Everyone Says CDs Are Dead or Dying, But Here’s the Real Story

 

Everyone Says CDs Are Dead or Dying, But Here’s the Real Story https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/10/cd-not-dead-evolving/

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CDs may be ‘retro’ but they’re not irrelevant.

With in-car CD players vanishing and digital platforms thriving, you might think CDs are on their way out.

Yet, against all odds, CD sales tell a different story. They’re still far from being the dominant music format and perhaps they never will be. But, CDs are growing to meet new demands driven by collectors, younger listeners, and exclusive releases.

In other words, CDs aren’t dying off; they’re changing with the times.

• Are CD Sales Even Really Declining?
• The Loss of In-Car CD Players Doesn’t Mean the End
• More People Are Shifting to CDs
• CDs and Streaming Can Coexist

Are CD Sales Even Really Declining?

You might have seen Billboard’s reports showing CD sales falling by around 20% in 2024 compared to last year. But before you write off CDs completely, there’s something you should know about how these numbers are tracked.

YoY comparison of album consumption units by format. (From: Billboard)

You see, Luminate, the company that gives Billboard its data, completely changed how they count CD sales (or any music format sales for that matter). They used to make weighted estimates about indie store sales, but now they’re only counting actual reported sales.

Some indie stores didn’t like this change and stopped reporting their sales in protest. This made comparisons with previous years less reliable, which made it look like CD sales dropped more than they really did.

It’s kind of like if half your friends stopped posting their music recommendations. You’d think nobody was listening to new music anymore!

But, when you look past these reports, CDs are actually doing pretty well.

In fact, in the first half of 2024, CD unit sales grew by 3.3%, reaching 16.8 million units.

The differences between Digital Downloads vs Physical sales in the first half of 2024. (From: RIAA)

Even better, CDs made $236.7 million compared to digital albums’ $87.8 million. Meaning, they’re making nearly three times more money than digital albums.

The Loss of In-Car CD Players Doesn’t Mean the End

When Subaru announced they were dropping CD players from their 2024 Forester, it felt like watching the last record store in town close.

With this, all major car manufacturers have now shifted to digital systems like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. This makes it easy to think that streaming has officially taken CDs to its grave.

However, this announcement really irked a lot of people. Contrary to what the manufacturers thought, not everyone’s thrilled about being forced to stream their road trip playlist.

In exchange to CD players, car manufacturers are now relying on streaming for automotive entertainment. (From: Subaru)

The numbers back this up too.

Kim Bayley, who runs the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA), found that around 7 million people in the UK (that’s 15% of adults!) still prefer listening to CDs in their cars.

Many respondents also expressed dissatisfaction with the absence of CD players in new models in recent surveys.

It’s clear that while car manufacturers might be ready to move on, millions of music lovers aren’t quite ready to let go of their CD collections just yet.

That’s reassuring for CDs as the pushback means the format is still appreciated in this time and age. And, there are still millions of people actually supporting and using the format.

More People Are Shifting to CDs

CDs are finding fans across all age groups. Younger listeners, nostalgic Gen Xers, and Millennials are all part of the format’s comeback.

In fact, Gen Z, the digital natives born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, are some of the biggest CD fans.

For this group, CDs bring a totally different experience from just tapping a screen. It’s like discovering a cool new technology that happens to be retro (A.K.A. trendy). They’re falling in love with the ritual of opening that plastic case, flipping through the booklet, and actually holding their favorite album in their hands.

The ownership factor is huge too.

Ever had a favorite song disappear from your playlist overnight because of licensing issues? With CDs, once you buy it, it’s yours forever. No internet required, no subscription needed, no surprise disappearing acts.

CDs are cheaper too.

While vinyl records might look cool on Instagram and cost $30-40, most CDs are $10-15 or less. That means you can build a serious music collection without emptying your wallet.

More artists are releasing variants of a single album to increase revenue. (From: Luminate)

Not to mention, major artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are also helping to boost CD sales with special edition releases that appeal to collectors and superfans. Thanks to this, CDs have officially become collectibles with fans buying more than one variant of the same album at a time.

CDs and Streaming Can Coexist

It’s easy to see streaming as the end of CDs, but the two formats can and do coexist.

Streaming works great for exploring new music quickly and making playlists on the go. It’s perfect when you want to jump between different songs or try something new.

However, CDs serve a different purpose. They provide a physical and more permanent connection to your music.

Sometimes you want to sit down with an album, follow the lyrics, and really focus on the music. Or maybe you want to show friends your signed copy of a rare album. These are the moments when having a physical CD feels special.

There’s more to buying CDs than just nostalgia.

It’s not about one replacing the other. It’s about having options for how we experience music.

