CD sales grow for first time since 2004 | Hacker News Reader

CD sales grow for first time since 2004

axios.com

163 pointsDrew_267 comments

Adele had a huge album launch last year, and sold very well on vinyl and CD. That one album may account for the entire growth. Maybe her fanbase are of the right age/demo to enjoy or to be nostalgic for physical media, maybe a lot of copies bought as gifts... Between that big launch and vinyl pressing plant supply issues (Covid supply chain issues and huge orders for two album releases) people who want the physical object may have moved from vinyl to CD editions.

Anecdotally I pulled my CD collection out of retirement for use in my home office during Covid. There's something about 'putting on' a cd/record that streaming just does not do. A couple of weeks ago I caved and bought a vintage technics record player (late to the bandwagon), the price of vinyl is shocking compared to CD - $30+ for a 28g new release/reissue and quality used records are easily $20+. Feels like when I was a teenager and carefully deciding what I could afford that week/month and then playing it to destruction.

The ritual aspect is heard in many mouths :)

There's a tiny glimpse of magic of seeing the apparatus that turns physical storage into music. Even a CD drive gives you some mechanical hints of things happening. Best part is when you have an open drive mechanism :)

For me the ritual of deliberately choosing what I want to listen to from a somewhat limited/curated selection of music is the magic. Although seeing a diamond rubbing over a piece of plastic and knowing that's how the sound is made is pretty cool too...

I never gave up on CDs or physical books. Though I use Kindle and a few years ago I subscribed to Google Music and stopped buying new CDs.

Lately, it is very rare that people discuss music. So recently, I moved my CD (& books) collection to living room and it has been good way to start conversations about music. Friends scan through the collection, sometimes, they borrow them. Album art is another thing that is fun to look at together. It feels a lot more social than sharing music on Facebook.

My only issue is I don't have a CD player anymore except in the car.

(Same thing with books, any book I buy on Kindle, I assume it is a rental. If I really like the book, then I get a paper copy.)

Really nice used CD players are super cheap right now. Pick a solid model which still has rubber belts available for it and you should be golden:)

@midnightclubbed love to hear about some models that you think are worth looking for.

I use a Onkyo DXC390 CD player/changer (going strong after 3 years or so). Still available to buy new (albeit at a ridiculously inflated price) but should be available for ~ $100 used. DAC sounds fine to me though speakers but I have a discrete DAC/amp for headphone listening, although honestly I can't tell the difference between that and the CD player headphone socket.

I used a Yamaha CDX-450 for years, although I dint think it had digital outputs. Was built solidly. Dove deep down the Sony megachanger rabbit hole but never pulled the trigger on getting one - have a huge following though and parts/advice are readily available.

Reccommend the arcam cd95 unless you’re going for some kinda dj setup then cdj’s I guess.

Physical presence of media in one's space is underrated. The cost (in space, being a pain in the ass to move, et c.) is high but there are significant benefits.

I purchase the physical books as well ones I bought on kindle or audiobooks that I think will age well, want to read again or want my kids to peruse at some point. Scanning a library on a kindle just isn't the same.

> Adele had a huge album launch last year, and sold very well on vinyl and CD. That one album may account for the entire growth.

That doesn't hold up under any scrutiny. Adele's album sold around ~950,000 physical copies in 2021 in the US. The average CD price is $15, and that particular album has been on sale since the release, so the absolute maximum that it could contribute to an "unusual" influx of CD sales is $15 million -- and that's very generously pretending 100% of sales were CDs and that she didn't sell any copies of any albums in 2020. That leaves a minimum of an $85 million (and more realistically >$93 million) increase that can't be attributed to a shift in audience demographics for the year's top seller.

> Between that big launch and vinyl pressing plant supply issues (Covid supply chain issues and huge orders for two album releases) people who want the physical object may have moved from vinyl to CD editions.

Vinyl sales doubled in 2021 and outpaced CDs, and growth actually increased throughout 2021, as roughly ~60% of the sales took place in the second half of the year.

https://thevinylfactory.com/news/us-vinyl-sales-2021-reach-t...

After a decade of streaming movies, I started buying Blu-Rays again last year.

The last straw was trying to watch Kurosawa's "Ran". The supposedly 4K remaster available on Amazon Prime Video is criminally badly encoded. During the raid on the castle, you literally can't see the smoke because macroblocks are popping so hard on every keyframe.

The Blu-Ray is pristine and nobody can take it away from me. With streaming services, you pay for movies but you never know what quality they actually deliver on a given day. These are public corporations trying to deliver shareholder returns in what has become an environment of sinking stock prices, so if they can save on bandwidth costs by making the movie look a bit worse, they'll probably do it at some point -- and then again next quarter.

> The supposedly 4K remaster available on Amazon Prime Video is criminally badly encoded. During the raid on the castle, you literally can't see the smoke because macroblocks are popping so hard on every keyframe

This is such a widespread issue, especially in dark scenes. Netflix is bad, but Prime Video seems by far the worst. I watched Mr Robot through a few months ago, and at times it was like watching 2009-era YouTube, despite being 4K on paper.

I'll take a 1080p Blu-Ray over a 4K stream any day. UHD Blu-Ray is nice, but it's a shame it's still 1.5-2x the price of regular BD. Then again you can still buy DVDs for some reason, so I guess high quality physical media is starting to be considered an enthusiast option..

This is just my observation & I don't know if others might have noticed:

Netflix streams sharp pixels towards the center of the screen, and the backgrounds are always bit worse due to the bandwidth constraints perhaps. It perhaps works on the assumption that our focus is on the foreground mostly, and not the background.

This is all good until the scenes are darker shades and you could notice the choppiness due to the network constraints.

That's one of the "psychovisual enhancements" employed by modern codecs. Here [0] is a nice explanation I could among in top search results:

"... x264’s psychovisual enhancements do a pretty good job of keeping detail where you’d notice it (the face), at the expense of the stuff you normally wouldn’t notice while watching (like those background areas)."

[0] https://mattgadient.com/comparing-x264-rf-settings-in-handbr...

I may or may not have torrented many films available on Netflix (which I pay for) because of this issue.

This is a primary point on why I groan that Discord is so popular.

The hyperaggressive codecs and bandwidth-saving behaviors make the experience absolutely miserable.

I feel your experience is the stream end game:

Imagine you get two choices. One great quality and mundane to poor programs. The other is super compelling, but of dubious to low quality.

Which do you use?

Given a limit on stream throughput, choice will push quality aside every time.

> The Blu-Ray is pristine and nobody can take it away from me.

Actually…

> All BluRay player, devices, and drives contain a key that unlocks the encryption and DRM present on BluRay discs. Since 2007, the consortium responsible for this DRM scheme has been pushing updates and revocation lists on individual BluRay releases. Putting one of these discs in your drive will brick the device […].

https://hackaday.com/2014/09/08/unbricking-a-bluray-drive/

To be clear, this is an increase from calendar year 2020 to 2021. The 2020 baseline was artificially low with the pandemic. This isn't a trend, it's one skewed data point.

Yeah, it's almost certainly more likely that the CD sales market has hit a floor with a variable margin...

You're right, the trend is still down:

2018 - $696m

2019 - $631m

2021 - $584m

I've returned to buying physical media. Its really awesome. Things I like dont just dissapear anymore. And the 10 movies or so I watch per year is cheaper than a subscription service.

Yes, this is it. For me what matters is ownership—physical media, objects, artwork. I like owning things that bring me joy day after day. It's about being able to experience them whenever I want, on my terms. We rent, and lease, and license almost everything—books, software, cars, apartments, music, movies, furniture. Everything is offered "as a service". I get that a lot of people are drawn to the "flexibility" and ease of use that comes with rentals, with subscriptions, but not me. I'm not giving up on ownership.

One benefit of physical media that I don't see mentioned here: if you like underground music, the rarity of the CD/Vinyl can cause it to greatly appreciate in value over time. It's a great reward for dedicated fans who are willing to jump on a release early. A lot of my CD's double in value within months (eg this album[1] came out only 2 years ago* and has already tripled in value)

[1]: https://www.discogs.com/master/1701108-Spectral-Lore-Mare-Co...

*edit: I forgot what year it is

But you will not be able to read the CD anymore after some years.

Rip. Mix. Burn.

I have CDs from the 1980s that read just fine. In any case, I plan on backing them up at some point.

