Ten years from now, will more people be listening to vinyl or CDs?

Vinyl may be increasing in popularity, but the gap between vinyl and CD is still very wide. I do not expect vinyl's popularity/usage to ever exceed that of CD. And if it does, it'll happen at a point where the number of users of physical media is so small as to make the event insignificant.

 

Neither.

I'm still always surprised by the 'CD is King' crowd. In 10-15 years new CDs will be as extinct as VHS is today. In 10 years legal downloading/streaming and illegal downloading will be the format most people will be listening to. CD sales have been declining steadily over the last 10 years but I expect they will begin to really plummet over the next 5-10 years. I believe major retailers like Walmart will stop dedicating any floor space at all to the sale of CDs by then, which will be the death knell. The writing is on the wall. The CD format is a lame duck.

I think the vinyl resurgence will still exist although it will never again be the format of choice for the average listener. I think audiophiles, DJs, and curious young music fans will keep it going at a healthy enough rate to justify its existence. I suppose the same could be said of CDs but that's the brightest future that the CD could possibly have in my opinion.

Rega will still be making turntables 10 years from now and that's incredible if you really think about it.

 

So your vote is vinyl?

 

I did vote vinyl just because I think the CD has no future for the same reasons dkmonroe stated. But if 'digital files' was a poll choice, or 'Neither' I would have voted that way.

 

Of course. But the OP wasn't asking about the most popular listening format in 10 years. He was asking whether CDs will be more popular (more used) than vinyl, or whether vinyl will be more popular than CDs. Both will certainly be niche items in 10 years (they're almost at that point already).

 

Even cars don't come with CD players anymore. No one will be listening to CD's in 5 years, let alone 10, except for this small handful of audiophiles (and even those tend to be vinyl people)

 

CD...as they they should be.

 

The question isn't what one you prefer but what will most people be playing. It is obvious what the true answer is.

 

so someone like me who has thousands of cds & continues to buy cds
at quite low prices will stop listening to them? will convert all of them to
files on a hard drive or some external storage device? will get into downloads
of some sort & get rid of my cds? why ?

 

I think you underestimate the longevity of these formats amongst the non-tech savvy and low income portions of the population. e.g. There are still plenty of VHS players in use. Not as many as 10 years ago, certainly, but they're far from dead. I see no reason to believe that CD will be different.

 

Some of us are aquiring backlogs of cds that will take over 10 years to listen to.
I would say cd only because there are probably more of them around readily available than records in better condition and in more titles .I have met some younger people who are more into records over cds.I think people just need more exposure to hearing what records can sound like.You know,they`ve either forgotten or completely have no idea.

 

Vinyl and lossless downloads. CD's will be landfill.

 

Thats what I think.

There will always be a market for vinyl - even it if ends up a niche market (if it isn't that already?). But mass produced CD's? I'm not so sure - what with the increased HD capacity already available what will be the point? They will end up being the next generation of Musicassettes and VHS video tapes to hit the garbage!

The current Gen Y kids are MORE into vinyl than ever - maybe more so than some of their parents - and more into downloading (legal or otherwise) music as files. Soon the MP3 will be passe too as the full non-compressed files will commonly available and will easily fit onto the smallest of computers and players. Where does that leave the CD then?

 

The original question is - what will be people be listening to more of in ten years time?

CDs, surely - there are just more of them out there, or at least more people have the capability of listening to them. I know hardly anybody in my immediate circle that even has a turntable.

But if you are asking what will be selling more in ten years time?

Both CD and vinyl will be selling only niche amounts, I feel - the future, like it or not, is download.

 

Can't see more people running out to get a turntable and finding records they want to play. Playing vinyl takes time and care, 2 things people don't like to invest. Cds are convenient, and even when abused (left laying around, handled with greasy fingers) still play and sound "o.k." You cannot do this with records.

 

I do think people will listen more to CDs than LPs in ten years' time. Many titles will be cheaper and easier available on CD, esp. on the second hand market. Plus they're easy to rip and play on most devices that will still be around at the time.

