Are CDs Making a Comeback? A Statistical Analysis (statsignificant.com) 90
Reports of the compact disc's death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 and 3.06% in 2024.
Google search traffic for "CD Player" has ticked upward over the past 16 months after two decades of near-continuous decline, and a May 2023 YouGov poll found 53% of American adults willing to pay for music on CDs -- ahead of vinyl at 44% and online streaming at 50%. Respondents under 45 were more likely to express interest in buying physical formats than older cohorts. But on the supply side, Discogs data shows vinyl remains the dominant format for new physical releases; artists have not meaningfully shifted back toward CD production.
Google search traffic for "CD Player" has ticked upward over the past 16 months after two decades of near-continuous decline, and a May 2023 YouGov poll found 53% of American adults willing to pay for music on CDs -- ahead of vinyl at 44% and online streaming at 50%. Respondents under 45 were more likely to express interest in buying physical formats than older cohorts. But on the supply side, Discogs data shows vinyl remains the dominant format for new physical releases; artists have not meaningfully shifted back toward CD production.
why buy in the cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
When you can rip your own CD? And places like Amazon will sell you physical media and "autorip" much of their catalog (but not all)
For people that only buy one track, it makes sense to drop $1-$2 for a song. And ignore the whole album. That's perhaps the way popular music works. But for fans of certain bands, we buy the whole album.
Re: why buy in the cloud (Score:2)
I haven't had a PC with a CD drive in like a decade.
Also, a digital album is often cheaper than a CD.
And tons of shit isn't even released on albums any more anyway. And singles are WAY more expensive on CD.
Re: why buy in the cloud (Score:2)
Yea. I can't imagine that singles are selling on CD all that well.
I have a desktop for the massive (but old) graphics card, so having a Blu-ray/dvd/cd-rw in it is relatively cheap compared to the whole system.
Laptop only users seem unlikely to buy an external drive. Even though they are cheap.
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Yea. I can't imagine that singles are selling on CD all that well.
I have a desktop for the massive (but old) graphics card, so having a Blu-ray/dvd/cd-rw in it is relatively cheap compared to the whole system.
Laptop only users seem unlikely to buy an external drive. Even though they are cheap.
I have a Pioneer Bluray writer that connects to the laptop via USB3. It's kind of a swiss army knife of optical drives, happy to work with CD/DVD too, so it gets "enough" use that I have no regrets about buying it.
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There's nothing stopping you from backing up digital files onto new media.
The physical CD can become damaged or degrade, rendering it unreadable. The readers will also fail over time and need to be replaced, and while they're still being manufactured today there will eventually reach a point where readers are not being manufactured and you have to rely on old stock or refurbishments.
Older media formats are becoming increasingly hard to use these days, even if you still have the physical media and it's not d
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USB CD drives are plentiful and cheap, so far.
Ripped files are so durable and so much easier to manipulate for listening that I don't care what vinyl sounds like.
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Floppy drives and blank disks were plentiful and cheap once too, now they're getting harder to find and a lot of the used units available are in poor condition. It will happen sooner or later.
But yes digital files are easier to manipulate, and you can periodically transfer them to newer storage devices so you don't get stuck with obsolete and unreadable media.
Cynical take (Score:3)
Vinyl is really good for older releases where room sound matters a lot. For most stuff made after the 1970s, CDs are superior. I prefer CDs for classical because I think they actually capture better range with less false sustain.
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It depends. Some older stuff was badly mastered at the time, so the re-mastered CD can be better. On the other hand, around 1990 the Loudness War really kicked off and so vinyl became the preferred format again due to it physically not supporting so much distortion.
There's a database of how dynamic various releases are, so you can find the best one: http://www.dr.loudness-war.inf... [loudness-war.info]
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Precisely. I once bought one of those Costco 100-CD packs, and it worked well for various things: not just music, but also files that I wanted to store as backup. But when I got to the last bunch, there was always a CD here or there that just couldn't be burned. That's a risk one incurs while going for disks, that one doesn't have w/ flash based storage
Re: why buy in the cloud (Score:3)
There was a story recently about flash media degrading much faster than you might think the longer it is unpowered.