I do, too. Not one suffers from "CD rot".

I usually prefer CDs from the 80s, before they were "remastered", dynamically compressed, etc.

They were always mastered, there was just the 90s-2000s race for loudness that changed how they were mastered. There are some genre's that benefitted from that loudness war (pop music sonics changed dramatically) but yeah anything which should have had subtlety got squashed to oblivion.

How do you feel about more recent re-masters where they have been more sensitive to over-compression and in some cases re-re-mastered to address the appalling re-masters? I have some issue with re-masters that attempt to fix problems with the source material. I'm not a huge fan of artists tinkering with the original material, adding elements that got lost in the mix due to overdubs/noise, were not technically possible, or just re-mixing for their taste. At least Taylor Swift is up-front about re-recording her albums.

My gut is that music recorded/mastered to tape is going to sound 'as intended' on vinyl and everything recorded digitally (the old DDD label on CDs) targeted CD. I have nothing scientific to back that up though.

> How do you feel about ...

I don't trust them enough to risk spending money on more re-masters. I always go for the original.

Interestingly, I've grown to dislike music that is too perfectly produced. I like that the singing isn't perfect, there's some background noise picked up by the mikes, etc.

For example, listen to some of the Jefferson Airplane albums from the 60s. Those albums would never be produced today, because the band is a bit of a mess. The harmonies are out of sync, the pitch is imperfect, the timing erratic, everything is off kilter. But that rawness is, strangely enough, what makes the albums so endearing and a treasure. It's like the band has come by your house and is just having fun in your living room.

So much better than the antiseptically perfect modern productions, along with that awful ubiquitous autotuning. Barf. C'mon, dare to have a sour note here and there.

Totally different type of music, but I feel the same way about rap.

Eminem's very early music feels amateurish, you can hear various audio issues. But it's some of its best work.

Now, anyone who makes an album can make something. That sounds absolutely spotless with about $2,000 worth of gear. Something's lost, there's something nice about hearing a mistake someone makes, but they don't have enough money to rerecord it so it stays on the record.

Rarely when I make my own music, I'll just leave some of the problems in there.

I find recordings of Moreschi (the last castrated tenor as far as I'm aware) to be very fascinating for that reason. The quality is terrible, he isn't hitting the notes or the rhythm particularly well, and yet it's really endearing.

https://youtu.be/KLjvfqnD0ws is one that has been digitally cleaned up but prefer listening to the messy version sometimes

Here is one that is particularly insidious: some of the remasters are done with new tracks, wherein the old musicians are replaced with session musicians, who do not have to be paid royalties and the like. I found out about this practice and began listening carefully ...

Wow. I didn't know about this practice. The music industry never stops innovating new ways to screw over their talent.

Computer programmers don't get royalties. Why is that different?

Session musicians replace the band members a lot even in the 60s or 70s. Often, the band couldn't play at all. They'd have to learn to play their own tunes so they could tour.

See "The Wrecking Crew" documentary.

Even for "Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass" there was no "Tijuana Brass". Herb was a session musician and decided he'd try making his own album. It was such a hit he had to go round up some brass players so he could tour.

Ah, the A of A&M.

Most of the first CD's in the 80's were made straight from the masters engineered for Vinyl and Casette media. They sounded awful with absurdly excessive EQ in the 3-6KHz range. Non-technical people commented that they preferred Vinyl because they could "hear the Aluminum" in CD's.

This was eventually fixed and proper CD masters started to become common in the early 90's.

Another thing to consider is the natural aging of our ears. Even without abuse high frequency sensitivity degrades as we get older. Those 80's CD's probably don't sound as harsh to someone 40+ today as they did back then.

I remember going to hear the first CD player imported to our city, it was a big event. I wondered why they had picked speakers to go with it that sounded so horrible. It wasn't until later that I found out it wasn't the speakers.

I have many CDs bought around 2000 which I cannot read anymore.

Burned CDs degrade because their method of writing is a chemical change. Pressed CDs do not suffer the same problem.

Some bad pressings do - but it's true that the majority of pressed CDs remain readable.

Pressed CDs decay because the reflective aluminum layer oxidizes. The bottom of a CD is a pretty impenetrable plastic, but the top is just painted on.

Many of my CD's are from the 1980's. I am listening to one right now. It sounds just like it did when I bought it. I have several hundred CDs and to my knowledge none of them are unreadable.

The only issue I have run into is using really cheap CD players. Some of the earliest CD's were manufactured using sub-optimal material and manufacturing processes and have always had a very slight warp to them even from the day I bought them. The really cheap CD players most notably Wonnie have trouble compensating for this.

You’re confusing physical formats with the advantages of ownership.

You can own DRM free digital files and have all of the same advantages, plus also enjoy the ease of use of digital.

The only problem is there is no legal way of obtaining DRM free digital copies of movies or tv shows. For music you have Bandcamp and (I think) iTunes.

I don't think they're confusing the two, it's more that sellers are forcibly combining the two. Nobody likes it, but they keep doing it, except in a couple sections where massively rampant piracy has essentially forced them to provide less user-hostile options.

> The only problem is there is no legal way of obtaining DRM free digital copies of movies or tv shows.

I think that depends on where you are. Maybe someone will correct me, but I was under the impression that here in the US you can "format-shift" a DVD or BD you legally own by ripping it to an unencrypted format so you can watch it on your tablet or what-have-you. Isn't that the legal leg iTunes stood on (before ITMS) for ripping CDs to listen to on your computer or iPod?

It is pretty hard to rip Blu Rays, from my surface level understanding only one piece of software supports it (MakeMKV), and only certain Blu Ray drives with specific versions of firmware support it.

mpv can be convinced to rip most blurays, but getting the requisite magic files can be a bit of a trip. You're looking for the latest "KEYDB.cfg".

There's also still a chunk of blurays that it just won't rip because they're too sophisticated, although shocking few releases seem to be releasing those. (Must be a lot more expensive to make them.) You also run the risk that if you're not careful about what you put in your drive, you can have the latest Bluray disk revoke your drive simply by it spinning up and doing the initial read before you even ask for anything, from what I gather. I'm not sure if this is a current risk, but it's always changing.

I've also found there's some confusion about what constitutes a 'track number'. DVD only has one, Bluray seems to have two. Most releases keep both in sync, but not all of them. The STTNG Blurays were a bit tricky to get the right shows off in the right order.

IANAL and have not followed this super closely so take this with a grain of salt, but from what I understand the answer is "no". In practice nobody pursues this kind of personal use, but that's very different from it being legal, and it has not truly been tested in courts either way.

You can make backups... with the encryption intact. But breaking DRM is essentially always illegal for any purpose, thanks to the wonderful DMCA. And that's before getting into EULAs that more and more frequently deny you ownership over what you bought, only a "temporary, revocable, non-transferable license to play this format on licensed devices in specific circumstances" or similar.

> And the 10 movies or so I watch per year is cheaper than a subscription service.

Libraries (and the free-if-you-have-a-participating-library-card Kanopy streaming service) exist, too.

Back in like 2005 or so, I would get all my music and movies from the library and just make rips to blanks to grow the collection at home. I did that with netflix dvd service too.

For me, it was the trouble of inadquate losless download offerings by so many labels / distributors. Even if you just want a digital library, getting the physical medium and making your private digital copy is a so much more stress-free variant, and it also doesn't limit your choice, because almost all music is available on CD and a much smaller fraction as well-produced losless audio downloads. I'm not paying CD price for a mp3, it's not the 2000s anymore, I can afford to download 700M of data for an album --- data saving was the original purpose of lossy audio codecs to begin with.

> the 10 movies or so I watch per year is cheaper than a subscription service.

I think the value here _really_ depends on your usage patterns. For you, it sounds like individual discs make a ton of sense. But, many people watch more movies than that (during the height of lockdown, we were watching 1-2 movies _daily_), so streaming services made the most sense. Sure, it's annoying that movies come and go, but the price is certainly right.

Once size won't fit all here, so it's definitely great that discs are still an option. I'm glad it works for you!

Ha! Coincides with me starting to buy CDs again, so I guess I'm not the rebel I thought I was.

