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Phasing out of Compact Disc

So just this week my wife and I pre-ordered the new Melody Gardot and Florence and the Machine, $33 and $29 respectively on Amazon. There's absoluetly no reason for these prices, and we've never seen anything like this before. These aren't imports or high res files. Talk in the streets is that this is the beginning of the end of physical media. Of course it will be around like vinyl. Thoughts?
donjr
in_shore's avatar
in_shore
596 posts
 
During the 1990s vinyl was dead , buried and gone to some with the promise of a digital revolution , 25 years later it's rumoured the compact disk is going to be dead and unavailable very soon , HI Res down loads are the new digital revolution with some claiming , there are no better sonic reproduction available ,...........Really ,...!
jafant's avatar
jafant
19,745 posts
 
Donjr-

there is no such thing. The CD is not going away anytime soon. Further, this medium will never be replaced w/ any stream nor download.

Vinyl has not met it's demise and neither will the compact disc! Keep me posted & Happy Listening!
zephyr24069's avatar
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zephyr24069
1,243 posts
 
Vinyl has meet its demise? Don't think so....read an interesting statistic that over 73 MILLION records were pressed in 2014. Doesn't sound like a dead media platform to me, not mainstream, but certainly not dead; the quality of the pressings available according to my vinyl-loving friends is increasing dramatically too.

CD/SACDs won't go away completely anytime soon either...
martykl
3,578 posts
 
CD sales peaked at about a billion units in 2000. The last data I saw (2013) showed that it was the latest of a dozen straight years of declining sales, bottoming out at +/- 200 million units. Since 2010, the avg annual decline has been small, so it appears that CD sales aren't really being "phased out", they're just slowly dying off. At what point do "major labels" stop releasing CDs altogether? Does it matter? It's pretty clearly a dying format.

I don't have data from the 1960's, but, by comparison, in the '70s, LP sales peaked at +/- 200 million units. Obviously, that was a smaller (unit) market for recorded music than we have today. Contrary to what many here seem to believe, however, the LP was not "killed off" by CD, it was killed off by cassettes, which displaced LP sales at basically a 1 for 1 rate up to 1985. Then CD joined the party and LPs essentially disappeared as a meaningful piece of the market.

As a practical matter, LP is still dead. Unit sales might make up 1% of the market and dollar sales might be 1.5 to 2%.
orpheus10
8,668 posts
 

Martykl, thank you for a very informative post.

Enjoy the music.
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