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Admittedly I don't really buy digital music but I would assume they have great control in what you can do with your music (depending on the company).
And there are constant stories of digital media either being altered/edited, or pulled outright, and removed from your library. That's the main reason behind the physical media movement.
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Digital media encumbered by DRM or stored on someone else's server can be pulled, but unencumbered files (eg mp3 files) that you have on your own devices can be backed up wherever you want.
Re: why buy in the cloud (Score:2)
Digital vs physical my dude.
Re: why buy in the cloud (Score:2)
It's about digital vs physical, but you seem to have missed that point.
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Re: why buy in the cloud (Score:2)
My PC doesn't even have external drive bays. However, it does have USB ports, so when I want to rip something it's not a problem.
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Why buy at all? $2 for a song? That sounds expensive. When you compare it to something like paying Spotify for your life:
78 years * 12 months * $12.99 = $12,158.64 lifetime dollars.
Spotify library is 100 million songs.
I just looked it up and $12,158.64 turns out to be less than $200,000,000.
I don't see the advantage of buying physical.
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I have tried Spotify. Convenient as that is, it does require, among other things, an internet connection, and it runs ads after a bunch of songs, particularly if one is using the unpaid version. $2 for a song, otoh, enables one to save it in a digital format, and then play it on an MP3 player or any player of one's choice
One thing I'm not getting is this return to gramophone records, cassettes and CDs. In my life, I've been through all of them. For the first, there was zero mobility: one generally lis
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No one postulated an unpaid version. We're talking about paid. Zero ads. Also it allows 100% offline connection, anything you add to a playlist can be set to automatically download to your device. Online is required for you to get new music, a significantly lower bar than driving to the store and buying a CD.
The thing is I have the same capability. My phone actually still has a headhpone jack so I can play it in a car with an aux port. But more commonly I play it via bluetooth on virtually any device, or st
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My monthly music spending on music is way less than $12.99. Having access to 100 million songs, is like a scaled up version of Cable TV, which has hundreds of channels that nobody wants, but you pay for them all anyway.
And, whenever you stop paying Spotify's monthly fee, you've got nothing, I've got hundreds of albums of MP3 tracks that will never go away.
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So yeah Spotify isn't for you. But then you're not really into music are you since to keep your low monthly spend would be buying less than 5 CDs per year. Music isn't for everyone.
But for those people who listen a lot, it is worth doing a cost benefit analysis.
And, whenever you stop paying Spotify's monthly fee, you've got nothing
And why would I do that when it presents one of the best cost/benefits to me? I pay far less having subscribed to Spotify than I used to pay for CDs. By the way I still have some old CDs, and radio is also still a thing, so not having Spotify does no
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Great, Spotify works for you, I don't think you've made a wrong choice. As for me, I'm apparently more selective in my tastes than you.
However, this statement does not follow:
you're not really into music are you
No, I'm not into a wide spectrum of music such that I need a constant supply of new artists. But I do audio mixing and stage lighting, where I get to enjoy live music on a regular basis, and there is *no* audio format that compares to live.
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That's some girl math right there. "This handbag is $2,000, but if you wear it every day for 30 years, that's only 18 cents per day!"
One, you'd have to listen to a large part of the library to get the calculated economical value (including stuff you don't want to hear), and two, you'd have to force yourself to keep listening to it day in day out to keep extracting that value. That one song you bought, you could listen to at your leisure, the way entertainment should be: not forced, no anxiety about its eco
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When you can rip your own CD? And places like Amazon will sell you physical media and "autorip" much of their catalog (but not all)
For people that only buy one track, it makes sense to drop $1-$2 for a song. And ignore the whole album. That's perhaps the way popular music works. But for fans of certain bands, we buy the whole album.
Or better yet, have your own MP3 player. Download the songs - yeah, pay the $1-2 for a song, arrange them in a playlist of your choice and copy them to the MP3 player. Then play it all you want, w/o bothering about the internet connectivity anywhere, or ads b/w songs after you've heard a couple or more (like in Spotify)
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Used CD albums are in the $1-2 range anyway. Easy to find on eBay, or used shops if you have them where you live. Might as well get the whole album.