I was buying albums as FLAC, when I realised; "wait a minute, what the heck am I doing?! This is more expensive than buying a CD which I can rip myself to FLAC anyway". So I did _a lot_ of research on the best medium to buy music in for sound quality (surprise; it's not vinyl), and I'm rebuilding my collection. Listening to albums is fun again :)

What tools do you find helpful in managing tags and missing album art work?

When ripping CDs myself with iTunes, I never found either to be a problem... Yeah, iTunes had other issues, but it's original functionality was 'Rip, Mix, Burn'.

I haven’t done a ton of ripping, but a fair amount, and I’ve found Music on macOS to be pretty decent.

I use beets

https://beets.io/

It's a bit nerdy but for large collections it's a godsend

This is great, I don't know how I missed it!

Is there any configuration I can use to tag only, and do no conversion or copying. In other words, I'm more interested in correcting tags than actually managing the library. Can't seem to find the correct configuration options :/

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/guides/main.html

Under the 'configuring' section there is a paragraph or two on this.

Not OP but I've been using MusicBrainz Picard[1] to manage tags on my collection (much of it was ripped 20 years ago and has traveled with me; I now use Plex and Plexamp for all music listening). Picard does sonic analysis and compares it against its database to find matches and then allows you to preview, change, and approve new tags and album art.

1: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

I wrote a simple script that asks some questions and uses the information to write the tags after ripping and encoding. I looked into looking it up automatically with CDDB, but typing out a few song names by hand seems to be more reliable.

EDIT: This is it, in case it helps. It's not great, but it gets the job done for me. I also use MusicBrainz to add cover art.

https://pastebin.com/8mDcr178

I highly recommend Quod Libet, open source and under active development. It's specialty is in large libraries: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Are you buying hidef audio in flac tho or flac where the source is the cd after whatever compression and normalisation has been applied?

Personally, I think hi def audio is nonsense, but I know some audiophiles who swear they can tell a difference.

Should you be one of those maybe the extra price is worth it ;)

Yeah, I concluded the same during my research into which physical medium to buy. Save your money. Turns out standard 16bit music CDs are all you're capable of hearing anyway.

Get one of those audiophiles and repeat a blind test 10 times ;)

> Are you buying hidef audio in flac tho or flac where the source is the cd after whatever compression and normalisation has been applied?

That would only be applicable if the two versions are mastered differently. Is there any reason/empirical evidence that's the case? I think the reasonable default assumption is that the recording studio just exports the same master for flac and cds, because it saves work. If they're going off the same master, then the only difference is 16 bit 44.1khz PCM audio for CDs, vs 16/24/32 bit 44.1/48/96/192khz audio for "hidef audio in flac" which is imperceptible.

I wrote a bit recently about why I still collect music on CDs. Here are my 3 reasons, which echo a lot of the comments:

1. To Support the Artist, 2. To Own the Music, 3. To Collect Artifacts (which is fun)

I also found a few recent attempts at creating new physical music formats, but most of them require Internet connectivity and are essentially cloud services that have physical access tokens :( I ended up just lamenting that we never got the Sony MiniDisc revolution that we all deserved.

The post is here: https://www.matthewhowell.net/notes/2022/on-collecting-music...

For me, collection things that you do not really need, is just a waste of scarce resources.

So you have no hobbies that are non-essential?

One could say that living at all is a waste of scarce resources.

Honestly he’s just being edgelord trying to yuck other people’s yum.

Speak for yourself, but for me art in a physical form is something I need.

I like that you mention “collecting artifacts.“ I have a pretty extensive video game OST vinyl collection. The first thing I do when one comes in the mail is open it up, deep clean the record, drop it on the record player, and spin it. But while it’s playing, I actually have the audio routed through a recorder capturing it as 96kHz/24bit wav.

I have so far archived every video game vinyl I have and I’ve slowly doing the rest of my vinyl collection. It’s been a really fun project, and like you said with “artifacts,“ I feel like I’ve got my own little museum of sorts going on. Plus it’s fun to cut them into sides (not tracks), compress into 48kHz wav, FLAC, and mp3, add the album art, and get them on my phone and home server. So I basically can take my vinyl anywhere I go!

Is it the most practical exercise? Of course not. But it’s really fun in its own way. I just like archive diving a lot given my history background, so making my own archive scratches a similar itch I guess.

I’ve been thinking of doing something myself. Any tips on the recording end of things? Is routing to a laptop good enough? Do computers even have stereo line in anymore …

I use a zoom h6n - which records to an SD card - so I can separate the stereo left and right into their own mono recordings then recombine on the back end (this allows me to use the XLR ports instead of 1/8” stereo port for better fidelity). This isn’t strictly necessary, just make sure you’re getting the stereo audio and not combining it into a mono track (unless of course it’s not stereo vinyl).

A computer is totally fine. You should be able to do it through the headphone port if you have one (I’d be surprised if you didn’t). It just all depends on what output options your turntable has. My technics 1200 mk II are RCA out so I go turntable -> left RCA right RCA adapted to their own XLR -> zoom h6.

> technics 1200 mk II

Ah lovely, same decks myself! Thanks for the advice!

> I ended up just lamenting that we never got the Sony MiniDisc revolution that we all deserved.

I recently got "into" MiniDisc myself. I completely skipped that format back in the day, but noticed some artists i liked were releasing albums on MD (through Bandcamp). I had also watched some YT videos on the format, and thought "why not". So I bought a portable player and a deck for at home. It's a really cool format. I can buy releases from artists i like, or use NetMD to "burn" them myself. I have a small collection of MD's now, and i do enjoy playing that more than just pressing play on some Spotify playlist.

Also read your blogpost. MD does tick most of the "ideal format" boxes, except for "easy to reproduce". If you use an existing MD as a source to create a new MD, the lossy compression will not allow a 1:1 copy.

There's a small but fairly active community around minidisc.wiki, and some developers reverse engineering the netMD protocol and the firmware on the players. They already have some modern NetMD clients right now, making it a breeze to use the format.

Worth noting that CD sales as a percent of total revenue fell from 4.0% to 3.9%, continuing the trend relative to the whole there.

From: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

It is also worth noting that people spent more on Vinyl than they did on CDs last year. CDs are a fairly small niche now.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/us-music-fans-spent-m...

Doesn't that have more to do with Vinyl being basically a collectors format with much higher MSRPs per album than CD? In unit sales CD still sells more.

No, vinyl is the majority of physical sales by unit now in the US.

> According to data from the MRC and Billboard, 38.3 per cent of all album sales in the country last year were in vinyl format, while it accounted over 50 per cent of all physical album sales (41.72 million sales out of a total of 82.79 million).

https://www.nme.com/news/music/vinyl-albums-outsold-cds-in-u...

Billboard source (paywalled): https://www.billboard.com/pro/vinyl-sales-new-record-past-cd...

I have no interest in going back to vinyl and I don't have most of my old albums any longer. But if you want retro physicality of your music medium, vinyl probably has a lot more appeal than the alternatives. I do buy CDs from time to time if they're as cheap or cheaper than MP3s (or they're something oddball I can't buy digitally). But I generally then just rip them and put the physical CD in a box in the attic.

Holy hell 38.3% of ALL album sales? I get people mostly but individual songs but I would’ve never guessed almost 40%.

...while total revenue of all media formats grew from 12.7B to 15.0B. CD revenue rose from 505.9M to 584.2M, but actually lost 0.1% of market share.

The big winners of market share among formats were LPs -- up from 5.3% to 6.9%, and on-demand streaming (with ads) -- up from 9.9% to 11.7%.

(Revenues and percentages are in US dollars after adjustment for inflation.)

Cassettes are also ticking up in sales and major artists like Taylor Swift are releasing new material on cassette. Obviously this is a very niche market but I find it fascinating that physical formats are being appreciated again. I'm kind of a nut about this personally as I have reel to reel, cassette, DAT, minidisc, CD, and of course vinyl in my personal collection.

A reel to reel machine is a heavy marvel of engineering and arguably sounds worse than many of the better compression formats. This giant machine with moving parts, required maintenance, and finicky loading is not everyone's cup of tea - but I love the quality of the machine and process by which it plays music.

Locally we have a used CD, cassette, vinyl store that is always busy (Every Day Music - they actually have two very large retail locations.) I love the physical media aspect for all the reasons already mentioned by others in this thread. Nostalgia is also a prime ingredient. So hearing that these formats are finding a place in the market, however small, is good news and means more fun for me.

