtain revenue from other sources such as live performances, but the record companies don't directly profit from that
thus to survive, the record companies need to increase the per item profit margin to cover the fixed costs, thus they aren't going to make large deductions in price when small costs are removed from the equation
so whilst a cd may cost 5% to manufacture, how much does it cost to host? it surely must be somewhere in the low percentages, or is it actually higher?
do you know?
All agreed - the point I was trying to make is that if the labels offer digital downloads then you can bet the house on that they'll target at the folks with the iPod Nano's rather than the cognoscenti with the Naim HDX etc.
Brother In Arms? Yes, that was my first CD too - remember buying it from the local John Menzies store to play on a Sharp ghettoblaster I'd just bought from the local Comet - wanting to try those new CD things I'd seen on Tomorrow's World.
Well, as you say, 26 years later the John Menzies, Comet and ghettoblaster have all gone, but I've still got that CD, and it still plays - although for some reason not in my Sony BluRay home theatre system. :shocked2: It's also interesting to compare the production of a "classic" album of that with a modern one - to my addled ears the modern one obviously sounds more "polished".
By the way, I just slapped in disk 2 of the remastered "The Wall" album (Pink Floyd) into the home theatre system (to double check that it still plays CDs seeing as it didn't like Brothers In Arms) and just discovered that one of the kittens in the house seems to like it. :)
One other point about losing CD's that someone else made - does this mean that we'll also see the demise of the album? That being the case, then I for one regard it as a retrograde step, since I've never been overly fond of the idea of cherry picking the "best" tracks from iTunes etc. Apart from the nebulous idea of "not getting the experience the artist(s) intended", I've oft come across the situation where a "secondary" track has "grown on me" and I've come to like it more than the "headline" track(s).
ok, you don't know. fair enough
now moving on...
let's just say that manufacturing costs are 5%, and let's say that shipping costs are 5%. it shouldn't be so high for the volumes being moved. so overall you could potentially save 10% by not providing a physical product. obviously you can't offer a reduced retail price of 30% to 40% saving and maintain your profit margin
then you have the next things to consider...
with no physical product for sale, you have no products in stores. right now you can walk into places like hmv, asda, tesco, etc and meet a wall of product, being presented pretty much in your face of the new and popular releases, offering the chance of impulse buys to the customer. and in the case of the music fan in a music store, you lose the browsing facilities that lead to sales. thus sales will instantly be lost, and product awareness will reduce
and with no physical product for sale in stores, you will lose your print ad's from hmv, asda, tesco, etc that promote your products existance in the first place, and availability in the stores
so coupled with the loss of product availability in stores and the loss of print advertising by stores, plus a potential loss of even internet related advertising as the likes of cdwow won't be emailing you about cds anymore, product awareness is going to take a notable hit
thus to compensate for the reduced product awareness and advertising alone, increased promotion and advertising will be required from the record companies just to retain the current levels of awareness
then coupled with the loss of a physical product that is no longer available in traditional retail outlets for customers to by whilst out shopping or doing groceries, again increased marketing will be required to recoup those lost sales, not to mention an advertising campaign to drive customers from the brick and morter and online stores that sell cds, to buying the products digitally online
thus whilst you may have a saving of 5% for the physical product, and say 5% for shipping, you will have increased promotion and advertising costs, which could potentially surpass the costs of providing a physical product, at least in the short term whilst customers get used to the transition away from physical media
thus with the costs involved, it's not going to be possible for record companies to discount digital media across the board by 30-40% and maintain profit margins, or even make any profit at all
there are a lot of things involved to persuade people to make the move from physical products to digital, from simply training people to be able to download music and transfer them to devices, to getting over emotional issues such as not being able to resell the products you purchase, as you have been able to do with records, tapes, cds, videos, dvds and blurays over the past few decades. if you buy an album you don't like digitally, you can't cut your losses by selling it on ebay or trading at a second hand record store or selling at a car boot sale. you can't even give the download away to a friend, collegue or family member. this would require a marketing campaign costing a considerable sum over an extended period
I do know, I've answered that same question on 3 separate occasions. I suggest you take the time to learn how to read the English language. Or pull your head out of your ass.
The market demand for digital music has already been extremely strong for the last decade (hence all the 'piracy', popularity of iTunes, Amazon MP3s, etc..) Retail is increasingly becoming a dying breed. The figures speak for themselves.
Also, there's nothing which prevents digital content license transference beyond artificial restrictions put on consumers by big content. Something which is easily fix by government growing a backbone and standing up for the people.
The great thing about CDs is you can sell them at Gigs which is key to many Alternative bands (well that and having a good T-Shirt Design). From the labels I see at work, they do not wish to phase out CDs any time soon, however vertically integrated Label/Distributors like Sony pumping out "manufactured" music and bands probably do.
for a start i've reported your post for being abusive - i'm not going to respond in kind as it's not worth it
secondly if you know the actual answer, post the figures. you've posted no figures, either percentages or monetary values. posting the same thing over and over is not providing a useful answer
now we've ascertained that you don't know the actual amounts, can we move on and leave the bickering, thanks
one of the problems with the big companies pulling out of cds is they are behind a large amount of the smaller "indie" labels. there are few genuine independent labels left these days
and if the big companies stop producing cds, record stores will close down and record departments in places like tesco and asda will close down too, so the current outlets that sell a majority of major product and small amount of genuine indie products will disappear and the outlets for real indie labels will vanish, leaving the real indie labels struggling to find outlets for the products. many of those companies rely on product being available instores, and potentially have a large marketshare from big stores like HMV, so if they are forced to stop selling cds it could affect the indie market
in saying that, the music business as we know it has only really been on the go for about 100 years, and it's only really the past 50-60 years that it's been a mass consumer market in anything like the way it is now, so the digital shift might just be the start of a new chapter in music
Knock it off, guys.
I've got to go out right now, so I['ll look into this later, but a quick review suggests that the figures aidanjt quoted came from a pie chart Unique posted.
As for "abusive" comments, again, only a quick look but I can see at least two or three occasions where Unique has suggested aidanjt doesn't know what he's talking about. If there's abuse, that appears to be where it started. And if you take that attitude with people, it's not surprising people eventually react.
So this is a provisional view and I will take a closer look at this, but can't right now.
Meantime, thread temporarily closed.