Totally agree with this. And I also want to add that cd players disappearing from new cars is not a problem for me. I have NEVER stored or played MY cds in the car. I fear that they will get scratches in that environment.
I do not consider myself to be an "audiophile". I can only tell the difference because I have ears that work. And for the record, there are way more (newer) CDs compressed like Death Magnetic (or close to it) than not.
I think you ARE an audiophile. The minute you care about DR you are one of us. Maybe I'm just not as sensitive to compression as you are, maybe I even enjoy it a little? I recently purchased some remastered FDR cds I already owned the regular releases of, and apart from being tonally better, the difference in DR, audibly speaking, wasn't anything to write home for. BUT.....they were grindcore releases from a label called Earache, so.......varying mileage.
So who are these people buying the Taylor Swift CDs? Is it all kids with too much money who want them as cute little artifacts?
If you spend time on the Taylor Swift threads on this board, the conversation there suggests it's Swift fans of all ages.
May well be! My nephew's band sell more cassettes than bandcamp files. The buyers almost never have anything to play cassettes on. He doesn't want to have cds pressed coz he doesn't think they'd sell. And that if he could afford having vinyl pressed, those would sell like crazy. Crazy right?!
Isn't that the definition of phasing out? "Oh, that thing's not selling anymore, so let's spend less time, money & investment on it until it becomes non-existent and we can stop caring." Phasing out wasn't the cause, but it could be argued (this isn't even my take, btw) that a lot of the labels are trying to phase them out now, which, I think, was the impetus for this thread? I don't think it would've been irrelevant - in every single news article. It's not like the price of tea in China. They're parallel music formats. It's fine to not include them, sure. But it wouldn't have been off topic to include them - especially if they were weaved into the article naturally, like a good journalist should. I'm not complaining. Just pondering about the intentional? exclusion. I don't have a chip on my shoulder. Do you? Is that really topical to this thread? Well if that isn't a non-direct personal insult! I enjoy discussing back and forth with Chervokas because he's not argumentative or insulting and always follows up with high detail and a clear passion for the subject matter; being a CD collector himself. I like debating with someone with a differing perspective. Although we don't always see eye to eye, it's enjoyable to compare notes. I feel like I learn a lot from these threads. Thanks for the links & discussion, everyone! It's not really tunnel vision. As you say, this forum isn't representative of the general populous. There's a higher percentage of the CD (and vinyl) defending community here; thus said opinions being fairly commonplace. This is where we all hang out. There are better outlets for more indicative consensus. I haven't seen anyone demanding their personal wishes become actual truth here. Just venting and sharing their personal perspectives & opinions... I wish. Though that's generally true right now, some select titles are going for crazy money. Regardless, I agree, now is a great time to buy up the format; probably the cheapest they'll ever be. Great advice. My car doesn't have a thumb drive, though. Have to use a portable device with a 3.5mm jack into the aux port. Or, just use the onboard CD player. What if we wanna listen offline? Or don't want to use Wikipedia? Mark Lewisohn and Lukas Kendall (and plenty of others) are much better, articulate writers. Love well done liner notes as opposed to whatever comes up on Google first. Sure, there are some great blogs, wikis, and breakdowns out there - but I'll gladly pay more for a dedicated blurb as part of a luxury set; it's exclusive, too. Finally, some numbers! How's that compare to the UK stats for her other albums? Seems like it's crushing all other formats over there.
No, actually I don't think that is the definition, and it's certainly not what the thread title asks -- which ask about "being phased out intentionally." Phasing out in this content means the producers have decided regardless of what the demand is they don't want to sell them so they're slowly removing them from the market. That's not the case in any way. First of all, they're fully available on the market from the companies; second of all, in some markets where the companies do business, like Japan especially, they're the leading format. Labels are NOT trying to phase them out and haven't every tried to phase them out. Consumer demand is declining for them in the US even though labels have continued to produce and sell them. There was only one news article -- the Billboard article about the Luminate data (Billboard and Luminate have the same ownership) and the records set. Other news organizations just picked up the single story, the didn't do any further reporting, they just reinterated the Billboard story citing Billboard. On top of which, no, as I said, there's nothing newsworthy about the number of CDs sold -- in no way was it unique or remarkable such that it would be of particular interest to a general readership, or even an industry readership. It's only of interest to a particular clique of people who seem to be very possessive fans of the CD format. What was exceptional was the biggest one day Spotify numbers, the fastest to 1B on Spotify and the biggest vinyl week in 33 years. That was the newsworthy stuff. There was nothing biggest, fastest, most, not done in decades about the CD sales. The CD sales figures, from a new perspective, are in that kind of "glacial movement slows" and "Generalissimo Francisco Franco Still Dead" kind of newsworthiness category.