What I don't quiet understand is why we never went to flash for media distribution.

SD cards are dirt cheap and can hold massive amounts of data. Seems weird that we can't just hand out 128MB SD cards with an album on it.

My guess is digital purchases became easier just before flash memory was cheap enough to use for albums. Also, distribution is much simpler, and the labels can get more profit due to decreased manufacturing costs.

This is my thought too. By the time SD cards were cheap and ubiquitous, digital music already had a huge foothold, and has the convenience of not worrying about losing the SD card.

iPods became big around 2003. Back then, 128 MB of flash would cost you $40[1]. This was why HDD-backed mp3 players were so revolutionary for the time--flash wasn't viable, yet. By the time flash got cheap enough, portable mp3 players were so established that the time for physical media for audio had mostly passed.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20030520151144/http://www.newegg...

Yep, the reason why the OG iPod was shaped/sized the way it was, is due to the form factor of commodity laptop hard drives. I forget, but I think the OG iPod had a firewire connector (sort of the equivalent of today's Thunderbolt 3/4), which allowed the owner to use the iPod as a portable hard drive. Most macs had at least one firewire port.

2nd and 3rd gen too. I still have a 3rd gen

Still got mine. First gen, Mac only, Firewire. Haven't turned it on in a few years, I wonder if it still goes...

Sony would want to use their proprietary Memory Stick format

There were a few attempts, slotMusic is one that comes to mind.

They kind of all were doomed. Why buy a digital music player that couldn't manage music as well as the cheapest MP3 players? These products also felt like an attempt by the flash storage makers to dump older inventory since an album would fit on smaller cards than most consumers wanted. Then the iPod steam rolled the market. The convenience of iTunes, even over poor Internet connectivity, was hard to beat.

Isn't that what the nintendo switch is doing?

IMO - collectibility is inversely proportional to media and packaging size.

That said, I think the Switch gets it right. If everybody was handing out microSD cards you’d have a nightmare managing those

Bill Gates called it when interviewed about the upcoming Blu-Ray format in 2005. "Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts."

I think speed of production is also a factor. A factory can stamp out CD/DVDs very quickly, flash has to be written out to by a computer.

Finding the best cassette decks these days is a science unto itself though. Lots of mediocre stuff getting put out to ride the hype.

Got myself a Nakamichi BX-300, and I'm kinda blown away by how decent it is. With the price old 80's cassette decks go for today, it seems like you could produce a fairly well spec'ed machine for ~300 and have it sell. Agreed though, most of the stuff produced today is rebadged white label junk; go to a thrift store and pick up something second hand, it's probably better.

Cassettes on the other hand may be another story though, I don't know if the chemistry allows for old metal tapes to be produced anymore.

People in my social circle know I like cassettes and often funnel old collections my way. I just received a box with 85 vintage cassettes. Probably 50% will be unplayable from warping of the outer shell (these are often pulled out of an attic or storage with annual cold/heat cycles). A further 20% won't sound very good.

However those that are in good shape typically sound terrific. The quality of the player is key (most currently produced cassette players are truly awful) and older machines can easily be brought back to life in most cases. Sony's old high-end walkman's are also magnificent for playback.

Metal tapes are hard to find new, but i have repurposed used ones to great effect. I would like to emphasize that even the boring stalwart type 1 cassettes can sound really good. The quality of pre-recorded could be incredibly inconsistent fresh out of the wrapper back in the day and I think this gave them a bad reputation.

Some of my vintage Beetles cassettes, and Peter Gabriel cassettes had extremely high production standards and really hold up. "Peter Gabriel's "Security" was digitally mastered and sounds fantastic.

I was watching the new film "Nobody" and the main character steals a hot rod with a cassette player and rocks out while driving. The rattle of the old cassette and sound of it loading really hit a nostalgia nerve but it was plainly cool. This kind of thing appearing in new media might be one reason people are going back.

Agreed on type 1 tape. I have many that sound great, it actually works really well for bass heavy music like hip hop.

Makes sense that most of the mass produced tapes at the hey day of cassette were inconsistent.

After the 80s expired, in Germany, long-form audio dramas [1] transitioned from being produced to vinyl to cassette (the transition to CDs happened amazingly late in the 2000s, and for quite some time both cassette and CD were typically released at the same time). Basically, all my audio dramas are cassette or vinyl.

What I was running up to say: whereas the quality of CD masterings typically was consistent and befitting the medium, many of my audio drama cassettes have quite varying physical qualities. It esp. gets noticable with long-running series such as the "three ???" series; over 100s of cassettes, you can make out the slumps and peaks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_drama#Germany

It really is a shame that replacement products that are up to par do not really exist. You'd probably have to persuade a local enthusiast or skilled audio electronics repair man to restore an old deck for you unless you can do everything yourself should you get one. At least, the cheap consumable mechanical parts like belts are available for any make and model under the sun, so keeping one deck running with some care is something even non-enthusiasts can do

I grew up with Napster, Morpheus, KazaA, eDonkey/eMule. never ever bought music.

recently i bought a music CD for the first time. I really liked the artist. Was surprised to find:

- a complete booklet of all track lyrics

- some additional behind the scenes content

- hidden tracks

- no DRM, I can simply lend it to ppl.

- if need be Windows Media Player will rip to mp3

- a good feeling from sunk cost and my willingness to repeat this

There is a reason that CD/DVD sales in Japan are still going strong.

You're probably looking for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30641467

Moved hither. Thanks!

thanks haha!

Wrong thread?

Similarly related, I've been collecting UHD blu-rays for the past year and have been enjoying it greatly.

Lawrence of Arabia is being released as a 4k scan later this year and I'm pumped!

I think there are a few parts to physical media collection

* No fear of the media getting "Cancelled" and you losing access to it

* Quality is always consistent. 4k and high quality audio bit rates generally do ok when streaming but start artifacting when there are any hiccups in your connection. I have GB service and I Still have low quality moments on my streaming.

* Collecting items scratches an itch I didn't know I had

* With vynyl and CDs, listening to a whole album shows you songs that you wouldn't normally consider or search for. Spotify makes it easy to skip a song you may not like but I tend to try out new songs on my record player and sometimes I like new things

* The artwork for blu-rays, vynyls, and CDs can be beautiful and make a nice addition to a shelf or library in your living room.

If you use YouTube and search for “LG Oled 4k” you will find fantastic looking streaming videos that look better than anything streaming from Netflix, HBO max, Disney plus, Apple TV etc…

It is very frustrating that Blu Ray is the only way to get high quality Hollywood content. The technology is there for streaming

All true except for one thing. DVDs and Blurays are very susceptible to the slightest damage, even invisible damage. Every time I play one, I wonder if it is going to play or hang halfway through. Many also make it hard to actually get to the movie, inserting several minutes worth of various delays.

At least CDs don't have that last problem, just insert and they play. CDs can also be pretty beat up and still play fine.

Actually, Blu-rays are supposed to have an improved chemical formulation that resists scratches/damage compared to CD and DVD media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Hard-coating_technolog...

Audio on scratched CDs can sometimes be cleanly ripped and repaired with the cdparanoia program. I don't know anything that does this with DVDs.

https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

CDs and DVDs can also be refinished by equipment that grinds down and polishes the plastic, assuming the data layer is intact beneath it. This cannot be done with Blu-ray media, because of the altered surface chemistry.

I wish the component players had better read failure programming to overcome those scratches. I have tried finding reviews for the better players with no luck. Using a laptop sometimes handles scratches better.

In my experience, DVD players have gotten steadily more able to deal with damaged discs over the years. But still, if one doesn't play in one player, it might play in another, or maybe a blueray machine will play it. It's not predictable.

Sometimes, washing the disc will get it to play. Sometimes, rubbing a tiny bit of oil (!) on it will get it to play.

In many jurisdictions it's legal to have a digital backup if you own the cd/dvd. So you wouldn't necessarily have to actually use the CD/DVD to play the media.

From my understanding, CDs are actually quite prone to damage because the layer that stores the data is actually on the "label" side of the CD. Anything that damages the label can also damage the data layer just underneath.

DVDs moved the data layer into the middle - sandwiched between two layers of plastic, Blu-rays move it to the surface opposite the label, but add a protective coating to try to keep it from getting damaged[1]. I think DVDs are actually the least prone to permanent damage from scratches because of their sandwich structure - surface scratches can often be buffed out. However all 3 can also progressively rust if damage exposes the recording layer to air[2].