I have to admit that this is partly wishful thinking, though. But both will definitely be niche products, only of interest for a small amount of hardcore music lovers and therefore produced in small numbers. The near future will be streaming digital, that's for sure. Which indeed will make CDs more obsolete than LPs.

 

Both

 

Tell her to get a copy for me too.

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There is only a few ways to get true analog sound: records, tapes (and of course, live performance). For those who prefer analog sound, these are what they will listen to. CD's and "stored digital" just can't replace this.

 

The problem with this statement:

"Soon the MP3 will be passe too as the full non-compressed files will commonly available (sic) and will easily fit onto the smallest of computers and players."

. . . is that as of today, about 80% of the United States has no access to the kind of high-speed internet that is needed for hi-rez (or hi-def video) downloads. And that access is not forthcoming in the next decade. My Hughes satellite is fairly fast, but viciously expensive, AND they automatically shut the speed down to a crawl if I download "too much" outside of middle-of-the-night hours.

Besides, ******* with computers and the internet as a center-of-psyche activity is a lower-class accountant-type OCD behavior that just isn't any fun. It is aesthetically-blank, aesthetically-degraded; a virtual non-activity compared to even something as banal as spit-cleaning an old 78 or cleaning dog vomit off the Armstrong linoleum.

Something else to keep in mind:

Did the CD kill vinyl?

Did Radio kill the movies?

Did TV kill radio?

Has the internet killed magazines and newspapers (at least not yet?)?

These asinine "which will we still be using in 10 years" threads all tend to ignore the fact that virtually nothing completely goes extinct nowadays. Things exist side-by-side, in perpetuity.

I envision a future where those who are better-off sit around with coffee and physical magazines or paper books while listening to their Blu-Ray audio or even SACDs, while the wage-slave masses huddle in their lovely work cubicles with s***** earbuds stuck in their ears listening to yet another monthly subscription fee-provided service (music from the cloud), paying ceaselessly for poor sound quality that they ignorantly mistake for high quality with the $ (or, more accurately, the credit) that they do not really have.

Physical stuff may become a luxury, but it ain't going away, no matter how much farther out-of-reach it gets for the masses.

Take your turntable to a mass-market electronic repair place, if you can find one. Or, even more pointedly, take your TUBE cd or SACD player there. The technicians will express amazement. They never knew that such things even exist TODAY. Much the same way that the average street dweller in "Soylent Green" barely knows of steak or strawberries.

A lot of "downloads-are-the-future" folks here are those Soylent Eaters, damnfire certain that Soylent Blue is the hottest thing compared to yesterday's "passe" Soylent Green, just because Steve Jobs says so. When the truth is that steak is all that counts, and Soylent downloads are just your old neighbors dried, pulped, flaked, and formed into a tasteless mass for the consumption of the masses.

 

CD.

 

People as in general out on the street people and homer simpson?

Or People meaning "us" in here?

 

Do you guys realize how many actual CDs physically exist?

 

I thought the question was "listening to CDs" not buying.

I think you may be severely overestimating the amount that actually download. I know many people that simply dont care to download, not out of some technical reason or sound quality reason, but its simply far easier to buy a CD and play it in their car on the way home from a store or to toss it into pretty much any of the 10s or millions of CD and DVD and Blu ray players present now.

TO downlaod, you must have a file on your comp, to use it in your car, either purchase an I-pod type device, to play it out in the garage requires another investment in a dock, to play it on your home stereo....who knows depending on ones set up.

Sure its easy and convenient if thats all you have ever owned, but im quite sure many over even 30 years old have a lot of CD players in their car, walkmans, Boomboxes, shelf systems, and home stereos, that play a CD just fine for now.

 

Right on all counts. There could be trillions of cds out there on people's shelves around the world. They aren't all going into landfills overnight. Collectors and hard core music lovers just wouldn't do that to their collections. Others will keep their cds out of sheer inertia.

Now, I fully expect that in 10 years, most people might not be listening to cds on cd players, but will rather rip the cd to a computer and play back through either a squeezebox type device or some sort of ipod. But cd will still be the source of the music and it will still be many orders of magnitude larger than the lp.