I love cds because they are a way to play digital music without using an interface that feels like a computer. I program computers for my job, but I really dislike software interfaces in general. I’d always rather have real buttons to press and real objects that tell my playback device what I want to hear just by inserting it - no need to select on a screen or tell Siri what I want to hear. Though really, in my ideal world, I also hate digital audio and really wish that all recording was still done to tape or some superior analog format we could have invented by now if digital audio wasn’t so cheap and convenient. And I’m sure we also could have invented an analog playback format superior to vinyl and as portable as cds. But I accept that not enough people hear the downsides of digital audio to drive any reasonable sized market for such things.
As @chervokas noted, that 800,000 is absolutely not about downloads. For the very reason you mentioned... this is about younger people and young people aren't paying for downloads when they can stream the album for free. Many of the people who are buying all those CDs (and vinyl, for that matter) aren't doing so because it's their preferred listening format. They're streaming the album on their phones and displaying their CDs and LPs as part of their "Taylor collection."
Music isn't 'stuff,' but the object it's pressed on is. There's a big difference. Maybe? I read ebooks all the time, I don't have the space for a huge library and i like not having to figure out where to store them. But also the act of reading a book is more tactile than putting on a CD...once the thing starts playing, it's the same to your ears. I do wish digital services would figure out liner notes, but back in the day I had tons of CD's with nothing particularly interesting in the booklets either, so that's not a given.
Pulling up the new Pet Shop Boys and Transatlantic albums and hitting 'play', yeah, that's some real logic there. Just because apps have algorithms and all kinds of extra crap doesn't mean you have to use them, I use mine just like any other curated library, 100% my own 'logic' and having it play only what I tell it to play. It's easy to ignore features or elements you don't want or need and just get down with the music you want to hear.
I still remember my first proper mp3 player, 2002 or so. One of those discman-sized Creative Labs ones where I swapped in a 60GB drive which was HUGE at the time . I was in college and, of course, always somewhere. Once I could take music with me that way and not fight with a discman on the go, the die was cast, I suppose. I stuck with the format a few more years, but by the time of a huge interstate move in '08 I was done, I couldn't take my collection wtih me to my new place anyway, and it really wasn't hard to let go. The technology took a couple years to catch up but even in '08 it wasn't hard to see where things were going as far as streaming happening sooner rather than later (I think MOG and Rdio launched around 2009-10, I was onboard for both in the early days, Rdio was the shiznit!)
Other than vinyl, there was never any way to mass-distribute analog audio in a high-quality way. I don't know if something could've been 'invented,' honestly...there'd definitely be a lucrative niche market for such a thing, but when you think about the actual physics of audio tape, the limits come into play fairly quickly. For me there's nothing quite as tasty as an all-analog LP, but short of breaking into the studio and playing back the original master tape, there's not much that was left to develop there, as far as a commercial product, unless people were gonna get huge tape machines installed in their houses and store boxes of 1" reel-to-reel tape.
Not towards sales in Luminate or RIAA data. You're taling about chart position calculatons which is not what the story is about.
True. Considering only the objective factors. But as with LP, there are sometimes subjective factors in play with CD too. Different, subjectively "better" mastering where the streaming and downloads are mastered louder for listening in the car. Sometimes. Subjective aversion to file management versus jewel cases, etc., for those who like to collect things. (It's dawned on me that I like to collect things a bit too.) But yeah, most people just moved on to streaming.
The cool thing is that with so much info available, it’s easy to put an album on, do a quick web search, and come up with plenty of info from wiki and beyond that can be even more comprehensive than liner notes.
How are physical book sales doing these days? In theory it seems like a roughly parallel situation to the music business.
Oh? The sales figures mentioned were cited as coming from Billboard, so that's whose definition I looked for.
Do you realize only vinyl audiophiles care about that, right? And I'm not sure what percentage of physical media buyers are actual audiophiles. I use both formats and unless the cd version is Death Magnetic-compressed, I'll take it over vinyl all day long.
Didn't know that, given how much more expensive vinyl is, but of course I'll take your word for it. I ebayed my Millions Of Dead Cops the other day, given Amazon wants a whooping 106 bucks for it, and the inexpensive, better-sounding CD counterpart has the More Dead Cops comp thrown in for good measure
Depends on the house. Ours sucks, but it was the only thing on the market we could afford when we needed to move. Anything that doesn't fit on the kallax isn't happening. I do wish I could have more books and such but it's just not worth it.
They do come from Billboard, but it's not a chart story -- Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets Department': Records Broken (billboard.com) Album equivalent streams is used in chart position. It's not part of sales statistics. Two different things: chart position calculation and sales figures. "Of Tortured Poets 1.5 million first-week sales, 700,000 of those copies were vinyl. That breaks Swift’s own record for the largest sales week for an album on vinyl in the modern era, or since Luminate began tracking data in 1991, beating the 693,000 sold of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in its first week in 2023." That's about sales -- LP, CD, download, cassette. For more clarity, if you're still confused, this is from a follow up story from Billboard a couple of days later, with updated numbers: The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each units equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. The Tortured Poets Department earned 2.5 million equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first six days. Of that sum, traditional album sales comprise 1.85 million. The Billboard Chart position involves a calculation that includes sales and "streaming equivalent albums." But the sales figures involve "traditional album sales" only -- which then become a part of the chart calculation. When Luminate/Billboard reports sales, not "equivalent album units", that's sales, not sales plus streams.
It's complicated and impossible to know for any given CD or LP what in input costs are given a big label's economies of scale. But if you look at Disc Makers' advice to independent artists, the margin on CDs is like 80%, on LPs its like 40-60% -- Can You Make a Profit Selling Vinyl and CDs? | Disc Makers One of the reasons that CD was so incredibly successful for the record business was because it was such a high margin product.
Easily solved by plugging in a USB disc drive. The same can be done in a car. As far as I know no new car models come with a CD unless some luxury brand still offers them as an optional extra. Actually a lot only come with a tablet glued to the dash and no actual buttons or dials.
Physical books have held up pretty well -- personally I find there's a huge difference between reading on screen and reading on paper, where there's not any difference between listening to music played back through a DAC from a CD vs. music played back through the same DAC from a file on a server, local or remote, but I don't know if that's the reason why or if the built in market for books from school uses plays an outsize role, which is pretty different from the music business -- not just text books, or novels and poetry for lit classes, but other kinds of categories as well, like science non-fiction or like What to Expect When You're Expecting type health books . Books really aren't just an entertainment or leisure consumption product. That said, the audiobook market has been growing considerably annually for a dozen years.
Just in case anyone interested, here in the UK they announce the charts/sales on a Friday. Big numbers for Taylor Swift of 270k, CD has done very well. 270,091 Taylor Swift - THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT [109,392 CDs, 66,388 vinyl, 4,457 cassettes, 10,948 downloads, 78,907 streaming]
Of course, when I get a car that doesn't have a cd player, it is still highly likely that something like this would work with it.