[1] https://www.cdrom2go.com/blu-ray-information

[2] https://blog.discogs.com/en/say-no-to-disc-rot-how-to-look-a...

I was archiving / ISO'ing my CDs/DVDs last month. So many of them weren't even recognized as a disk. Many had read errors. The disks were in proper form.

Did the same for my 3.5" floppy disks. None of those had problems

It's important to mention the durability of the medium is very different when you compare writables to pressed, and there's a large variance in quality for writeables, particularly now that lots of old stock (with a history of non-favourable storage conditions) is intemixed with demand being low.

If you really value your data, use archive disks. They are costly, but they will actually reach their rated lifespan, often of 50-100 years.

You should note that if you were using Windows 10, it sometimes has problems with old CD-ROMs. If you rip the disk, it reads fine, but Windows Explorer doesn't understand the filesystem and reports the disk as a DVD-R or something

Was using isobuster

Yeah my experience with physical media from the cassette age to now is that CDs are by far the most finnicky of the physical medias. Any little scratch or gunk leads to skipping and bad playback. I can count on one hand how few DVDs I've seen that had problems, and I've never seen a blu-ray that ever failed to play.

I have over 1000 DVDs. The vast majority I bought used. They're a lot more durable in my experience, as long as you don't abuse them. Slight scratches can be buffed out. Some have a reflective foil layer printed on the "up" side (rather than integrated into the plastic layers), and if you damage that, it's hosed.

Store your DVDs in sleeves or in the original cases, and you shouldn't have any problems. Don't leave them laying around or stack them.

At some point I want to rip all my DVDs and put them on a media server (~4-6TB worth), but it's a serious undertaking.

Local computer shops might be a place I’d check. I know some places that could put a high schooler after school to work on a simple project like that for a few days.

I calculated that 4 DVDs per hour would take 250 hours....that's several weeks of work. I found a robot that does this, but the company that makes it seems to have gone out of business.

You could use multiple drives in parallel. Also: https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-rippi...

Assuming a single-threaded process with one final destination, sure. If you're just archiving them, a couple cheap-o machines with external SSDs can really crank through the bytes.

1000 dvds is really not such a large number, it will go a lot quicker than you think.

Source: I once made 180(!) copies of a ~400 page document for an event, by using six copy machines and collating from stacks of 30 sheets. I don't remember exactly how long it took, but it was less than 2 full workdays. It's all about the M:N efficiency!

When my kids were very young, I discovered that they had a talent for destroying DVDs. So I put together a media PC and started ripping. I've had to upgrade the HD a couple of times, but every kid's DVD I ever bought is now available instantly on that PC, and the originals are packed away in boxes where they don't get touched.

> Many also make it hard to actually get to the movie, inserting several minutes worth of various delays.

This depends on the software you use to play it.

> With vynyl and CDs, listening to a whole album shows you songs that you wouldn't normally consider or search for. Spotify makes it easy to skip a song you may not like but I tend to try out new songs on my record player and sometimes I like new things

This is the exact itch I tried to replicate with https://audile.app

It loads a random album from Deezer’s collection on every page load.

+1! btw, I heard it's notoriously hard to play UHDs on a PC - how do you do it?

MakeMKV makes it trivial.

This is the right way!

You let someone else do all the hard work and download their DRM-free torrent.

You can still buy albums on MP3 from a variety of places. I guess that is the same as getting the CD and ripping it, but I like to own MP3s I have paid for. I enjoy playing music from my collection rather than having it served to me by a service for a variety of reasons. But I am not knocking streaming. It's just nice to really have the asset.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but CDs are higher quality than MP3 usually. You can rip losslessly to WAV or FLAC and preserve the original. MP3 is lossy and will be a lesser version.

when you buy a CD from amazon.. for lots of them, you can download the MP3s right away after you paid for it

Didn't know that. It's a weird disparity that you can't download a PDF when you bought a book. You get an online book viewer instead. I would have expected them to likewise stream the audio if anything, or require you to use their app to listen to it.

one problem i've found with music is someone discovers an uncleared sample, and the album either becomes unavailable, or stays available with samples removed so its not actually the same album anymore.

Not a problem if you buy DRM free files, which most places offer. You're just responsible for storing them from the moment of purchase.

it is a problem. if you go to buy the album today, the updated versions already have the offending samples removed. the originally released CD does not have this problem.

You can't trust that commercial MP3s are encoded for gapless playback which is sort of important for live albums that play through without stopping. On my rips all pregaps are preserved at the end of the previous track and playback is always identical to the CD.

I've been buying DVDs/Blu-Rays again.

In my case it's mainly because you can't trust the online streaming companies to preserve access to content, especially if it's older content that's no longer considered politically appropriate.

The watershed moment for me was when Netflix removed The Mighty Boosh over a small number of admittedly questionable scenes. There are other places I could stream it from, but some other content can be hard to find, even illegally. Other comedies have had scenes modified or episodes pulled.

As a side benefit, I concur with the observation that the quality of Blu-rays and even DVDs is typically better than the streamers. Lots of films are 4k Dolby vision on Blu-Ray but still only 1080p on Netflix/Prime. Apple TV tends to be better, but usually no cheaper than buying the disc.

Buy DVDs and rip them and run your own Plex server.

Sometimes it's almost as if they want you to pirate stuff.

Monkey Dust Series 3 is another series that is now impossible to buy legally. They used various people's music but didn't have the rights, so it got broadcast and then they couldn't sell it on DVD.

I like to keep a copy of obscure and hard to find recordings - it's almost as if recent history is being erased before our very eyes.

Limmy's Show Season 3 is the exact same: https://twitter.com/daftlimmy/status/542009546588581888

The fact that the BBC could make this mistake several times does strike me as incompetence.

The Monkey Dust situation is a real shame, as it was such a ground-breaking and innovative comedy programmes of its time. Ridiculous that something so influential can now only be watched thanks to piracy. Also kind of ironic considering some of the themes of Monkey Dust...

The Wikipedia article also says this: "Another reason for the lack of DVD releases of the later series is thought to be the 'teenage jihadi' sketches being considered unsuitable in the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings that occurred a few months later."

Monkey Dust is criminally underrated.

> Monkey Dust Series 3 is another series that is now impossible to buy legally. They used various people's music but didn't have the rights, so it got broadcast and then they couldn't sell it on DVD.

This has become a reoccurring thing in the streaming world. Dramas have taken to changing the songs, and in the case of Dawson’s Creek the theme [0].

I one time tried to watch an episode of Bevis and Butthead streaming, and the parts where they comment on videos were dead silent except for their remarks. Weird

[0] https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a34671665/why-dawsons-cr...

Even situations like Seinfeld. Netflix altered the aspect ratio by cropping the image, and it really does effect the show. And there's no option to change it.

That was done for the HD syndication run. Not Netflix's fault.

However, Crackle ran HD 4:3 versions (in the original framing), so those do exist.

Same here. I started buying UHDs because they meet or exceed theatrical resolution. I stopped buying DVDs and BluRays knowing that someday I'd have a TV where I'd see the pixels.

I do the much cheaper version of this and collect high quality 4k rips of movies and amass private tracker accounts.

A normal length movie is about 80-100GB.

I like the process of making groups in Plex too!

I wish there was some guarantee of a movie's integrity matches the original disc. There are so many versions of a file floating around and while the file size of 80-100GB seems to indicate no transcoding, you can't be 100% sure.

This seems funny to me. Discoverability of new songs (and artists) seems like the strongest benefit of Spotify and it’s kin. I usually check out a new album multiple times a week

It’s not discoverability, it’s giving songs a chance that don’t sound appealing at first, because skipping them would be too much of a hassle. Songs can grow on you after listening to them a couple of times even if you didn’t like them initially. When using streaming services, that trajectory rarely happens unless you specifically decide to always listen to the whole album, multiple times.

This is exactly what I meant. If a song doesn't immediately tickle my fancy on spotify, I hit next. With a vinyl, I just leave it on and oftentimes I end up liking it.

>With vynyl and CDs, listening to a whole album shows you songs that you wouldn't normally consider or search for. Spotify makes it easy to skip a song you may not like but I tend to try out new songs on my record player and sometimes I like new things

We currently have an old Macbook Pro running Qobuz that sits next to our receiver. I used to stand up and skip to the next song if I didn't like a track but it grew old quickly and I now just let it play through.