Plus, the numbers show there’s room for both. While streaming brings in millions of plays, CDs still earn serious income for musicians.

Think of it this way: streaming is like having access to every restaurant in town, while owning CDs is like having your grandmother’s recipe book. Both are valuable, both serve a purpose, and both make our experiences better.

It’s never about choosing one or the other, but more about enjoying the best of both worlds.

15 reasons why I STILL BUY CDs

 

SPARS code AAD: When CDs sounded best

 

Why Super Audio CD Failed

Super Audio CD (SACD) was introduced in 1999 by Philips and Sony, its co-inventors, as the next generation of consumer audio, featuring six channels of Direct Stream Digital (DSD), the highest resolution then available to home listeners, and backward compatibility to existing CD players through its hybrid CD layer.

AR-logo_sacd copy.jpgMy Sony and Philips colleagues and I demonstrated DSD surround recordings of classical, jazz, and rock music to several hundred leading recording engineers, musicians, and reviewers, using top-quality playback equipment in acoustically treated environments. We received almost unanimous praise for their transparency. Reviewers exulted over its lack of digital harshness, and one well-known engineer told me that while 96/24 PCM sounded good, with DSD he heard the output of his console, not the output of the recorder.

Interestingly, one major artist A/B compared this engineer’s simultaneous 96/24 PCM and DSD recordings of her music in his control room and told him, “We can’t go back.”

Consumers could buy SACDs before they bought surround systems and their purchases wouldn’t be obsolete when they upgraded. The same discs would play in their cars, their portable players, their children’s boom boxes, and the surround systems in their listening rooms.

AR-DVD_audio_logo copy.jpgFurther, DVD-Video was making significant progress in homes, helped by low-cost but low-quality “home theater in a box” surround systems. One might assume that surround audio on a CD-sized disk would be an easy sell.

So why was SACD not a commercial success?

First, there was a format war. The DVD Forum, headed by Toshiba, refused to pay patent royalties to Sony and Philips, and they launched a competing format: DVD-Audio, which couldn’t be played in a CD player. Ironically, the royalty for an SACD was the same as for a CD: $.10 per disc, while the royalty on a DVD-Audio disc was around four times higher.

Record labels chose sides. The Warner group, part of the DVD Forum, went with DVD-Audio, and Universal and Sony chose SACD. Consumers are understandably reluctant to choose one new format over another — they remembered the Beta vs. VHS format war — so neither SACD nor DVD-Audio gained significant traction.

Then came the bombshell. Like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected the iPod. While there were MP3 players that preceded the iPod, they were clunky, difficult to use, and thus had limited success. Steve Jobs and his crew put a simple, straightforward user interface in an elegant package that was a huge hit. Never mind that it used MP3 files (although it could also play PCM files).

The mass market fell in love with the iPod. Consumers didn’t care that its supplied earbuds were poor quality and that its MP3 files didn’t sound as good as CDs, let alone high-resolution. Then Apple released its iTunes software, first for the Mac and then for Windows, and they started selling music at $.99/track through the iTunes Music Store. Apple made it easy for the average consumer to buy music and carry it in a convenient package.

The money that consumers would have spent by on high-resolution surround sound instead went to portable music, and the demand needed to establish a viable high-resolution format never materialized.

When we look back, we see that acoustical recordings, which started around the turn of the century, were replaced by electrical recordings in the mid-1920s. The LP and the 45 replaced those in the late 1940s and evolved into stereo records in the late ’50s. The CD took hold in the early 1980s. SACD and DVD-Audio may have been too early, as they were introduced in 1999 and 2000, respectively, but the iPod’s introduction in 2001 sealed their fate.

Source: https://audiophilereview.com/cd-dac-digital/why-super-audio-cd-failed/

Why have premium audio formats such as DVD-Audio and SACD failed?

It was a couple of things, all at once.

Average Consumers Don’t Care

To start with, the average consumer doesn’t have an audio system capable of demonstrating a discernable difference between a higher-spec format and a CD. So immediately, at least on paper, the higher-spec formats were audiophile-only.

Let’s revisit that for just a second, then I’ll go on. In practice, this wasn’t actually the case, but for all the wrong reasons. CDs were typically part of every record company’s mass market operations. It was a very common thing for these divisions to take an artists’ final release and do a pretty lousy job of final mastering for production. This includes engaging in “loudness wars” evils, compressing the pretty wonderful dynamic range of CD down to 12-bit, 10-bits, sometimes 8-bits of actual dynamic range.

The high-spec audio was always sent to the “specialty” division of the record companies, the same guys who dealt with all small production music: classical, jazz, audiophile, vinyl, etc. So they got the artists’ release master and didn’t screw it up. So in reality, if you bought an SACD and listened just to the CD-compatible layer, you probably heard a much better mix than you would with the mass-market CD. But no one really understood that, or even cared that much about it.

