The compact disc’s last stand

True / Slant ^ | 22 March 2010 | Michele Catalano

[ShadowAce]

Yesterday, I got a text message from my cousin asking if my son wanted any CD shelves, because he was getting rid of his.  I texted him back “LOL CDs.”

Our CDs – thousands of them – are stacked on a floor to ceiling shelf unit in the garage. All those compact discs have been ripped onto the various computers in our house, shrunk down to invisible little bytes that take up no space in the house.  All of our subsequent music has been bought in digital form (save for my occasional vinyl purchases).

If there was any doubt that the compact disc is dying, look no further than Universal’s announcement that they will start selling most CDs for ten dollars or less.

The Universal Music Group could rewrite U.S. music pricing when it tests a new frontline pricing structure, which is designed to get single CDs in stores at $10, or below.

Beginning in the second quarter and continuing through most of the year, the company’s Velocity program will test lower CD prices. Single CDs will have the suggested list prices of $10, $9, $8, $7 and $6.

[…]

“We think [the new pricing program] will really bring new life into the physical format,” Universal Music Group Distribution president/CEO Jim Urie said.

I think Universal is wrong in thinking that the problem is pricing.  We live in an age of instant gratification.  You hear a song you like, you plug in your iPod, go to the iTunes store or whatever the Zune equivalent is and that song is yours ten seconds later. Who wants to go to a store to buy music? Or even order a CD online? Sure, you never have to leave your computer chair to do that, but then there’s the waiting for it to be delivered. Digital music purchase is the ultimate in home delivery.

Way back in some year I don’t care to remember – let’s call it 1981 – I was working in a video rental store. It was one of the first of its kind on Long Island. For just $75.00 a year, you got the privilege of paying $3.95 a night to rent a limited selection of movies, mostly MGM classics, low budget horror movies and tons of porn.  My boss may have not had a lot of foresight when it came to stocking movies, but he was smart enough to know when a gig was going to run out. He saw the prices for VHS movies coming down and knew it wouldn’t be long before he couldn’t charge ridiculous prices to pillars of community who called ahead for their copies of Bad Girls and Debbie Does Dallas to be slipped into brown paper bags.

So he sent me to a trade show, where I was to listen to talks on the future of home entertainment. I spent an entire Saturday afternoon in a hotel conference room at JFK Airport watching haggard salespeople talk about the future.

That’s where I saw my first compact disc.  The salesman held the disc up for all to see and proclaimed it be the Next Big Thing. He talked about the bulkiness of vinyl, the scratches and skips on our records, the difficulty in storing large collections of music. He held the CD up to the light and made it shine for us. It was like magic. How could all that music fit on one little disc? We were mesmerized.

My boss didn’t think CDs would ever become a thing. He cited the tiny little album art and liner notes as the main reason compact discs would never catch on.  I’d call him shortsighted, but a year or so after that he turned the video rental store into a video game store and made a boatload of money. Most of it off of me.

Later in the 80s I was working in a record store when we had to clear a small space next to the classical records for the arrival of compact discs. Everyone dismissed them. The jewel boxes came housed in cardboard boxes the size of a small child. The prices were exorbitant.  We called them novelties. They’d never catch on. Even though the big name artists were all latching on to the new technology, touting the cleaner sounds, we were all “Yea, call me when the Butthole Surfers release something on CD. We’ll stick to our scratchy vinyl.”

Six months later, half the record wall was replaced by new shelving for CDs. A year or less after that, the cassette department was gone.

CDs had a nice, long run but it was only a matter of time before something came along to push them off the shelves. Turns out it was a thing that needs no shelf space. The ease of buying digital music – and, of course, the pirating of – have done to the CDs what Georgetown did to my NCAA bracket: made it damn near obsolete.

Universal can throw as many life preservers as they want to the drowning medium. Fact is, compact discs will some day be looked upon with the same curiosity as today’s teenagers look at cassettes.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

2$ a disc...ouch.

Blu-Ray hasn't been mentioned...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

OK

Archival Gold BD-R

But only goes for 200 years...

10 BD-R discs in an archival ten pack spindle $249.99

[GonzoGOP]

If we still get tombstones in a few years.

Fewer and fewer are. You just get vaporized by a laser and then digitally uploaded onto a flash drive.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I want to be a flashdrive for each of my grand kids....ROFL!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Neptune is very busy out here.

[Zuben Elgenubi]

I’ve got the Beatles White Album on vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD and mp3. Dear Prudence, indeed.

[nickcarraway]

To me the CD sound was never as good as a cassette tape. Too compressed and not as warm.

[Zuben Elgenubi]

" . . . the Archival Gold CD-R's have been shown to safely store your images for more than 300 years."

Accelerated stability testing?

[zeugma]

With vinyl it is not cheap or easy. But there is hope. Last year I read about some engineers that had invented a machine that used a laser to read vinyl records and converted the recording to digital files. I would think that the device might be commercially available in a few years.

Those are already available. Not cheap, but available.