I never realized how much good music I was skipping until now.

Something about vinyl specifically is the fact that there is a real break in the album when one side ends. It requires some thought and gives an additional aspect to artists when creating the track listing.

For example, "Stairway To Heaven" is the last track on the first side of Led Zeppelin IV. If you listen on Spotify the song hits the (overplayed) epic climax, smooth come down and ends with some haunting vocals. Then immediately the jaunty bop of Misty Mountain Hop comes on all bouncing around the room in a totally contrasting upbeat mood. Very jarring.

It is very obvious these were planned to the end of one side and the beginning of another. When Stairway ends I need a minute to breathe and take it in before moving on. With a vinyl record this is planned for and intended by the artist, but on any other medium (save cassettes maybe) you lose this capability.

Even just the fact that the artist gets to specify the play order. Today it's rare that a playlist will even have two songs from the same artist in sequence, but in olden days you could have a sequence that was greater than the sum of the parts. My favorite example is the last 3 songs on side A of The Cars Candy-O - Double Life is kind of relaxing, Shoo Be Doo cranks up the tension, and Candy-O starts with a crescendo that releases the tension. I don't actually know if that was intentional, but it feels like it was.

I'm glad that more people than me are doing this. I'm concerned about the shrinking selection of PC Blueray drives will prevent us from further keeping control of our media. The problem with Blueray is the requirement of needing updates for newer titles. There are methods of stripping the DRM and getting unencumbered files but after they stop selling the last blueray drive then the clock starts.

Yeah, I've thought about this too. I have an LG super drive that does blu ray, lightscribe, and a bunch of other cool tech but it's about 8-10 years old. I'm waiting for it to self destruct. lol

LG sells Bluerays drive that can be hacked but unfortunately they have mixed quality/reliability. Pioneer sells really reliable drives that can only currently do regular blueray, not 4k but they are being worked on. I suggest to nab one before they disappear and then hopefully they get cracked eventually. MakeMKV forums can provide more info.

I don't understand 4K blu ray. It's 4x the resolution of HD but only has ~2x the storage capacity of blu ray. Isn't that limiting bitrate/quality?

UHD Blu-Rays can go up to 100GB in capacity and can be read at 144Mbits/second. I don't think it limits many movies, but my 4k Lord of the Rings copy has the movie split into multiple discs.

Different codecs. Regular Blu-Rays are largely H.264 (though some of the original releases are MPEG-2 like DVDs); UHD is H.265 which is way more space efficient.

I hope CD never dies. It's a lossless, DRM-free physical format. There's nothing like it.

Listening to cymbals is much better on a CD than streaming.

And even better on vinyl!

I have bought several CDs in the last year, in order to get .flacs that weren't otherwise available, or not available at a decent price. Unfortunately for the music business I've bought many used. It's like $8 vs $24 and I don't need to downsample to 16/48 to save space and play on the car stereo.

All older recordings should be cheaper to combat piracy. The idea that I'm gonna pay top dollar for something multi-decades old because they remastered it (which is 10x cheaper to produce) is silly.

> All older recordings should be cheaper to combat piracy.

That would kill the sales of new stuff.

Most kids and some adults aren't interested in old stuff. Not until they get older.

When the RIAA went after Youtube-dl I realized I was digging my own grave supporting streaming sites. Used CDs, Bandcamp, Flac. Anything but streaming sites where the RIAA gets money.

While I'm not particularly interested in going back to physical media for music, I have mulled over the idea of dropping streaming and going back to buying albums.

Apart from the fact that using Apple Music is an absolutely dreadful experience, anecdotally I feel like I enjoy music less when I listen in the ways that streaming tries to funnel you into, i.e. playlists and radio-like experiences. The music becomes less of an active engagement and more just background noise.

The sticking points I have are that the discovery aspect is huge—despite my reservations about playlists, I've discovered a lot of bands that I really love from them just popping up randomly. But also, the cost difference is a hard sell; I recognise that that's largely a function of streaming pricing being pretty much unsustainable for all but the biggest artists, but when for the same price as one album per month I can access a huge portion of all the music in the world it's difficult to say no to that.

I am certain I have contributed to this statistic.

I was sent off the deep end after Spotify removed one song in particular from my playlist that I really wanted to listen to on one occasion.

We are only into the month of March, and I have already spent ~$500 YTD on physical CDs, BluRays and other multimedia formats. Last year I probably spent close to 3-4k on the same.

The rate at which I have pirated content (which is otherwise difficult to source on physical media) is also up dramatically since this incident.

I was so hyped when Spotify added my country. But I then found that most of the artists I listen to (Reggae artists, CHVRCHES) was missing from the catalog. I keep it for a little time as it was cheap, but did not bother to renew when my card expired.

  [x] Works on relatively low tech hardware
  [x] Doesn't require internet connection
  [x] Can't be removed from your possession for violating ToS
  [x] Can be easily backed up

All of the above is true for Bandcamp except needing an internet connection initially but I don't imagine that's such a limiting factor. There's still CD sales going on there so the above doesn't explain it completely and I imagine the nostalgia, having a physical item, contrarianism etc. have a bigger hand in the resurgence.

I feel very fortunate to have grown up before streaming (ie, music you can't own). I collected about 800 CDs that I still have and listen to, and about 1200 LPs mostly given to me by people getting out of vinyl. I love the big artwork of LPs, and the ritual of cleaning and playing them, many of which are unavailable online. I ripped most of the CDs so I can avoid losses due to damage and listen on any device. I pay zero dollars to streaming services, nothing paid to Apple, and nothing supporting Joe Rogan. The down side to this approach is mostly just space for storage.

I sorta feel the same way as you as I spent a lot of money on music when I was younger.

But, that said, those 800 CD's and 1200 LP's cost you around 800 * $15 + 1200 * $10 = $24000. That's enough to pay for 200 years of streaming at $10/mo. And with streaming, you'll get 1000x more content to choose from. So I kind understand the appeal for the younger crowd.

I understand too. However I didn't pay for a huge portion of those LPs, because people gave them away by the box load, including a long time subscriber of the Capitol Records club who didn't play them. I lucked out and I'd rather keep playing them than subscribe to anything.

The counterpoint.. The day you cancel your subscription to a streaming service and you have absolutely nothing to show for it.

Without the physical media, I lose the journal of what I enjoyed, why and when (as well as the guarantee I can listen to it)

I had the same experience when all the alternative rock radio stations shut down in our area, after their heyday had passed. All the music I had been listening to for years was suddenly no longer on the air, and unless I remembered something specific I had no way to track it down.

I buy CD's on Bandcamp but leave them in the wrapping since they also give you a flac copy. I imagine others do the same.

Bandcamp was recently bought by Epic Games. Do you happen to know of an alternative of the same quality?

Is there something wrong with Epic?

I don't if there's something specific, but there's a pattern of companies getting bought than after a year or two, your favorite thing about the platform gets remove or put behind a paywall. It might not happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

My favorite thing about Bandcamp is buying albums and downloading them. That's already behind a paywall by definition.

I do not. I listen to all my music through Plex so I'll probably go back to ripping CD's and finding stuff on the open seas at the first sign of funny business. The nice thing about being able to download your content is Bandcamp can close and I still have what I paid for.

Compounded by my lateness to the smartphone world, I feel hopelessly out of touch, but I have finally decided to start ripping a lot of my fairly hefty CD collection in hopes of playing them in my car, but many things I once thought true have mutated over time:

- Headphone jacks disappearing from phones

- iPhones in general, it seems like a lot of work just to get some random file onto the damned thing

- Head units don't recognize .m3u playlists (what?!)

Overall, it seems the happy path is just to subscribe to some music service and like whatever it is they have on ("played at a reasonable volume," as the Pictures for Sad Children bit goes). However, I already have the radio for the "shut up and like what we feed you" option.

We're swimming upstream a bit here, liking CDs.

>Headphone jacks disappearing from phones

For most phones it just got merged into the USB C port. It's the same thing, but with a different connector except USB C also supports digital audio output too instead of just analog.

That doesn't change the problem that I can't plug my headphones in anymore.

