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Is this a joke?

Has anyone experienced this first hand? I was just about ready to do my first "burn" today or tomorrow of music to clear my hard drive. But my goodness, if this is true, that isn't good.

Also I thought about making a video cd of video files, but if they are just going to go "bye-bye" in two years, what is the point?

I thought CD media was supposed to be better than cassette? All my cassettes have last much longer than 2 years. Heck, they are still going strong after a decade.

Surely this study is not real valid?

I was just about ready to do my first "burn" today or tomorrow of music to clear my hard drive. But my goodness, if this is true, that isn't good.

I wouldn't worry about it for that purpose. If some of the bits become unreadable on an audio CD--hell, if many of the bits become unreadable--you probably won't be able to hear the difference, and if you're burning from MP3 files, there probably won't even be a difference, unless you are using a wastefully high bitrate (or VBR).

Contrast this with a data CD: flip one bit in an executable program, and it very likely becomes unusable. Flip one bit in a bank of data, and right answers become wrong. (Ask RadioAstronomer how important that can be.)

I've just started burning audio CDs myself. I'm a longtime subscriber to Emusic.com (which I recommend to every true music lover), and have assembled a (figuratively) massive library of MP3 albums. Now I can tote my treasures with me anywhere; that's the real value of it. If storage space is your main issue, you might want to reconsider: 32 MP3 (VBR) albums take up about 2 gigabytes of space on my system. Disk storage costs about a dollar per gigabyte these days. The cheapest storage case I've found for 32 CDs costs about $10, not counting the media.