[PapaBear3625]

We live in an age of downloadable YouTube videos (I use the "1 click video downloader" add-on on firefox), terabyte hard drives, cheap multi-gigabyte flash thumb drives, WiFi and high-speed internet.

Kids can borrow CDs from the library and rip them to their hard drives. As soon as one copy exists on a hard drive, it can be copied to friends hard drives easily. They don't need file-sharing hosts any more (with their vulnerability to RIAA subpoenas) if they and their friends can merge music collections completely under the radar.

[Tuscaloosa Goldfinch]

Oh, gosh, you pointed out several no no ‘s that I’m doing. Cheap cds, regular markers. I guess I need to look around for a bulk supplier of high quality cd’s. We go through a bunch. Probably 400 a year?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I haven't looked at these...anyway some links:

******************************************

PDF]

NISTIR 7017

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
simulation of the production process using empirically ...... for the implementation of accelerated test plans, predictive ...... (Statistical Engineering Division, NIST); S. Doty, B. Belzer, ...... longevity of nano-multilayer magnetic media.” ..... National Institute of Standards and Technology. Director ...
www.nist.gov/msel/metallurgy/upload/AnnualReport2003.pdf - Cached - Similar pages

• [PDF]

  Table of Contents

  File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
  Using NIST's crystallographic databases it is possible to resolve a ...... At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) the ... directional test facility (a current highbay lab at NIST in building 226). ...... have created a microfluidic device to perform the Eberwine process using a column of 6 µm ...
  www.surf.nist.gov/pdf/promo2008.pdf - Cached - Similar pages
• [PDF]

  Statistical Engineering Division

  File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
  Laboratory (ITL) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) ..... Under the Bayesian paradigm, such a test can be performed using so-called ...... Students are invited to bring sample data sets on a floppy drive or CD-R. ...... Workshop "Longevity, Aging and Degradation Models in Reliability, ...
  www.itl.nist.gov/div898/pubs/ar/SED2004.pdf - Cached - Similar pages

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See link at #100.

[Pontiac]

Not cheap, but available.

I doubt they will ever be cheap because they will never reach an economy of scale.

Not many people will really want to convert vinyl to digital.

Most recordings that most people would want are already available digitally and at a much better quality than could be achieved by converting a vinyl record to digital.

Pretty much a special use item for museums and professional archivist.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Looked thru some of those links,...lots of stuff...but never found was I asked Google for....sorry.

[rarestia]

700 MB isn’t much storage for images anymore. Most new digicams are set to astronomical dimensions for greatest pixel clarity, but the sizes are well over what most normal folks’ desktop resolutions can handle. As a result, some digital images can breach the 5 MB mark. Isn’t it amazing how far we’ve come?

I was marveling today at how people talk about 500 GB or 620 GB or 750 GB like it’s nothing; it’s so new. I have 2 160 GB SATA disks in a RAID10 in my desktop mobo from 2005, and I’ve made that stretch. Disk storage is obscenely cheap nowadays with 1 TB disks become commonplace; and with 3 Gbps from SATA and 5 Gbps coming up with SATA2, disk access/write speeds are no longer an issue. And finally, jump drives, thumb drives, call them what you want, the offerings in portable USB and firewire hard drives are plentiful.

Most photogs I know use solid-state stuff like thumbdrives and portable disks, esp. with newer OSes (esp. Leopard) coming with backup-to-disk options nowadays.

RIP CD. This must’ve been how it felt for my old man to say goodbye to the record or even the 8-track.

[Darnright]

I download stuff off iTunes then rip it to CD’s to play in the car. I do not like the gizmo you plug into the cigarette lighter, that plays your iPod on an unused radio station, because I always get static. I like the CD’s because they play better, at least in my area.

[SunkenCiv]

Oh, I didn’t think of that. What a silly bunt. ;’)

[zeugma]

I doubt they will ever be cheap because they will never reach an economy of scale.

That's true. For folks with large collections of LPs though, they could be a lifesaver. I can easily understand hard-core vynal owners shelling out bucks for something that won't wear the record when it is played (as even the best needles do). With modern DSP equipment to remove the inevitable pop and click, it might extend the live of LPs for quite a while. 

My wife's uncle Bob had  (conservatively) 10K albums when he died. He'd started converting a bunch of them to CDs in his later years before he passed, but didn't really make a dent in his collection. Someone really got quite a haul of big-band, blues, and old country stuff when his estate went up for sale. Unfortunately, family issues kept us from actively trying to preserve it.

The last few years we would take a paper bag full of CDs from him, take them home and rip them, and hand him his disks back and a couple of DVDs to load on his computer. He thought it was better than sliced bread because he had so much stuff available right at his fingertips. Of course we kept copies so I have some really interesting stuff in my collection. I have a copy of "Rising Son Blues" recorded in the late 30's to early 40s. It's the oldest version I've ever heard of what became a big hit with the Animals as "The House of the Rising Sun".

[wizr]

I am buying up used VHS tapes of favorite movies. The ones I couldn’t afford to buy before.

Call me cheap. Me, I’m frugal.