I've bought a few digital tracks, but only where there wasn't a physical release.
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Or if you're out of bars? Or going through a tunnel? Or the streamer decides that's *so* old, they stop streaming? Or because you actually *like* the musician(s), and want to hear what they put together?
And the musician gets more money from you buying a CD than what the streaming services give them.
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Or being able to actually listen to them. Just read a story about the band Behemoth being banned in Turkey for "preaching satanism". Amazon has already edited or banned books on their Kindle store.
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I've reached the point where if I want to own a song, I buy the entire album.
Fuck streaming starvation of artists.
Multiple rug pulls (Score:5, Informative)
The streaming services have already done multiple rug pulls, rights-stripping acquisitions, and bankruptcies to take away "purchased" streaming rights and force people to pay a second time (and a third, and a fourth...). But yeah, the people who have CD players with analog outputs and who buy CDs are the dumb ones.
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I pay for an Amazon Music subscription and I have yet to not be able to find something that I wanted to listen to. Music streaming has gotten better in recent years. Video streaming has gotten worse. I miss being able to find anything on Netflix. Now I have to buy a month of Disney+ if I want to watch the new Tron movie.
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I set up Navidrome on my home server, and Cloudflare Zero Trust so I can access it from anywhere. On Android you can use Symfonium, or just access it with a web browser.
So I have all my music available for streaming, anywhere, and I own all of it. No ads, no enshittification, nobody can delete it.
CD + Sound Engineering for the win! (Score:2)
Simply fix the horrible sound engineering that undermines any rich format and you'll win. Records sound better for many people because they are engineered for a crap format that limits them; so while they ARE low quality, the limitation has them better engineered than superior formats.
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Very true. I have plenty of CDs that are highly compressed with very little dynamic range. Wall of loud sound. LPs, despite their crackles tend to have pretty good dynamic range.
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one arguably has room to make noises about "LOL BUGGY WHIPS" and such, to declare optical disks a form of inferior practicality, a downgrade
but to do so means pointing out that the "you own nothing" cancer has become so bad that the downgrade is outweighed
then is where the sub-forks about local ripping, thumb/drives, servers, etc comes in - individuals after the idea at large, which if you've read this far let's face it, is septembers bucking per the above and pushed into CDs
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Not really a horse buggy argument when anyone buying these CDs is ripping them to mp3.
Re: Multiple rug pulls (Score:2)
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Happened to me with the Nintendo eShop. I lost my password or otherwise couldn't log in (don't remember) and Nintendo was of literally no help. So that was it, the games I bought there were gone. Go create a new account and buy the games over again, but they closed the eShop not to long after that anyway, so sucks to be you, Mr. Consumer.
Yeah no thanks.
Convenience won already..... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a Gen Xer who still really values the concept of holding onto my own music. I don't like paying for subscriptions to music streaming services that can get rid of a given album or even artist at any time, or who is likely to only offer their greatest hits, vs deeper tracks.
But I resorted to ripping my entire CD collection and hosting everything on a file server at home, with a second copy of my music on my Apple Mac.
The physical media takes up a lot of space and is subject to scuffs/scratches -- not to mention a dying popularity of CD players themselves.
I have very little interest in buying music on vinyl at this point in my life. I've been there, done that -- and the whole format is just inferior. Records wear out with each play and needles on turntables get dull over time. The format doesn't lend itself to listening in a moving vehicle either. Just a technological step backwards that's only popular to be retro and trendy.
But yeah, at this point? I'd buy digital tracks or albums and put them on my server/computer ... copying to thumb-drives for in-car use as needed. I don't think physical music CD purchases are necessary anymore, really.
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I'm in the same boat.
I still buy music, on bandcamp and 7digital mostly. The difference in price between digital and CD is a quid or two, but it's the shipping that's the killer. I always look to see if I can get the CD somewhere cheaper than digital, which still happens sometimes, especially for older stuff that was popular and is still floating around on eBay.
