Compact Disc death foretold for 2012

I mean both the ones you can peruse in person for a brick-and-mortar experience, AND the ones you buy online for cheap. The point of this thread is that CDs will go away period.

Yep, I buy directly from the artists or from their independent labels (often enough the artists’ own.) I see no references on the printed materials that come with the CDs to the 4 majors. Let them starve. It’s also better music than the overproduced mainstream on the radio. Roots, Americana. These artists deserve our support.

When you think about it, you realize how absurd it is in the digital age for record companies to be still marketing music on physical media in the first place.

With compact discs, you have the expenses of manufacture, packaging, distributing and retailing. Not to mention "shrinkage" due to theft and the expense of taking returns for unsold CDs.

Compare all of that to the distribution of digital media over the Internet. You have unlimited supply with nearly zero cost of inventory. Whether you sell one copy or ten million copies of a particular song, it takes up only a tiny amount of space on your servers.

Consider that 20 years ago - the heyday of the CD - the largest superstores like Tower Records are Virgin could still only stock a fraction of all the recorded music that was available. I remember shopping for compact discs at the Tower Records on Mass Ave in Boston. It had three floors of product. Yet I often went in there and came out empty-handed because the music I was looking for wasn't in stock. They carried plenty of Michael Bolton and Madonna CDs however.

Nowadays, you have online "record stores" like Amazon and iTunes that have tens of millions of recordings to choose from. What's not to like about that? In order to cram that much inventory into a record store, the record store would have to be larger than the Pentagon building.

Music snobs love to complain about the low quality of digital files and that may have been true in the early days when most online tracks were DRM-infested 128 kps offerings. But now the standard is unprotected 256 kps files. One you get to 256 kps, you would need really expensive headphones (and excellent hearing) to tell the difference from an uncompressed audio file.

I recently signed up for the iTunes music match and now have my 18,000+ tracks in the Cloud. I no longer need to worry about backing up my music library because if I lose my hard drive, I can simply download them all over again - only this time, for free. Best of all, I was able to replace all my 128 kps files with brand new 256 kps files with no DRM.

I feel that cloud-based music will be the final nail in the coffin of not only compact disks, but any physical media to store music (other than your computer hard drive).

Sorry, see what you mean. I've been getting all of my music digital.

I was seeing retailers pricing themselves out of business, just like we saw it with Hollywood Video and Blockbuster.