Who buys 25 identical Paul McCartney or Rolling Stones lps on different coloured vinyl? Is it old men with too much money who want cute little artifacts?
As mentioned previously (way, way upthread) that's not always the case. There are plenty of examples of music only available on one format or another - or missing on one format or another. (haven't you even given examples of this too?) Just hypothetical here: if CDs stopped selling completely (or, at least, in numbers sustainable to continue producing them) the labels would stop producing & selling them, right? The concern here, as posted in the OP, is that this process has already begun in the US and some other markets: CDs becoming too much hassle to continue producing. Thus a phase out. We can disagree on whether this has actually happened or not, and where. But that's the question in the OP. Are CDs being phased out intentionally. IMHO, some of the intense bottom-lining has contributed to CD sales decline. (though, it's not the cause) This has, in effect, been a bit of a self fulfilling prophesy. CDs sell less, so less effort is put into them, so consumers buy less CDs. Full circle. Really, that's what I'm arguing, not the exclusion of CD data. The mindless copy/paste of the Billboard article, without anybody doing their own investigating. Cheaper & quicker, I guess. Still, would love to know those numbers - and I maintain they are relevant here - regardless of whether they also broke their own records or not. New album, huge seller - what are the numbers per format. Makes Taylor Swift look better, doesn't it? But the focus, and thus narrative, is exclusively on streaming and vinyl. So, members of this forum. I'm not possessive at all. Just curious.
You know Taylor Swift is unique -- she's the biggest thing in the music business with a broad base of fans of all sorts and ages. But if you look deeper at the best selling CDs in the US last year, it's a list dominated by K Pop acts with titles that had multiple variant covers, many of which were probably purchased by younger fans as, sort of, "collectibles."
Personally I find that's a pretty rare exception with new music releases today. Not doubt there are labels that don't stream. There are individual self-producing artists who don't stream. There's the Finish Tum label that only puts out music on CD. But the examples actually are not THAT numerous. Five or six years ago it looked like things were going that way, but the resilience of CD sales has actually make that less the case now than it was then. Back catalog, particularly in low selling genres, no doubt, companies have decided not to spend money on new physical reissues for the US market in large measure, even when the make the stuff available for digital and streaming. That's certainly a problem in journalism generally, no doubt. But in this case Billboard and Luminate ARE the story -- they're the keeper of the stats and the charts and the records. Just like everyone entertainment news section of a general interest new organization would routinely publish the weekend movie box office grosses, pickup up the gee whiz story about the biggest pop star in the US breaking sales records from the keeper of the sales records isn't really a problematic kind of journalism. Some of the stories I saw had a problem in that they didn't explain that it wasn't the biggest vinyl sales week ever but the biggest since Luminate/Soundscan started. That was sloppy. But what I'm saying is exactly that in this story Billboard/Luminate was both the source and the story basically, and there's nothing really hinted at otherwise that would warrant an kind of broader investigative look. The focus was exclusively on the record-breaking superlatives. Those happened to be in those areas. I'm sure if Swift had sold the most first day CDs in 33 years, or had the most single day CD sales of all time, those would have been big stories. Well, some members of this thread anyway. I don't even think most members of this forum care that much about CDs. And even those who like CD around her, some of them don't even buy new CDs, just used ones (an then they wonder why maybe record companies might be loath to invest more in CD production).
And it's usually wrong. The information online is rarely provided by knowledgeable specialists or the musicians themselves. Most of what's on the Web is fanboy stuff. Wikipedia is the most effective spreader of misinformation we've ever seen... because it's free. The mistakes and old wives' tales in Wikipedia get copied thousands of times onto other peoples' websites, making it very hard to locate good data unless you have the time to wade through forty or fifty pages of cloned crap first. It didn't start out this way but the results were probably pretty predictable.
There's about 100 posts on YouTube with women in their 20s posting their Taylor Swift collections. Once one did it the masses followed.
The people who do that are obsessives. They have an addiction-like need to possess it all. You don’t need 25,000 fans buying your album anymore to make money, if you have the obsessives in your fan base. You only need 1,000 obsessive fans buying everything you produce. It is easier to play to the smaller group and manipulate them. Because they cannot stop.
My own experiences with 'computers' and stereo equipment are something that I consider to be not even remotely comparable. I consider the former 'likely to go haywire at any time,' and the latter very reliable. With stereo equipment, I expect it to last 10-20 years, and am usually right about that; with anything 'computerish,' I consider myself lucky to get 3-4 years worth of use.
I buy cheap duplicate ones for the car all of the time, $1-$2 each; bought about 10 that way in the past couple of weeks. And no marks of any kind on them.
Good question - which leads me to this one: I wonder how the numbers for book readers and music listeners compare? I'd guess that there are fewer of the former, but that's just a guess.