I've slowly been moving my CDs from jewel cases to DiscSox sleeves - I'm not sure why really, as it's quite pricey, but I can't yet bring myself jus
Same (Score:4, Interesting)
That has served as a sort of gravitational center of my music; everything I would seek out to listen to, I already own, so that only leaves "discovery". And I don't have mainstream tastes, so consent-manufacturers like Spotify are useless for that. I'm also older and less in to random new music, so I tend to be old-school there, too, and depend on friends for new music.
I still buy CDs sometimes, mainly at shows when I know the money goes directly to the artists. Then I rip it.
I have no reason to subscribe to a streaming service.
Re: Same (Score:2)
If a band's website or YT has a Bandcamp link, I'll almost check it out and follow or buy something if it seems cool. That's been my path to discovery.
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Completely agree. Bought a bunch of songs on iTunes. Also downloaded some music videos from YouTube, and have quite a collection. Previously, I'd create a playlist in iTunes, and then using that, load up the purchased songs to my iPod
These days, though, I'm more into podcasts, so don't listen to much music in the first place. But if I did, that's how I'd do it.
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>"I'm a Gen Xer who still really values the concept of holding onto my own music. I don't like paying for subscriptions to music streaming services that can get rid of a given album or even artist at any time, or who is likely to only offer their greatest hits, vs deeper tracks."
Same here. I ripped and stored all my hundreds of CD's eons ago. And supplemented regularly with newly-bought CD's over the years, and also digital song additions. All my music is mine. I copy it to every device I own- phone,
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But you can have convenience with physical CDs. You just rip them. I don't know how streaming services control their media but I'd assume it isn't as simple as copying their mp3 around.
Oh come on now. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh come on now. (Score:4, Funny)
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To be fair, no one has claimed the death of bluray. The article was about the end of the recordable bluray settop box, something that I'm not sure I've ever seen in the west, though they apparently existed in Japan.
When CD's were established--they price gouging! (Score:2)
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Need more releases on cassette (Score:2)
NO, they aren't (Score:2)
NO, CDs aren't making a comeback. Give me a fucking break.
How desperate are journalists to come up with something worth reading that they have to stoop to spewing out filler text like this 'article'?
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Small data point:
I have been selling used records and CDs at record shows and via the mail since the mid 90's. When first I started, LPs were about 20% of the game and CDs 80%. That changed with the advent of Napster (I still remember the Boston record show in September 1999 when the CD dealers all looked at each other and gasped at the crash in demand for CDs from college kids) and from then on LPs became more and more or our business.
Three years ago the percentage was probably 90% vinyl and 10% CDs. Last
Can cars start offering CD players again? (Score:2, Interesting)
Did they take them away to sell more Sirius XM subscriptions?
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That's fine: anyone w/ a subscription and the app on their phone can listen to their Sirius programming on the road, courtesy their wireless data connection. If they don't want to burn that, they even have the option of downloading a show in advance back home, and then setting out while playing it for their trip
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Sirius XM? Is that like a shit version of Spotify? /sarcasm No CD players disappeared from cars because consumers largely stopped giving a shit about CDs. When every guy on the road connects their phone to their car not only are CD players obsolete, but largely radio is taking a back seat to endless subscription media, podcasts, music streaming, playing files from your phone.
Honestly I stopped listening to CDs in the car in 2000 when I bought a car with an aux jack.
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My car has a CD player AND a mode to play Sirius XM radio. Currently, I'm not subscribed to it, but when I was, I'd log in via my phone and listen to it that way. Yeah, it was consuming my wireless data, but on the flip side, if I was listening to a show, I'd pick up where I left off after I returned to the car, as opposed to be at the mercy of whatever was live at that time
Sirius XM has nothing to do w/ car CD players any more than FM or AM radio does
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What are you talking about, my car still has a CD player!
SA-CD or DVD-Audio is where is at. (Score:2)
If we are going to rescue a digital physical disc format:
Why not rescue the ones with better audio quality?
Problem with SA-CD is that it uses special players. But DVD-Audio? Come on!
