The CD’s Rise in the Music Business: An Oral History
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Turns out, CDs are pretty durable. Even though my attic gets crazy hot in the Texas summer, none of the CDs (some 35 years old!) failed. Next thing I needed was to buy a CD player (again). I was somewhat surprised by how few companies are still making players, but I got an Onkyo unit that I'm happy with.
Now I have a pretty great sounding setup and I have little booklets to examine while I listen. Browsing the collection for something to play is fun.
I'm back to buying CDs and it's actually a great time to be buying this stuff. New and used is cheaper than ever (lots of stuff is the same price it was 30 years ago) and so much stuff is available online and off. I love going to Waterloo Records in Austin and flipping through the stacks to buy a couple titles from my list and probably another title or too because I liked the artwork on the case or the guy at the counter recommended something.
I also bought a small bookshelf system for my desk because popping in a disk then having some music for maybe an hour then having to get up to change it works well for me. If I'm streaming from Spotify I end up working for too long, often unproductively. Taking a break every hour or so and shifting my attention (take the dog outside, make some tea, change the CD, then back to work!) seems to help my problem solving skills. I look at it as a healthier version of a cigarette break.
The only problem I've had with my disks is that a couple of them seem to not be balanced perfectly and they make a bit of mechanical noise in the player as they spin.
This is unlike blowing an NES cartridge, which actually had a detrimental effect due to blowing spit on the pin contacts and oxidizing them.. [3] I do remember Babbages/KB Toys/etc did actually sell NES/SNES/Gameboy cartridge cleaning kits though [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%9...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=clean+cd+rom+toothpaste
[3] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/nes-cartridge-blowing-air-ur...
[4] https://www.thevintagegamers.com/2012/11/vintage-gaming-clea...
I've had even better results with this three-step stuff that's actually meant for plastics, with most scratches not needing more than step 2: https://novuspolish.com/
That works great for bottom-side scratches, but sadly it's not usually possible to repair any damage done to the label-side of a Compact Disc due to proximity between the label and the reflective data layer underneath. It's really common for well-intentioned people to remove discs from a drive and (in absence of the case) set them upside-down to "protect" them not realizing it's the worst possible thing they could do. All-over-print labels add an extra margin of protection over discs that leave the label's negative space as bare disc silver: https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/cd-crosssection.gif
That's the other thing I realized - I love finding great albums of music rather than individual tracks. Concept albums are especially great.
And then one day I moved overseas and one of my CD boxes got lost in the mail.
And then, some other day, the bottom box of my CD boxes that were temporarily stored in a basement got flooded and destroyed.
Now I don't give a shit about CDs. I have unapologetically pirated the music from CDs that I used to own but got lost or destroyed, and for all my new music I bought it online and back up the digital files to the cloud. I'll never lose music I paid for again.
CDs are legacy media for a reason. All other legacy digital media will follow it, except for the small group of people who fetishize it for nostalgic reasons. There is a tiny argument that still exists for buying legacy analog media - the "it sounds warmer" argument. But honestly, you could just pipe your digital files through a filter and get the same effect, so, meh.
It's a world 7B+ strong, there's room for everyone. Even those who like to appreciate holding a music medium in their hands.
It's ok. You can move on.
There are more arguments than that. For some people, it's all about collecting and community. For others, they love the large format artwork. I'm not playing analog media, but I still like the physical interaction part. Many of us also like that, for some artists, buying a record is a way of supporting them. Then there's the fact that playing a record or CD doesn't require an internet connection and that means nobody is tracking the records you play today in order to better sell things to you tomorrow. There's also the gear part - it's an excuse to put together a great audio setup. For those of us who still buy physical media, I don't think the "it sounds warmer" argument is terribly common.
All of this stuff is fun. There's not a lot of joy in tapping "dylan blonde" into a search box and pressing play.
Nowadays I most only buy music on Bandcamp, and if I want to throw more cash to the artist there are other venues like Patreon or even just a Paypal account where I can do that. Paying for physical media or merch is of course another indirect way to funnel money to the creators, but if getting money to the creator is the main goal, there are often more efficient ways to do it too.
Not wanting to object fundamentally, as enough of my recent music purchases have indeed been digital downloads, however I'm still glad that at least for now CDs still exist and provide an alternative option:
- Some digital releases have been somewhat mangled in a very minor (the mouse squeak at the end of 3:47 EST is missing) or somewhat more major (several live albums/albums with live content of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series are missing the pre-gap material between the individual tracks) fashion. Okay, in the former case I've simply grabbed the squeak off a Youtube recording and edited it back on, but in the latter case just getting the CDs is the most sensible option.
