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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Wow, hadn't realized how fast the transition to streaming went. It now responds for 75% of all revenue for the music industry (makes the Spotify semi-monopoly all the more worrying).

To put vinyl sales in context, it is almost half of all physical units in revenue. I think the AUR for an LP is much higher, but still impressive.

I've been thinking about how the vinyl/cd experience could be brought back into the digital era; something with space for decent artwork, like an SD card in a vinyl sleeve or something in between, and a chromecast-like player to match. Something you would be proud to own and display, with a low entry barrier in terms of equipment. If anybody is interested in working on something like this, my email is in my profile.

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I buy CDs, since I want to own a copy of high-quality audio. I then copy them to my computer, and they sit in a box.

I no more want to flip through LP-style artwork than I do photographs of friends and family, which are also only digital. What I'd like is high resolution (at least 4K for my monitor/TV) artwork that could be shown while an album is playing.

Too bad the CD format makes it difficult to get a perfect rip. I prefer a FLAC (or WAV as I occasionally see) download over CDs, but CDs are my second choice, especially for older albums with used copies available.

Tools like Exact Audio Copy and cdparanoia have made it possible to do bit perfect DAE since the last millenuium.

I think Apple Music has like 50 million subscribers to Spotify’s 80 million. Not exactly a semi monopoly.

What's the difference between what you are suggesting and just buying CDs?

Much the same reasons we started buying vinyl again. CDs have ridiculously short shelf life in practice, are too fragile, require a complex and brittle laser reader. The tech sits in an intersection between analog and digital that serves absolutely no benefit at this point.

Plus, the physical experience of owning and playing them was never anywhere near as pleasant as vinyl.

I don't know about short shelf life. I just pulled boxes of CDs out of my attic last weekend. 95% were purchased before 1995 with probably 25% being from the 1980's.

They've been in my attic for the past 10 years experiencing extreme temperatures that would have destroyed vinyl (probably 130 degrees in the summer and freezing during the winter). So far every CD I've played has played perfectly.

> a complex and brittle laser reader

It's a very low tech thing at this point. The player I used the day I brought the disks down was $9 at Target and it worked just fine.

> the physical experience of owning and playing them was never anywhere near as pleasant as vinyl

I don't think it's that far off, especially when you factor in some of the audio advantages that the CD format has.

Vinyl is more fun though, no question about it. The format you are proposing would be even less fun. CDs have problems, but they are still (for now) the dominant format, by a factor of around 6x.

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