My family buys CDs. We're into a lot of less popular genres such as chamber, folk, jazz, etc. We attend performances, workshops, and so forth. I've asked the musicians quite bluntly: How should I buy your stuff, so you can make the most money from it? The answer is: Buy the CD right here. Most of the performers sell CD's at their performances -- their own and ones from their friends. We often go home with a couple of CDs. I rip them onto a file server.

Digital distribution sounded like a great idea when it was introduced, and it's been great for the "industry," but I don't think that small time musicians have figured out a way to monetize it.

The volume of CD sales grew compared to 2020, but was less than the volume from 2019. If you look at the data chart from the link in the article (https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/) you can see the trend is still down. The revenue per cd in 2019 = $13.28, 2020 = $15.29, 2021 = $12.54.

Combined 2018/9 sales totaled 99.3M units sold vs combined 2020/1 78.2M units sold. There was a huge drop in 2020. Is it safe to assume that sales not done in 2020 were done in 2021?

I stopped purchasing ebooks and am buying hardcover or paperback, even if it costs more.

I want to physically own my purchases, not just have some entitlement to some file on a server.

I'm not buying NFTs, either!

I still do CDs, iTunes and iTunes Match.

I get all of the streaming benefits, etc on my phone, without having to deal with a shitty streaming service. iTunes Songs are DRM free.

Plus, since I’m pretty firmly established in the Apple world, I have an easy escape path for when they finally fuck up the music app beyond my level of tolerance.

Cost-wise, it’s about the same. I probably spend about $100 year on music most years.

One of my kids got into vinyl a few years ago and that triggered me to get my CD collection out of the attic and I started buying CDs again. I really enjoy listening to entire albums.

Lately though, I've been using Apple Music because I got a free trial and found I really like their spatial audio and ATMOS tracks. Just about everything I stream is lossless and most that I listen to are higher than CD quality.

The big question is (ignoring spatial audio), can I tell a difference between 16 bit / 44 kHz (CD) and 24 bit / 192 kHz (studio master)? The answer seems to be maybe. I've tried A-B tests where I switch between the two and I can never notice any differences. But after listening to an entire album I can often say that the album was CD or studio master quality. I wonder if maybe the two formats are mixed differently?

The CD format is trapped in amber and the world is moving on (esp. with spatial audio) and I think that's too bad for people who like to buy music.

I don't find the extra resolution helps at all at playback time, although I have older ears now. What it significant is a quality master in the first place. With that I downsample to 16/48, I personally can't tell the difference at that point from higher-res.

For example, I've made mp3/opus from a quality remaster, that sound better than the 80s CD, simply because the new master was scanned on better equipment.

It is not a good A/B test unless you are blind to which test is CD and which is not. Have you done that? (You need the help of another person)

> can I tell a difference between 16 bit / 44 kHz (CD) and 24 bit / 192 kHz (studio master)?

Even under perfect listening conditions (which are very rare) 99.99% of people won't be able to tell the difference.

The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between a 44.1Khz/16 bits .wav and a 128kbps MP3.

That's not true. If you said 320kbps MP3 then maybe I'd agree. 128 sounds crushed as hell on most decent setups.

Have you done a proper AB blind test to verify that?

I studied sound engineering and we did that test. Most people failed and it was in a studio environment. I couldn't imagine regular people not interested in audio with consumer gear.

Edit:

If you do the AB test, you really need to get pretty close to 100% success to claim you can hear the difference. Anything closer to 50% is just random luck.

>> The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between a 44.1Khz/16 bits .wav and a 128kbps MP3.

...are you kidding? I think most people could easily tell the difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3 if asked to listen to it hard enough. That, or play it in a club loud enough - and watch everyone cringe.

As the other commenter said - 320kbps - alright, sure. But 128kbps? Come on.

With a modern encoder, I think that's virtually guaranteed, yes.

Most peoples idea of "horrible" 128kbps seems to be skewed by the early days of MP3 -- which does mean there are horrible files and encoders out there, yes. But a modern LAME encoder is streets ahead at 128kbps.

> The big question is (ignoring spatial audio), can I tell a difference between 16 bit / 44 kHz (CD) and 24 bit / 192 kHz (studio master)?

Unless there's something different about the mix (as you note), it's unlikely that most people in most circumstances could hear a meaningful difference.

If someone has high end equipment & speakers and the speakers are placed correctly in an ideal room or if you've got high end headphones, then maybe, but otherwise I'm skeptical.

No, you cannot tell the difference between 16/44 and 24/192, unless the 24/192 has enough high frequency content to cause non-linear distortions in your speakers.

24/192 makes sense for recording because the extra bits give you more headroom to prevent clipping and the higher sampling rate means you can use less aggressive analog low-pass filters on your input.

I should also note that your playback solution likely has higher THD+N than the floor imposed by 16 bits. 16 bits implies a noise floor of -96dB which would be a THD+N of about 0.002%. Your playback equipment is probably 11-14 bits equivalent for the noise floor (-66 to -84dB). With 16 bits of depth you probably won't even be able to tell between a properly and improperly dithered CD that was normalized before down-sampling.

I agree that spatial audio is long overdue. IMO, Ambisonics had the right idea in the 1970s, though it was at least 20 years to early for actual adoption.

Maybe it's just better mastering, but I mostly hear the difference between 44 and 48KHz. And because of this, I'd love to see more DVD audio selling too :)

> get my CD collection out of the attic

Yes, please get your CDs out of the attic. Same is true for your photographs, cameras, paintings, and many other things.

I still buys cds. I stop to buying and for a while brougth albuns in Itunes. After being tired of spotify I ended up trying to download my old albuns, and find I cant donwload them anymore. So I just got pissed and stated bying cds and ripping them.

I don't care much about the phisical copy as long as it is preserved so I been buying digipaks.

any time i can't find a movie online i just buy the dvd, make a digital copy then throw it up on ebay. i have no use for the plastic bits either

I wonder if that is due to concerts and local artists earning money at shows, or if it is a broader trend. Story of one: I have been buying physical media from Bandcamp for albums that I like and that offer it. Bandcamp is so cool! Actually owning the music, even if digitally, is a comforting feeling.

For me at least the reason is:

- with a subscription model (e.g., Spotify) I enjoy the music as long as a) I keep paying, and b) the supplier keeps supplying it

- with a "buy a CD" model, I own the music forever. I can copy it in another CD to preserve it if needed. I don't have to worry about Spotify or Apple Music being up/down or if they even increase their base price or not

I honestly thought from the headline before clicking through that this was referring to the other CDs, "certificates of deposit", which, I imagine, may be more in-demand due to rising interest rates.

After several startups shut down and caused me to scramble to export my data and change my workflow I've decided to put much less of my life in things that other companies can tear away from me. I use Dropbox, iCloud, etc. that I expect to stay available and without big price increases, as well as things like Spotify where I make sure to not invest too much time in curating playlists in case Spotify's pricing gets raised to the point where I don't want to use it anymore. Perhaps others have done the same.

I'm mostly buying vinyl, but some CDs too, especially of stuff that isn't on streaming services (surprisingly common with older albums or those from non-US/UK countries). CDs can be poorly or well mastered, but the latter really sound better than a lot of the rips that have ended up on streaming services to me in a blind comparison.

Anecdotally, I've purchased several new CDs over the past 12 months because I bought a used car that has a CD player and I CBA to set it up to work with my phone. Given that the used car market is undergoing an unprecedented boom, I wonder if some % of CD sales come from similarly motivated new used cars owners.

I recently bought a “vintage” 2003 car, removed the aftermarket touchscreen stereo, and reinstalled the OEM tape deck. I’m playing my old cassettes, stuff I haven’t listened to since the 80s.

Adrian Belew, Desire Caught by the Tail.

Brand X, Product.

UK, Danger Money.

Yeah, not exactly hi-fi, but not unlistenably wobbly. Car has a stick and wicked turbo lag too. Smiles for miles.

As a person who carried a Discman for quite a few years, I do not miss CDs. I can only imagine that these CD buyers are either listening exclusively at home, or immediately ripping to FLAC.

I guess having the album art is nice, but if that's your main motivation why not go all the way and collect vinyl?

Would you like to meet my personal CD player collection? I'm heading to Mexico in a few days and I'm debating which of my players to bring. I have a modular bluetooth transmitter that works with all of them, but typically I'm just listening on my Sony studio headphones.