- Cover art beyond the front cover and liner notes are mostly missing. Okay, sometimes they're forgettable anyway and after all the music is the main thing, but sometimes it's still a bit of a shame to miss out on those things. In principle at least Apple/iTunes does have facilities for including a PDF booklet together with an album download, but in practice at least for the kind of music I'm interested in, encountering such a thing seems to be the exception rather than the norm. The Bootleg Series again is being a culprit here – personally I find the liner notes definitively interesting to read, but online you're getting none of that. (On the other hand kudos to whoever made sure to include the booklet for the Traveling Wilburys Collection on iTunes!)
- Occasionally (not often, but definitively sometimes), the (new, not used!) CD turns out to cost noticeably less than the digital download.
- Remasters are par for the course (though in some circles even those can provoke heated discussions about whether a certain remaster is really better or not), but with remixes the difference is more immediately noticeable even to someone like me. Sometimes remixes are being offered as an alternative version, and you can still buy the original version if you prefer that, but sometimes the remixed version is replacing the original albums. Online that means that subsequently piracy is your only choice of still obtaining the older mixes, whereas with CDs you've still got a chance on the second hand market.
- Where live albums are mastered with a pre-gap between tracks, it turns out I sometimes (e.g. especially when there's some stage banter related to the upcoming song) prefer the pre-gap to be tacked onto the beginning of the next track instead of the end of the previous track as seems to be the usual standard. When ripping a CD myself I can easily adjust that, when buying a download less so. (Having the pre-gap at the start of a track does have the trade-off that the music doesn't start playing immediately, but on the other hand during shuffling it means that any preceding stage banter remains together with the track it belongs to, and personally I find the latter more important.)
Though I guess you can classify some of those objections as somewhat "hobbyist", too… :-)
I get that there are differences between what is legally available as the "best" remastered version of the album and the original version as it was released on record or tape or CD back in the day. But if your goal is not to give money to the artist and instead just find the best version of the song, you can usually better do that through piracy. The artist doesn't get any money either way - whether you bought a second-hand album from your local record store or downloaded a version online - who cares?
The one case where original media is interesting is if nobody made a version available online via piracy. And that's a sad state of affairs. As I mentioned earlier - I have lost dozens of CDs that never got released online, because they were small runs on indie labels or just independently released back in the day before the internet was a thing... Well now every time one of those sorts of CDs gets destroyed in a flood, it's one less copy of that song in the wider world. If anything, people should be uploading the fuck out of all they got, because otherwise all those great indie artists of the 90s (never mind the decades prior) will disappear into obscurity and what's the point of their music then?
Digitize everything is my opinion. Digitize it, upload it, share it. It's the best way to preserve the culture of past years/decades/eras.
Are you not aware of this crazy idea of actually storing digital audio files on a local storage medium, and playing them from there?
Since you're in the Austin area you might also want to check out Astro Records in Bastrop (30 minutes east). Very friendly and knowledgeable owner. Vinyl is the bulk of his inventory, but he also has a decent collection of CDs for sale.
The attached bookstore is pretty nice too if you like a certain type of book.
Adding this to my list. I've definitely ramped back up into the CD game myself.
I think I have spent $2k between la-la-land and Discogs this year already...
The biggest catalyst for this was Spotify removing content from their platform, presumably due to licensing issues. I don't like the idea that someone could memoryhole a piece of art that I had previously experienced.
A capability I liked that never went public was removing the error correction portion of sectors of data, transforming the 2K per sector into something slighter bigger 2356 bytes. Anything to get more bits off the disk back when it was limited to 128K per second. This was interesting because it allowed the developer to selectively say "this data can survive some data loss, and it's fine".
Another feature that never went public was "real time files" - multiple files interleaved sector by sector on the disc such that at a given time after a "real time file play" has begun you're guaranteed the data from the interleaved files are in memory, with per-file-sector callbacks if requested. (And if you wanted, the different files could have full error correction or not, 2K or bigger sectors selectively.) Never used for, but would have been great for loading game levels where multiple files land all over memory, but streamed all at once.
If I'm remembering right — has been some years.
Now, CD-XA unfortunately didn't take off... or did it? It was initially only supported by the failed Philips CD-i, but it turns out that a few years later Sony would reuse most of the technology for their upcoming game console. That's right, the PlayStation 1 made heavy use of XA and of its audio capabilities; the system's native video format was in fact a custom container format interleaved with XA ADPCM audio, and many games took advantage of the ability to interleave multiple audio tracks as well.
Video CDs also used 2324-byte Mode 2 sectors without ECC by the way, but I'd say their popularity was far below that of the PlayStation 1.
