Music without a physical medium will always be considered as less valuable by consumers.
People are ready to pay more for a vinyl disc or a digital disc than for streaming.
Spotify and streaming are working against musicians and against music production.

While we're on the subject of crappiness of the the music streaming world, lets contrast it to TV and movie streaming. Netflix has actually UPPED the ante for creativity and quality content. They go after talented HIGH QUALITY people, scripts, directors and actors. we need something like that in music. A streaming service that invests and sees the value IN the art, not the value in TAKING the art from others.

I think that's been music's problem all along. Suits and mooks who see value, and KNOW that the people making are easily swindled.

Never use Spotify, I tried - for my own music - but they seemed to be tying me into something unspecified which would lead to chucking bucks at them. So I thought FY

Music without a physical medium is somehow bland - not the music - the experience. I bought a pop fanzine the other day, had to import it from Italy, no music, just loads of groovy information and photos of my fave band. That's what streaming edits out of the equation I feel.

CD's are great but they are so boring as things-in-themselves, so perfect and seamless (except when you get a dud). They can't compete with vinyl for that feelgood factor you get when you purchase a piece of vinyl, especially if it has a cool cover / art.

Say no to blandness.

THIS is what I have been saying since I first heard of Netflix. I don't have it, but I get the concept and if that same concept were applied to music at least it would start to move towards some sort of solution and better industry.

That's the whole point, the Biz never saw vinyl taking off, they tried to kill it for years. Same with cine film - real film not video - til Kodak realised they killed a golden goose then brought Super8 back into production.

Goodbye to CD drives? Probably. But, they said that about vinyl, cassettes and RTR tapes.

I just saw where 6 NOS TEAC cassette tapes sold for $400. When I moved here, there was an old man that sold yard art pieces on the side of the road for $10... now that he's dead they've become big $ collector pieces.

I say, buy up a few CD drives.

If the buy-rate for CD's continues to dive, the firms will just pull the plug, they are looking at the bottom line. What's attractive about the cassette & vinyl cultures, the cd industry does not have, it is a bland, seamless world of production so perfect you could split a hair in half with it ~ length-ways. Who cares?

As long as we can archive final mixes, vinyl records are cool. Archiving music digitally is also questionable in the long run - the technology is changing so fast. What happened to all the material archived on floppy & zip drives for example? There must have been a fair bit - I remember when the zip drive was the next 'big thing', most people hardly even know what one is today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_dr...ive_100,_2.jpg

Funny you mentioned floppy drives. A little off topic but I just read the US AIR FORCE just retired the 8-inch floppy that was still in use with our missile defense system. The system continues to be controlled by an IBM Series/1 computer installed in the 60's and 70's. If it works, it works. Still made my jaw drop reading this though.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...ontrol-system/

Last I heard a lot of seriously heavy military hardware is being run on obsolete Windows operating systems - that is scary. It's also dumb.

Knew someone who was still using Windows XP until recently. You can do that, but you become an isolate, & obsolete technology cannot easily communicate with contemporary technologies. That leaves you potentially vulnerable I feel.

The beauty of the phonograph and cine film is that it requires fairly simple, universally standard equipment to run them with, whereas the digital industry is a fractal universe of differing systems which are mutating like the flu virus, year on year.

Can still take an ancient cine film, run it, video it, put it up on the Tube - now or in 10 years time. But will I be able to open a video file I made 10-20 years ago, made on a 32bit system using a codec which is long surpassed and redundant? & that's if the file hasn't corrupted in the meantime. :-o

I don't have the money or the knowhow to make this happen, but I wish someone would.

It's funny you should ask that, I just did, from a CD that was burned in 1994 using 0S/2 Warp.


Now ask if I can open a flash video project from 20 years ago, today. Not on my system

It's like a Russian Roulette scenario if you ask me.

The CD drives in both my computers died years ago. I bought a little CD player/recorder for those times when I need it and that, as they say, is that. I prefer the computers don't come with them. They take up space and don't last very long in my experience. Better to have a separate CD device if you need one. If you don't, that's ok too.

My 2012 MacBook Pro doesn’t have a CD player on it. We are literally almost a decade into computers not supporting CD ROM....lol where ya been?

Money for artists nowadays comes from merchandise and touring. We must adapt and find new ways to generate revenue.

I never really liked CDs. Too delicate and easy to scratch! I’m Team cassette lol those are what I grew up on pre 1995-96.

The only thing I am using CDs for is to get access to lossless CDQ references or sampling which I rarely even do. But to be fair there is still no feeling like walking into stores like Amoeba in Hollywood and browsing around.

Digital tech has gone solid state.

Look forward to more vinyl arriving

My five year old son who is crazy about music wants all his music on CD. He has his own portable CD player and a bag filled with CD’s. He listens to music on my laptop too, but still wants CD’s. To him it’s important to have a physical copy. So maybe to his generation the CD is what vinyl is to the milennials?

It definitely would be nice to see some sort of even higher-res digital format replace the CD if it is to be replaced, even though that seems a dicey proposition at present given how many people have phased out of physical media. Vinyl records aren't something I have much interest in revisiting (and feel the same about tape). To me, the only good thing about vinyl is getting a big copy of the artwork you can hold and look at while listening. I'm just not big on analog formats that gradually degrade over time the more you listen to them, and/or add their own not-insignificant noise floor that didn't exist on the master.

At the very least, vinyl record sales should come with a download credit for a hi-res digital copy of the album. Maybe some already do?