I also make my own CD's complete with artwork and printing directly on the disc. I purchased Lorde's "Solar Power" (not available on CD) and instantly made printed disc with jewel box art. I think this tremendously fun. I recognize this will all go away soon, but some of us are doing the opposite of what you suggest.

Yes I should not be dismissive. It does sound really fun. I guess what I really meant to say is: it's interesting how everyone has their own perceived fun-vs-convenience tradeoff for old technology. To me, even though curating/maintaining the collection of players and CDs sounds fun, dealing with scratched CDs and a skipping discman does not seem worth it. But I also like to buy hard copies of math/CS textbooks even though they are ridiculously expensive, heavy, and don't have ctrl+F.

>physical music is enjoying a resurgence

CDs are the children of floppy disks, not vinyl. They are digital (it's in the name). Vinyl is actually physical beyond bits and bytes.

> They are digital (it's in the name)

CD stands for "compact disc"

What are you implying by "Vinyl is actually physical beyond bits and bytes"?

Are you trying to say "vinyl is analog"? Because that's true.

Are you trying to say "the analog vinyl is superior to a CD prepared from the same mix"? That's demonstrably incorrect.

Are you trying to say "the vinyl mixes are often superior to the CD mixes"? That's often true.

Maybe they are not implying anything?

Everything in the universe is either mass or energy (and mass is energy), so making claims about vinyl being "physical" doesn't need to be said. I assume they had a point to make, and I'm hoping that they will make it more clearly.

Sorry. I was just saying that a CD is a digital representation of sound. If you had a CD with a document on it you wouldn't call it a physical copy.

However on a vinyl record the sound is physically represented in the grooves. It is as near to a physical representation of sound as you could get. Like a physical document is on paper.

I have no bias. I listen happily to streaming.

A CD is a physical medium for digital music. I think the distinction between a CD and a zip file is pretty clear.

CDs are recorded in a spiral (like a record) not in concentric rings (like a floppy).

Perhaps some consumers are discovering that they really don't like it when an artist they have been listening to on their subscription streaming service suddenly disappears because of a label dispute.

I assume those people would purchase a digital file of the song with a lot less friction than buying and ripping a CD.

Probably. But owning the CD allows you to re-rip it at some future date if you decide that storage is cheaper than it was 20 years ago and you'd really prefer to have some of your favorite albums in lossless FLAC format than lossy MP3. Or at the very least, maybe a higher quality mp3 than the 128kbps that was the norm during the Napster era.

You're entirely discounting the cost of physical storage. It's a non-zero and non-trivial cost to store and move all those CDs. If you've ripped them with high quality lossless settings you will not get better sound later reripping as FLAC. So unless you only ever ripped them with the old unregistered l3enc (limited to 112kbps and a shitty encoder anyways) there's little reason to rerip them.

You may want to keep physical CDs for nostalgia or because you like the physical artifact but if you've ripped them in the past 15 or so years your lossless copy is likely transparent to lossless to the human ear.

I fear you've misunderstood me. I said going from LOSSY to Lossless, not lossless to lossless. Meaning even if your first rip was LAME-encoded VBR MP3 or OGG, you might decide you want to re-rip later as FLAC or APE.

And you misunderstood me, if you've got a good LAME rip you will not be able to distinguish it from a FLAC rip off the original CD. You'll be using several times the storage for no perceptible improvement. While disk storage is cheap the physical storage of those CDs is not nor is the time required to handle the CDs to rip.

I get what you’re saying, but no one is really arguing that physical storage doesn’t exist as an issue. That being said, CD’s have a pretty small footprint. You can fit several hundred - if not upwards of a thousand - jewel cases + CD’s in a typical book case. As far as hobbies go they’re pretty space-efficient!

Plus the whole point of a physical collection is to have it and to be able to hold it/admire it. Everything takes up space. It’s not purely about the utility of having the music available.

Go tell any music archive to destroy their physical CD’s if they’ve ripped them (or if they have the masters), if you want to see my point. It’s not just about the music onboard.

What I find is that unless you keep CDs in a very well monitored environment (right humidity and away from light, etc..) they aren't aging very reliably and sometimes they stop working completely.

Burned CD’s, sure. Industry-pressed CD’s? Nah. If you’re keeping them in an even remotely temperature/humidity controlled environment (and obviously they aren’t scratched to hell but even then they often play haha) there’s no reason they shouldn’t play fine today no matter the age.

Over the last 10 years people have been trained to stream digital files. I am curious if the digital sales of artists who disappeared from Spotify went up, or if they saw an increase in physical media sales, or neither. I suspect a small increase in physical sales as people realize the fragility of digital distribution but data may say otherwise.

Is that information available? Back when physical sales were the only sales it was easy to track the 'popularity' of any given song or album, with streaming and digital sales those numbers seem to be fire-walled by the various streaming services.

Plenty platforms will sell you a CD and give you the download immediately.

That's what got me to finally set up a little script to tag, convert, and store music files in apple music. I was getting annoyed not only at entire albums or artists being unavailable on apple music, but also sometimes individual songs, which just seems insane to me.

Now I drag some flac files into a folder, the script converts them to ALAC, tags them from discogs, and adds them to my apple music library, which auto syncs to icloud so I can listen to them on my phone whenever I want. No more "unavailable". I also back the files up to a second location because one time like 10 years ago I think I heard a rumor of itunes randomly deleting files that were added manually without being purchased through the store. Don't know if that's a real thing or not but storage is so cheap it doesn't really matter.

it's often cheaper to buy a cd and rip to flac than to buy a hi-res download. Plus you also then have the cd to play on cd player!

Only if your time is free.

I'm ashamed to admit that I will never be compensated for the four minutes it took to rip the hour long CD that I will listen to for the next few decades of my life.

Instead, I invoiced HN for the time it took me to browse this forum and post this comment, and I strongly urge HN to require registered users to include personal payment information so we can bill each other for our time spent reading and replying to each other.

Life is a tax on my time, and I will not be cheated.

I do it in my free time

I don't understand how people can post comments like this as support for streaming.

Not being able to watch/listen anything when Internet uplink or service is down. Low quality and artifacts due to congestion. Relearning menus when on-high decides to change the UI. Password resets and locked accounts. Suffering through ads. Waiting for device firmware to update. Having to buy a new device because your old one isn't supported. Dealing with HDCP issues. Having to buy a new display because your old one isn't supported.

That seems like a lot more wasted time and frustration at inconvenient times, rather than having to do a bit of work on your own schedule to rip a CD or start a torrent. I'd say the main difference is that with the top-down solution you don't have to think too hard - just do whatever the top-down system instructs you do, no matter what it costs you.

i’ve been buying cds for a while, mostly just new albums of a few of my favorite artists. the only thing that worries me is that most new cars don’t have cd players anymore.

I also bought some cassettes a few years ago that are pretty valuable now, but absolutely nowhere to play them since my old car was my only cassette player.

My car has a factory CD player still. Yay!

It's located INSIDE the glove box. WTH?

That's a seriously inconvenient location. Where do you keep your driving gloves?

My older car has a 6 CD magazine, very fancy for the time. When my kid noticed the "eject" button on the dashboard, she thought that the car had ejector seats!

I am no fan of Spotify and similar services, I keep buying CDs and ripping them into MP3.

Yeah the current generation sees right through software as a tracking service.

You think teens wary of Spotify tracking what they listen to caused a 15% increase in sales?

Teens see the result of the internet on their mental health, and decide to forego it yes. Even lawmakers clued up

Wait, what? You are joking, right? What percentage of teens have foregone the Internet?

I have two teenage children and they both pay out of their own pockets for Spotify

I really hope to see that and maybe a movement emerging in that direction. Sadly teenagers are one good target for commercial music because they could be easily manipulated with tropes that no longer work for other age groups (but they did when they were teenagers).

you got some sources to back that up?

My experience is that teens have poor mental health and have no idea the internet is causing it.

Polycarbonate is the new vinyl. Let the dynamic range wars reignite!

One reason that vinyl is doing better than CDs is because of dynamic range (loudness) wars. Vinyl is being marketed to more discerning customers, so it's being mastered with MORE dynamic range. By rights the CD should sound better, but it doesn't.

By about 20% if anyone's interested in the actual magnitude

Damn Millenials, ruining the digital music industry! /s

is this inflation? they don't mention sales volume increase just profit?

i had to look up "CD"

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