Average Consumers Don’t Hear It

As I jumped around from listening to music, playing music, recording and mixing music, I came to understand that there are fundamentally different ways of listening to music.

While it might be surprising, there’s truth to the old “musicians have the worst stereos” cliche, and it’s not just because musicians are chronically underpaid. But rather, when I “listen as a musician”, I have a pretty complete idea of any song I know already in my head. That’s actually pretty necessary when I’m up there at the open mic with just my voice, harmonica, and guitar. But it’s actually how most people who really like music listen. If you’re singing along, you’re probably one of us. Your brain fills in what you know about the music you’re listening to. So you’re pretty ok listening on an iPod, a smartphone, a car radio, etc.

And there are those who basically just put music as a background, They don’t pay much attention at all, so they don’t really care all that much about listening.

Then there’s the way I’ve learned, though both experience and coursework, to listen “critically”. That’s how you figure out how to tweak your 40 channel recording into something that sounds comparable to what you hear on that car radio. It’s listening with that memory part of your brain shut off and the listening part set to 11.

And I believe that audiophiles, whether they know it or not, pretty much listen the same way. This is not music at a gym, and no, they’re not trying to fix the music, though maybe looking to spend another $10,000 on some pointless tweak to their music system. But I’m not suggesting they’re all big fakes — just a little gullible. But they have discovered this same mode of listening. The audiophile goes into a room with an audio system that cost as much as your car, or at least my car. They put on the music, sit down in a nice comfortable chair, maybe wiht a glass of wine or a single malt scotch, and listen, with that memory part on low if not off completely. They experience the same kind of detail I’m listening for when mixing/mastering, only for different reasons.

Those are the folks buying high-spec music, and there just are not all that many around.

The Digital Revolution Continued…

So, while the various forces at Sony and Philips were concocting SACD, and other various folks as the DVD Forum were concocting DVD-Audio, everyone slowly started getting into MP3 downloads and digital audio players. This was a reduction in quality from CD, but of course, as mentioned, the average person was happy with their car’s factory audio system or the all-in-one they have at home. They were not put off by MP3 at 128kb/s, which had after all been designed to be “transparent” for use in radio (the 128kb/s was the speed of a dual-channel ISDN line, which was a common enough thing for radio station audio transfers).

That one player could take 20 albums, then 200, then maybe your whole collection. But here’s the second problem: you couldn’t “rip” a DVD-Audio disc, and you could only rip the CD layer of an SACD, if it had one. So that was just one more reason for folks to not buy these discs.

The Format Wars! And the Winner Is….

So, the other problem was that the tiny market for high-spec audio was split! It was DVD-Audio against SACD, of course. And not only that, but neither format could necessarily play on your existing gear. No CD player could handle a DVD-Audio disc. A standard DVD player could play only the compressed, AC-3 tracks on a DVD-Audio disc, and you probably had to turn on the televsion to enable that. The SACD’s CD layer would play on a conventional CD player or more DVD players, but you needed a special SACD player to play the high spec part. And the CD layer was not a requirement; some discs didn’t have it.

And of course, by then, everyone had already bought numerous CD players, DVD players, etc. So there was a strong pushback against “yet another format”. And so neither thrived. And even its friends didn’t stand behind SACD. I recall when Sony killed that compatibility in my PS3. I could have wrung their collective necks!

And it wasn’t all that long before there were two new high-spec audio formats. The first was the download. While you never got high-spec audio from Apple, Amazon, or other mass market vendors, lossless compressed formats like FLAC and ALAC allowed more specialized online music companies to offer the same content you’d get on SACD or DVD-Audio, but in a copy-protection-free format that would play on at least a more advanced audio player.

And Blu-ray came along. Not only did Blu-ray come along, but the Blu-ray people made their own version of an advanced audio disc with even higher specs than SACD or DVD-Audio. And they even had the uncommonly good sense to make that not a special new kind of disc, but in fact, a disc that could play on any old Blu-ray player. The details of the music-only Blu-ray, dubbed Profile 3.0, is really just the set of rules for discs to play on audio-only players — no screen. They still play just dandy on your bog-standard Blu-ray player.

So those two put the final nails in the SACD/DVD-Audio coffin.

Blu-ray Audio may not be knocking down walls with its mass-market popularity. But it really just amounts to an authoring decision for any company making an audio release. So it’s got its following. Similarly, online high-spec audio downloads have done better than the dedicated formats, because there’s really nothing extra to buy — though of course, your PC/Phone/etc. used as a player might need an app update, and might offer no better audio output than for playing CD-quality downloads.

Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-SACD-format-die-considering-its-audio-quality-was-far-superior-to-any-other-standards

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