> On their third album, 1999’s Guerrilla, Super Furry Animals slipped one of their best songs, ‘Citizens Band’, into the pre-gap, that is, the neverzone before the album proper. Autechre pulled the same trick, in the same year, on EP7, hiding an eerie six minutes of intricate sound design which seems years ahead of its time, and then three minutes of silence, before ‘Rpeg’. They did it again, including the untitled track in the pre-gap to the fourth disc of EPs 1991-2002.
> Pre-gap tracks are a CD-specific phenomenon, paralleled only by DVD Easter Eggs, or hidden levels in a computer game. On the one hand, they’re only possible digitally, on the other, they seem to be an attempt to add some mystique to a circle of plastic. They are a defense of the physical medium because it is impossible to rip them to your computer. Finding them meas having a bit of extra knowledge about the artist, uncovering a hidden layer of depth others hadn’t noticed.
> Earlier, experimental artists took even greater strides into the CDs unique sequencing possibilities. Otomo Yoshihide’s 1993 release The Night Before the Death of the Sampling Virus is a fluctuating voice collage designed specifically for the medium. Its 77 tracks are tiny, most less than a minute, few going above two. The listener is encouraged to hit the random option on their hi-fi. “To play this release in random mode is to allow the SAMPLING VIRUS to regenerate, to mutate with near infinite possibilities.”
> Eccles, UK-based experimentalists Stock, Hausen, & Walkman encouraged listeners to do something similar with their debut album, Giving Up. From the release notes: “The Original CD had 60 ID points deliberately inserted in the middle of a lot of the tracks so that random play would cut the music up and present the listener with a new and unique 'remix' version if desired.” There were things you could do with a CD, that you definitely couldn’t do with a tape or LP.
1. https://thequietus.com/articles/32116-cd-40th-anniversary
Which luckily isn't actually true. They might or might not have been problematic with certain software and/or disc drives, but in principle – especially these days – they can normally be ripped without any difficulties.
(Nevertheless, Columbia/Sony still managed to lose all the pre-gap material from a number of live Bob Dylan Bootleg Series albums while uploading them for digital distribution, so all streaming services and download stores currently only have faulty versions of those albums. Maybe they really ripped the physical discs in order to upload them and somehow chose the wrong settings?
As silly as that theory sounds, in another coincidence on iTunes, none of volumes 1 to 10 – the actual releases affected are 4, 6, 7 and 10 – inclusive bears the "Apple Digital Master" logo, so Columbia/Sony actually uploading mangled CD rips remains a distinct possibility…)
But I like going to second-hand stores and buying CDs for a dollar: if you like the first song, it's like getting a non-curated Spotify experience that can expand your tastes.
Also, the presence in the store means 1) someone though it was interesting enough to buy it in the first place 2) someone thought it was interesting enough to try to resell it, so it's non-curated in the sense it's not specially tailored to your specific tastes, but still good enough to have been deemed worth selling twice.
Sadly, I more or less stopped doing this the second that I got a Spotify account.
I do that, but also for genres: it's a bit like buying games on Stream: I build up a stack, then I consume it piece by piece until I can start appreciating its unique contributions compared to other genres.
Then once I find an artist I really like, I dig deeper into their earlier work and their feats.
Right now, after exploring Reggaeton then french Pop-Urbaine, I'm digging deeper into meditative music and 2000s EDM (well, separately, not both at the same time :)
> give it a listen in my car for a few days
Oh yes, the car trick is great! Old cars have CD players! And that's how I've become a fan of Pop-Urbaine: buying CDs during travel.
> The CD would only be a buck or two, so I figured that if I like even two of the songs then I'm ahead of the iTunes price
It's not just a question of price: for me, it's more about curation.
Besides the entire genres, there are some artists I would never have discovered without this "one weird trick".
Then once digging deeper, even for well-known artists, there are some obscure songs that I end up really liking!
But I’m a bit surprised how the inventory has shrunk over the last 5 or 6 years. Cmon people, unload your old CDs at thrift stores! :)
The name for this is the Loudness War, and with the exception of titles like Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, we are losing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
And here's an audio sample demonstrating what it sounds like:
Since then, we’ve had multiple attempts to replace CDs with higher-fidelity, DRM-damaged replacements like the SACD, DVD Audio, SDMI/DataPlay, and even Blu-ray Pure Audio formats - and later with all iTunes purchases before 2009 despite the CD existing. All failures. Digital music is DRM-free and not going back, thanks to the CD.
Also the sony rootkit
And madonna's "what are you doing"
I don’t remember this one. I tried to find it but Google is littered with CD recommendations to “break in” speakers because “break” is a synonym for “destroy”.
Do you happen to recall which CD this was?
The most destructive was XCP around the time of MediaMax, which used randomness in what tones they produced, which would damage speakers unpredictably.
