The CD player is dead.......

Mlsstl - 374 million CDs sold in 2009 is correct but it was 12.7% decrease from previous year. At the same time individual downloads increased by 8.3% to 1.3 billion. If you count per total number of songs then digital downloads represent only 40% but each individual download (or few) was likely bought instead of CD. Linn stopped making CDs in 2009 and I've heard rumors that biggest CD store Walmart might discontinue them.

CDs are way too expensive in my opinion. Making CD together with royalties cost in order of $1. Twentieth Century Fox was selling DVDs in China for equivalent of $2 admitting small profit (it explains region code).

While your additional detail is correct, I noted in my post that things had been trending down for many years. I believe the highest sales year for CD was 2000, 10 years ago.

The music industry is changing for a variety of factors. But it has been doing that for the past hundred years or more. I imagine the sheet music publishers were sad when their top-dog spot was overtaken by 78s.

For years, radio was the driver for music recording sales. Top 40 AM stations in the 1960s drove acts like the Beatles and Rolling Stones. That trend continued with FM radio in the 1970s and in the 1980s MTV was the driver with music videos.

Today, MTV is mainly concerned with reality shows, not music. Radio stations are a pale ghost of their former selves when it comes to music. An oldies station doesn't generate new album sales - how many copies of "A Hard Day's Night" does a person need? Re-releases aren't going to generate the sales volume needed.

We've also got both the legal and underground download market. We've got a fragmented music scene with endless genres appealing to various subsects of the market.

Keep in mind that teenagers drive the volume end of the CD market and they are not listening to albums. In a fashion, this is a return the the market of the 1950s and before when singles drove the music scene.

In short, things are changing, but they've always been changing. The industry will need to readjust to the change in the volume of CD units sold, but I don't think CDs will be going away for quite some time.

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I have to chuckle at the members here that say that they like to hold the recording in their hand and like to read the liner notes. It reminds me of 1998 when Apple came out with the iMac. The iMac, in a lot of ways was a revolitonary pc for its time. Then Steve Jobs did something with the iMac that freaked everyone out......the iMac came with no floppy drive! Never mind that just about everyone had already stopped using floppy discs, people still wanted a floppy drive 'just in case'. Well of course Jobs was right, if you aren't using it, then you don't need it. He forced the computing world to face up to the fact that the floppy drive was no longer necessary, and if you wanted his computer, you were not getting a floppy drive. Of course he sold millions of iMacs. Of course, the rest of the computing world followed. I see the same thing here with cd players. They are on their way out, but some diehards just won't let go. I still have a cd player that I rarely listen to. I should have sold it when I bought my Squeezebox and bought a killer DAC with the proceeds. Every year I watch as the value of my cd player deprciates. I found myself listening to much more music with a hard drive system than with a cd player.

I still own a cd player and have no plans to sell it soon, although I'll be the first to tell you that it is old technology and it is on the way out. I'm still one of those 'just in case' guys'. I own two turntables and 3,000 lp's that I'm still holding onto 'just in case', even though I never play them. Basic human nature does not like change, sometimes even if it's something better.
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Mitch4t - Yes I remember "no floppy" scare.

It is not easy to make predictions. I remember one serious columnist claiming 20 years ago that Hard Disks will never go larger than 40MB because mechanical cost will be too prohibitive. Today we know that he made mistake 100,000 times. In percent it would be 10,000,000% (and counting).