Please music labels, make it happen!
careful when searching for DV-DA (Score:2)
Typos aside. I think higher than CD quality format is an audiophile luxury. I suspect it is difficult to get consumers to pay for the higher mastering costs to make a worthwhile high quality release. It's mostly because to actually play it with any noticable improvements, you need better equipment at home.
Add to that that DVD-Audio is so poorly supported on desktop PCs and requires a little bit of third party software to get working. Seems like a hassle for something that most people don't seem interested i
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Unless you're talking about surround sound, the only meaningful difference between SACD and CDs is that the formers were usually remastered for production. Even so called "experts" can't tell a "HD" audio source apart from a CD because ... well.. human ears are just basic.
All you're paying for with SACD is a lot of additional noise in ultrasonic frequencies that your equipment filters out during playback.
the economics make no sense (Score:2)
But there are two huge differences between music and video streaming. First, it is still po
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First, it is still possible to buy downloadable unencumbered mp3 files, and sometimes even flac or ogg
Really? Please advise source for this.
To me, "buy" implies "own". Thus, if you "own" something, you should be able to sell it. Can you sell me one of your purchased FLAC, OGG, or mp3 files?
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First, it is still possible to buy downloadable unencumbered mp3 files, and sometimes even flac or ogg
Really? Please advise source for this.
0.2 seconds of googling says that both Amazon and Google allow you to download purchased music as mp3. How are you posting on slashdot if you cannot perform a basic search?
To me, "buy" implies "own". Thus, if you "own" something, you should be able to sell it. Can you sell me one of your purchased FLAC, OGG, or mp3 files?
Sure. Just like I can rip the music off of a CD and then sell it to you. Neither action is legal, but nor are there any technical barriers against either
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You can buy MP3 downloads from Amazon, completely unencumbered with DRM. Typical price is $1.20 per song or $10 for a whole album, most music is available in this format.
CDs were bad, they are still bad (Score:1)
conspriacy (Score:2)
I always figured since the hype was that they would last 100s of years that the execs purposely sabotaged them!
The Jewel cases are nice; however, they are brittle and the hinges break easily. They never tried to fix that because it was not a mistake.
In the early days, CD-ROM caddies were needed for computer players and burners. Important CDs lived in a caddy but naturally those were not cheap. They were quite similar to 3.5 Floppy cases! A cheaper case could have been made; one that was not removable from t
Re: conspriacy (Score:2)
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And how do I know, because I ripped them all about a year ago into a massive collection on a pair of redundant HDD's so I could
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Your memory of floppy disks is much different from mine. They typically lost their data in only a few years due to degradation of the magnetic storage surface.
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My collection of old CDs lasted a whole lot longer than my collection of floppies, on average.
But what I learned from that was, any static storage has a lifespan. If you don't want to lose data, you have to keep it active and duplicated, with multiple backups on different media, like hard drive and cloud.
Are CDs Making a Comeback? (Score:1)
I have some of my money in Certificates of Deposit.
The interest rates aren't that great at the moment, but its a lot safer than BitCoin
My daughters love CDs (Score:2)
I don't understand the appeal (Score:2)
I just bought a few second hand. (Score:2)
Because I couldn't find the tracks on youtube and still had some space in my CD shelf. And they were cheap and had a bit of nostalgia going on at that moment. I wouldn't go back from files to CDs, but they are a digital format and thus not totally from the steam age like vinyl or other stuff which can justify to keep them around if you have the room. My last _new_ CD is at least a decade back, probably longer. And I'm pretty sure that's not going to change.
cheap or premium? (Score:2)
Whatever rising interest in CDs today seems to be mostly driven by the extreme cheapness of getting started collecting them. It's like the very early days of the vinyl revival, when you could go into the antique mall and find boxes of well-preserved LPs marked $1 each. It was like a treasure hunt with people happily showing off their hauls. You can still do that sometimes with CDs.
LPs now are marketed as a premium product with emphasis on the packaging and sound quality. New CDs are being produced as shovel
Blu-Ray Audio (Score:2)