What's going to happen to CDs ?

[Elfrasho]

Personally, I think there will always be a need for some sort of physical medium. So, I think cd will be about for good. 

 

I still buy cds. I enjoy going into charity shops or fayres and going through them! I get a wee buzz when I find an album I like! 

[Christine]

We're vinyl lovers in this house, we invested in a decent system just as CDs were being released and have stuck with the medium throughout making further investments along the way. It was only very recently we bought our first CD player, 4-5 years ago? Now I admit our vinyl player is of a far higher quality than our CD player even though it was still quite expensive but vinyl has a big edge over listenability in my opinion as long as the vinyl is spotless (we have a record cleaning machine). There is also something more of an occasion to playing a record the set up, the album art, it's less so with a CD but not gone and let's face it the sound quality isn't bad at all with minimum fuss and it still gives that sense of ownership. Downloads, we did try but it seemed wrong somehow, download, click/play despite the excellent sound quality it feels disposable somehow.

So are CDs going to become relics of the past? I hope not, there is something extra to owning a physical medium

Gratuitous photo of my two Tbirds next to the hi-fi

 

Edited May 20, 2018 by Christine

[BrunoBass]

There’s a lot more affection for CDs now than I remember in the past. I remember many people saying how they sounded rubbish, hated the fact that the artwork was shrunk down, that they weren’t the indestructible medium they’d first been sold as. 

[BrunoBass]

47 minutes ago, Elfrasho said:

I enjoy going into charity shops or fayres and going through them! I get a wee buzz when I find an album I like! 

I like the convenience of streaming and the fact that I can listen to pretty anything that’s ever been commercially available at the click of a mouse, but I too miss the pre-Amazon thrill of unearthing some long deleted album I’d been seeking for a long time. Same with books.

[Ceebass]

Talking to my class of GCSE music students about favourite artists/albums the other day, the general consensus was that they didn't really have them! They seemed to have a list of songs they liked (that autoplay/spotify had helped them stumble across? I'm making assumptions), but no really affinity for/allegiance to any particular albums, artists or to some extent, genres. Interesting times.

[Woodinblack]

2 hours ago, BassBus said:

In the earlier days of downloads I bought quite a few from Virgin and HMV (remember them?). 

Of course I did, I bought a cd in HMV yesterday!

[BassBus]

57 minutes ago, Ceebass said:

Talking to my class of GCSE music students about favourite artists/albums the other day, the general consensus was that they didn't really have them! They seemed to have a list of songs they liked (that autoplay/spotify had helped them stumble across? I'm making assumptions), but no really affinity for/allegiance to any particular albums, artists or to some extent, genres. Interesting times.

Time then that the curriculum was changed to educate them that they should do things the way they were in the olden days. They were so much better then. 

[Norris]

I tend to buy the CD then immediately rip it into iTunes as mp3s so I can listen to it on my iPod. I then have a physical backup plus something to read/look at. Because our car is a bit old and only has a CD player, I'll occasionally make a compilation CD too

[discreet]

2 minutes ago, Norris said:

...our car is a bit old and only has a CD player...

Until we scrapped it a few weeks ago, our car only had a cassette/radio. 

[Thunderbird]

I prefer cd to most formats as it does my brain in when using an Mp3 player or the like as it takes ages to load up with music and I dont like having so many songs on it as I prefer to just listen to albums and I skip tracks a lot lol

 

[Twigman]

15 minutes ago, discreet said:

Until we scrapped it a few weeks ago, our car only had a cassette/radio. 

not an 8 track cartridge player? Your scrapped car must've been a bit modern for the scappy

Edited May 20, 2018 by Twigman

[discreet]

21 minutes ago, Twigman said:

...not an 8 track cartridge player?

No, but I do remember them. Track fading out then fading in again, anyone? Possibly the worst music format ever devised for the tin box with a wheel at each corner.

[uk_lefty]

I had a 2005 VW that had a cassette deck as well as a 6 CD changer. First time I drove it back to my parents I dug out all my old cassettes, trying to find the one recording I had of my band when I was a teenager. The tape unravelled pretty quickly and died. 

[jezzaboy]

I had thousands of lp`s, hundred`s of cassettes (all gone) and still own about 700 cd`s. I still buy the odd cd but I mostly listen on Youtube or buy digital downloads from Amazon.

I know lots of people don`t like the quality of mp3`s and years ago, when I had expensive separate hi fi gear, the quality of the sound might have bothered me but now I don`t really bother too much. It sounds good enough to these tired old ears. I will keep my cd`s as I spent a bloomin fortune on them and they are nice to have but I`m afraid the digital download and internet services have won me over.

 

I remember buying The Unforgettable Fire and Brothers in Arms about 1986 and they were £15 each!

Edited May 20, 2018 by jezzaboy

[Count Bassy]

 

More of these?

[MrDaveTheBass]

22 hours ago, discreet said:

 There is no delay with vinyl! Unless of course you're a bit too stoned and it takes you ages to cross the room to the turntable... 

