The CD is dead….
I’m tempted to say “long live the cd…”, but… EMI’s CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you’re not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so “dead” just means “in decline” in this parlance. However, I can’t help but laugh to myself of the notion that I release a cd through lulu of hymns and within the week the CD is declared dead. No, seriously… I haven’t bought a cd in quite a while myself. Mainly because I don’t want to put up with all the DRM restrictions these days. I want to be able to have a simple cd that I can extract to another player IF I WANT. But I want the original CD as a “high quality archived original” in comparison to the mp3 that might be lost when a flash drive or hard drive dies and isn’t quite as high quality.
That’s one reason why I wanted to just have a “plain old” music cd with no restrictions. But, to finish up the thought I would say there are 2(or 3) reasons that the CD is dead and for both of them you can say it’s because the record studios are killing it….. 1) TOO pricy for most big name artists 2) too much DRM crap 3)still stuck in an old mass-market distribution model in a niche market world.
Personally, I think the cd (or perhaps a DVD audio successor) will be around for a while IF THE INDUSTRY ALLOWS IT. Now, I know, some people are saying, why should I buy a whole cd for 16-17-18 dollars when I can get the 3 songs I like for $1.99 each and that’s a good argument, but I think it’s an argument that comes back to at least one point above *(too pricey….) the other point which I didn’t get to is that so many albums are not that impressive. You get 4-5 “mass market” tunes that will be made singles and you get leftovers as the other tracks. Many times there isn’t a lot of consistency in style across a single album.
Anyway…. back to regularly scheduled more technical stuff.