Floppy disks are also getting thin on the ground.

That's the way ahead, I feel, vinyl + WAV download.

They were useful for booting inert computers. What you're supposed to do today I don't know - hit them with hammers.

I started noticing it many years ago. I had to double check the date on your post, to make sure this wasn't a necro-bump thread from 2010. I went out and got USB CD drives for my own machines. Annoying having to pay another $49, but otherwise, not a big deal. At the college where I teach audio classes I got two drive to share for the entire lab. Two CD drives for 15 computers seems to be more than enough.

I made CDs for a client just the other day. It was for a song to be played at a wedding. However he also needed it on a USB Thumb Drive because that's what the wedding DJ requested. The CDs were for him and his band members.

as d.dot said, CDs are still a viable medium for gig "souvenirs". After your show is the one place you can sell sell a CD. And there is the whole chatting with the fans thing, which is important. I was at a festival last month and the older bands would close their sets by pointing to the table in the back and mentioning the CDs they had for sale. But the younger bands got on the mic and said: "Like us on Facebook! Add us on Instagram! Sign up for our email list and get a free download!"

IMO, we are currently living in the age after the "end of the CD"
I would say just take a look at the music industry today - that's the post-CD music industry.
Well there's streaming. Vinyl is making a "comeback" - by which we mean Vinyl has "come back" from being 1% of the amount of units sold in the 1970s to 2% of the amount of units sold in the 1970's. It has "doubled" - technically.

we are losing CDs. I have to admit slaving over the graphics of the booklet on some self-released stuff. But I also have to admit never looking myself at the booklets of any CDs that I bought anytime after the first day.

Music is just invisible and intangible "information", which is why music is "free" today. This became inevitable when CDs were first invented - but it took a couple of decades for the copying technology to work its way down to the masses. I knew it was all over in the 90's when I asked my students to bring in a CD to play for class and one year all of them showed up with burned CD-Rs labeled with Sharpies. After that, I knew it was just a matter of time before the physical object faded away.

Well, that is nobody's fault but your own. Copy your stuff forward. Whether you bought it or you made it, back it up. If you don't have 3 copies of a digital file, you don't really have it. And at least one of them should be geographically somewhere else in case of gas heater explosion or meteor strike.

If you are streaming, maybe some corporation decides what you have access to. Cloud storage is storage and I don't know any Cloud storage company that sticks their nose into what information your 1"s and 0's contain.

Total boredom-universe for the record collector mindset, & geeks who horde stuff like fanzines, I'm afraid.

Yes, I've seen the tables spread out with 'merch', can't somehow see swapping out CDs for usb sticks there though.

You missed out smart phones. What's to stop the fans 'liking' their bands from the gig while at the same time download/streaming onto their devices?

Still see this culture as wafer-thin & instantly disposable, people are not going to be making triple copies of everything they download, and even if they did a large percentage of those would get lost on a sea of memory sticks & external hard drives I feel, as the price for a solid state drive in the average computer rockets as the capacity plummets.

CD's make sense, they can be physically archived, while vinyl is an attractive thing in itself. The discerning musician can offer both.

Vinyl's back.

I had a friend who worked for a company who would record a board tape at a concert, and then they had a multi-drive high speed loader for the USB sticks. Between the moment of the last chord and people starting to leave the venue they had the first batch of USB sticks loaded with tonight's show at the table. They could make them fast enough so that a second batch was ready by the time the first batch was sold. Beauty part was that unsold leftovers could be wiped and used again the next night. There was also a folder with promo stuff included on the drive.

But you are right, it turns out USB sticks are not "attractive" to the fans. Nobody really wants them. And the blanks are very expensive compared to CDs. The band usually does better with coffee mugs and t-shirts.

I am sure they already do. I was just at AES and many of the booths had drawings where instead of putting your business card in a fishbowl, or letting the guy scan your badge, the entry into the drawing was you had to take a photo of yourself with the product and post it to Instagram.

I don't even have an Instagram.

Meh, people have been saying that about rock music since the 1950's. No doubt they said it about jazz in the 1920's. I may be old, but I hope to god I am never so old that I will talk like that about the "kids today".

Why not? Disk space is cheap. It is practically cost-free. You can start the copy and it will be done when you get back from your walk. Maybe you aren't going to back up your stuff, but then you have no right to complain when it is gone.

It's just not rock'n'roll - you are not going to get Marlon Brando speeding down the highway backing up his juke box faves, it's not going to happen. Or if it does, the culture must have changed beyond recognition.

https://i1.wp.com/www.gilstratton.co...on-a-bike2.png

You are also not going to get your Soundtrack if you delete it from all your drives. So your choice, Mr. "Rock and Roll".

The reason you have access to any of your groovy music today is because some "square" made the effort to put the master tapes in a vault. IMO, content is still king, and you are focusing on the wrong stuff.

Not at all.

You save to WAV & issue groovy sounds on cool vinyl - what's not to like?

FLAC, level 8, is more efficient, and still lossless. Looks like CD will be the last uncompressed, high quality, physical medium for sound. Beyond larger artwork, I have little interest in using noisy/fussy/expensive vinyl....

Love vinyl, for me it has character & atmosphere, all the things an instantly disposable culture lacks. Only now we have digital options to back up master-material, best of both worlds.

Vinyl is back

Pardon me if you've heard this before, but when everything is streamed you will only be able to see and to hear what the Thought Police let you see and hear.

And pardon me if you've heard this before, but the Thought Police are getting more aggressive every day.