I must've listened to the click of the needle in the run-out groove for hours whilst I tried in vain to climb down from the ceiling and turn the record over.

[Barking Spiders]

I only listen CDs and don't think much of streaming or the unlamented MP3 format. I go back to family in Germany quite a bit, and unlike the UK most music shops there haven't all gone to the wall. . That said, BPI info shows CD and vinyl accounted for 75% of albums sales and  in the UK last year and rising! So all this talk about the death of the CD is way overstated

[neilp]

I only buy CDs. I won't pay for a download, because you never own the content, you buy a licence to listen to it, under actually very closely controlled circumstances. I own my CDs, nobody can delete them or mess with them. I have around 3,000 CDs now, and believe me the CD player is not dead, any more than the turntable is.

[Skol303]

Vinyl sales are increasing by just over 25% each year in the UK and are currently "at a level not seen since the days of Nirvana's Nevermind in the early Nineties."

Make of that what you will, but I think vinyl is here to stay for a few years/decades yet.

As for CDs? They're cheap as chips to produce and people are still buying them. In fact, it seems that CD sales haven't suffered quite as much as people expected from downloads (FT article from 2016 for anyone who can be arsed reading it).

I don't imagine that CDs will hold their value in the same way as vinyl, however. But that may change in future.

[lojo]

Since just before starting this thread I've been making a massive effort to listen to whole albums , I've just picked a handful of favourite artists and have been going through in release date , it's been quite refreshing rather than constantly just playing selected tracks via playlists 

[Monkey Steve]

I'm another one who's paranoid that downloads will be lost at some point in the future, and my preference is for CDs.  If I get something that is only available as a download then the first thing I do is burn it to CD.  I have about 3,500 CDs and counting

I've started getting more vinyl of late (having sold the thousand or so albums that I had a couple of decades ago once they had been replaced by CDs...still regret that but financial needs and a complaining girlfriend won the day) but it's largely as part of the deluxe reissues where vinyl comes as part of the package.  I am the Super Fan.

In fact, the last couple of non-deluxe vinyl purchases have been where something has only been released on vinyl which comes with a download (which i then immediately burn to CD).  But I much prefer vinyl as a thing to have, even if it doesn't get played much.

And I rarely listen to CDs at home either - most of my listening to music outside of gigs is on my phone while travelling.  Although I have been getting into 5.1 mixes being played on my surround sound set up (not as high quality as my hifi but still pretty good).  And I do listen to whole albums: rarely anything else.  So I have spent some money on getting a DAC for my phone and some decent headphones which has hugely improved the quality of the sound.

But I try not to sit in judgement.  I have plenty of friends who just don't want "stuff".  they have quality equipment for playing files, and unlike me don't have rooms full of CDs.  Same with films - I have a room full of blu rays, they have a box that will play whatever they want to see.

Edited May 22, 2018 by Monkey Steve

[ambient]

On 19/05/2018 at 22:45, lojo said:

Vinyl is huge and seems here to stay for at least the next generation 

Cassette tapes and previous formats of tape seem to have disappeared 

So is Cd going to be collectible ? Or at least have enough fans to keep it alive 

 What does everyone predict ?

I sold my records when I thought I was going to emigrate years ago , or I think I'd have revived my use of it by now . I'm purely digital stream and Cd now , and rarely buy CDs , but often think I should at least be buying my favourites on some sort of format other than pure data 

 

 

Cassette tapes haven't disappeared at all, if anything they're growing in popularity. There's at least five cassette only labels that I know of. I released a cassette album in January, it sold surprisingly well, there's another being released by the same label early next month, and a release is scheduled on a different label in September. 

Cassettes are probably quite genre specific. Check out these labels : 

https://rustedtonerecordings.bandcamp.com/music

https://softerror.bandcamp.com/album/care-work

Edited May 21, 2018 by ambient

[lojo]

2 minutes ago, ambient said:

Cassette tapes haven't disappeared at all, if anything they're growing in popularity. There's at least five cassette only labels that I know of.

Yeah I was wrong , after I posted I looked on eBay and was quite surprised to see the bids on some cassettes. 

Thanks , I'm finding the replies on here really interesting 

[EliasMooseblaster]

3 minutes ago, Monkey Steve said:

I'm another one who's paranoid that downloads will be lost at some point in the future...

I don't think it's entirely paranoia: Mrs Mooseblaster lost an entire library of music because of a bug in an iTunes update. Apple's army of so-called "geniuses" were spectacularly unsympathetic about it and tried to make it seem like the problem in their software was somehow her fault.

It's a pity sites like Bandcamp haven't caught on more widely, as they give you ongoing access to anything you've bought (or even had for free, where the price is set as such), so you can still listen to the music even if you lose the file. I'll often buy downloads from BC for this reason, and the fact that it seems a bit much to ask a tiny, independent band to send me a CD all the way from Canada, Australia, wherever.

[chris_b]

I like to be able to hold my music.