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Once upon a time, the coffee chain represented hope that record-buying could remain a physical experience for most people. What happens when it stops selling CDs? Starbucks will stop selling CDs at the end of the month, and it isn't hip to cry about it. Last week's news that the coffee chain would do away with its register-side racks was met on Twitter with many a condolence to Norah Jones's career; at Vulture, Lindsey Weber mock-mourned, “Oh no, how will we know what adult contemporary stations are playing without having to listen to the radio?”

Many institutions have their archives stored on CDs — but the discs aren't as stable as once thought. There is no average life span for a CD, says preservationist Michele Youket, "because there is no average disc." --- Back in the 1990s, historical societies, museums and symphonies across the country began transferring all kinds of information onto what was thought to be a very durable medium: the compact disc. Now, preservationists are worried that a lot of key information stored on CDs — from sound recordings to public records — is going to disappear. Some of those little silver discs...

Compact discs weren't always impromptu drink coasters. Once, in the not-so-distant past, they played music, contained pictures, and let people play video games with tacked-on FMV sequences. And today, the venerable CD turned 30. Happy birthday! 1979-2009.Thirty years. Pretty amazing that it's been that long since those crazy Dutchmen at Philips spun the technology off of laser discs as part of an optical digital audio disc demo in Eindhoven.Of course, the CD didn't immediately take off right then and there. It needed a little help from Sony, which worked with Philips to get the format standardized. The standard they named...

Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse. IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,”...

In an indication of what the Wall Street Journal calls a "seismic shift" in the way people now acquire music, CD sales for Q1 2007 are 20% below what they were last year. Digital song sales, which were expected to salvage the industry, have risen 54% in 2007 from last year to 173.4 million, but that is not nearly enough to compensate for the 20% drop in CD sales to 81.5 million units. Overall music sales, both digital and physical, are down 10% this year. Adding insult to injury, one billion songs a month are traded on pirate networks....

The recording industry is testing technology that would prevent consumers from making copies of CD "burns," a piracy defense that could put some significant new restrictions on legally purchased music. Tools under review by the major labels would limit the number of backups that could be made from ordinary compact discs and prevent copied, or "burned," versions from being used to create further copies, according to Macrovision and SunnComm International, rivals that are developing competing versions of the digital rights management (DRM) software. SunnComm said a version of its new "secure burning" technology is already being tested by BMG Music...

The way the music dies Tanyia Johnson and Steven Neuman Illustrators CD rot renders compact discs unreadable, causing users to lose data permanently By Steven Neuman News Reporter May 21, 2004 They were supposed to last for 100 years. They were supposed to become family heirlooms, allowing home movies and pictures to literally defy time and keep memories as fresh as the day they were made. But the compact disc, as it turns out, may not exactly last forever. In fact, some CDs undergo "CD rot," the slow, gradual destruction of the data they contain. In manufactured CDs, the...

<p>Anthony Hamilton may not be a household name yet in music circles. But the soul singer is sure to be a hot topic in Internet chat rooms come Tuesday.</p> <p>His new CD, "Comin' From Where I'm From," will debut that day with built-in technology to restrict copying.</p>

European copyright protection is expiring on a collector's trove of 1950's jazz, opera and early rock 'n' roll albums, forcing major American record companies to consider deals with bootleg labels and demand new customs barriers. Already reeling from a stagnant economy and the illegal but widespread downloading of copyrighted music from the Internet, the recording companies will now face a perfectly legal influx of European recordings of popular works. Copyright protection lasts only 50 years in Europe compared to 95 years in the United States, even if the recordings were originally made and released in America. So recordings made in...

Despite efforts by record executives to stanch declining CD sales by releasing a cavalcade of big-name artists during the critical Christmas shopping season, early sales figures show an already struggling industry may now be in even worse shape. In the five weeks since mid-November, when the record labels began their biggest holiday blitz in recent memory, compact disc sales were down 12.9 percent compared to the period in 2001, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales. That poor performance comes even as new CDs from artists like Shania Twain, Mariah Carey, Jay-Z and Paul McCartney have sold...

Record industry attempts to stop the swapping of pop music on online networks such as Kazaa will never work. So says a research paper prepared by computer scientists working for software giant Microsoft. The four researchers believe that the steady spread of file-swapping systems and improvements in their organisation will eventually make them impossible to shut down. They also conclude that the gradual spread of CD and DVD burners will help thwart any attempts to control what the public can do with the music they buy. Doomed disksThe paper was prepared for a workshop on Digital Rights Management, (DRM), at...

September 16, 2002 Epic Records Takes Steps to Seal Its Newest MusicBy CHRIS NELSON he Epic Records Group, a unit of Sony Music, is approaching the sticky problem of prerelease music's being traded online with an even stickier solution. Writers receiving review copies of two soon-to-be-released albums — Tori Amos's "Scarlet's Walk" and Pearl Jam's "Riot Act" — are finding the CD's already inside Sony Walkman players that have been glued shut. Headphones are also glued into the players, to prevent connecting the Walkman to a recording device. By locking up the discs, Epic hopes to keep writers from...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Compact disc music sales decreased 7 percent during the first half of the year, a further indication that online music sharing sites are hurting the recording industry, a trade group said Monday. The decline cost the industry $284 million in lost sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The decline, measured by PricewaterhouseCoopers, compares with a 5.3 percent drop in CD shipments in the first half of 2001. The RIAA said the industry uses just-in-time delivery, so CD shipments are reliably indicative of actual sales. Also Monday, the RIAA released a separate survey of...

The writing could be on the wall for computer buffs who copy music CDs for their friends. Sony Music has planted a "poisoned pellet" of software in Celine Dion's latest CD, A New Day Has Come, that is capable of crashing, and in cases permanently freezing, the optical drives of personal computers into which the discs are inserted. Michael Speck, of the Australian Record Industry Association, confirmed yesterday that the anti-piracy software trials were under way but said "spiked" CDs had not so far been distributed in Australia, but it was inevitable. The music companies were "simply protecting their property",...

Filed at 3:20 p.m. ET NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new batch of compact discs designed to defeat Napster-style piracy is coming soon to record-industry insiders. BMG, one of the world's five major labels, said on Monday it would start issuing promotional CDs -- the free discs distributed to critics, retailers and other insiders weeks before the official release -- with technological countermeasures to prevent copying. The major labels, which include Vivendi Universal, Sony Music, EMI Group, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music and Bertelsmann AG's BMG, hope that copy protection measures will prevent users from ''ripping,'' or copying the music...