"MediaMax introduces a large amount of random jitter, making the disc sound like it has been badly scratched or damaged; XCP replaces the audio with random noise."
Key2Audio was the first tech that comes to mind that did this, originally employed on Celinne Dione's "A New Day Has Come" album. It would cause all types of issues, but one being random audio blips that sounded like when you turn on a bitcrusher and press the overdrive, it's easy to see how this can damage a speaker.
https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2017/cmsc818O/papers/less...
https://www.xboxaddict.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-10494....
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2127-copy-protected-d...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/dion-disc-co...
TIL. Thanks!
That sounds like the home audio equivalent of the "poisoned/drug laced Halloween candy" story, which is to say "something that did not happen."
The final stage in digital-to-analog conversion is a reconstruction filter that removes the non-sonic contents of the output. There's nothing you can put on a CD that will destroy your loudspeakers.
You can also get it on PC, for example, by paying $15 for the “Dolby Access” app and playing an Atmos track.
The music you get under these deals is never yours, but the price is so low that it's a reasonable trade for many people, myself included -- even though I was for decades (I'm 52) a serious collector of CD and eventually vinyl.
I honestly am not 100% sure why I like this so much more. Spotify can do the same thing. You can "heart" albums and then they show up in your "library", but there's just something that makes that so clunky to deal with. When you open the app, you get radio stations and podcasts. I love opening an app and just seeing album covers. I dunno, maybe I'm crazy.
I feel the same way, something fun about knowing my digital rips are the exact same edition as the physical object I can go pick up off my shelf instead of an album being some nebulous thing that might have extra tracks or a different mix depending on how I listen to it. I always type out my discs' catalog number in the Comments tag of my rip for that reason.
Also the predictability that my music will never disappear due to losing some distribution license (learned this lesson with Rdio), that I can never be out of network range, and that it is incapable of spying on me because it is incapable of using the network at all. I love the combo of old would-otherwise-be-ewaste Android phone + Musicolet + yuge SD card + my own CD rips for music in my car: https://i.imgur.com/HSSouVT.jpg
Fast forward to a time when I actually had the resources to purchase my own audio hardware, including a nice low-THD amplifier and decent quality floor-standing speakers in a 5.1 configuration.
Enter disappointment when I realized that while it was possible for my amplifier to split the input signal across all 5 channels plus the LFE channel, the music source was only encoded in 2-channel stereo. Then I went down the SACD, DVDA, etc route for a bit, only to end somewhat frustrated that it required hoop-jumping to get good quality multi-channel source material.
I haven't endeavored in this realm for some time now. Mostly, while coding I just use my Schiit Modi with some KRKs in my office for 2-channel stereo listening via a mix of Spotify and local FLAC files. However, I do wonder if anyone here has any recommendations for finding multi-channel digital music that I could enjoy in my home theater where a true decent quality multi-channel setup exists?
Or do you mean digital in the sense of available to download?
Movie studios must hate reselling. Buy a movie on iTunes? $15, strong DRM, never able to be resold. Buy it at Goodwill? $3, weak DRM, no new profit whatsoever. Also the iTunes version can be edited in the future to remove anything inconvenient, but the disc can’t.
It's still the Pong days for these things, and no one knows if their realistic usage will involve on-device compute resources for such a deployment.
I really do enjoy the physical nature of the media. I love the mechanics of the various machines that are needed for playback (I've been collecting personal CD and minidisc players for the past couple years). The accompanying printed material is truly delightful. My reel to reel is quite finicky and yet threading the tape leads around the various post and across the magnetic heads is magical. Every time.
I think my biggest objection to digital streaming services is this: My music disappears unless I keep up with the monthly payment. These companies control what is available. Robert Mitchums's attempt at the native music of Trinidad in his album "Calypso is Like so..." is utterly compelling regardless of the cultural appropriation. This music brings me so much joy. The vintage CD's are out there by the bundle for pennies. What a treasure trove.
I just purchased Lorde's "Solar Power" album. Its not available on CD. I took the wave files and created my own CD complete with printed front and back liner notes and art work. My Epson allows printing on CD discs and the final package looks amazing (And I enjoyed designing it myself).
Don't get me started on the absolute joy of minidisc. Just about every vinyl album I treasure has been captured by this medium so I can listen on the road.
I also enjoy streaming music, but it should be noted that I spend a lot of time offline. My work often requires that I'm out in wild places frequently (I'm off to film California condors on Monday). I might be a dinosaur. But perhaps not, most of my fellow collectors are in their 20's in my region.
Reel to reel is the most expensive format per second. It sounds lovely, but cannot match the quality of a Cd or streaming. Yet somehow, a 40 pound reel to reel behemoth with analog VU meters, crunchy switches and smooth turning knobs is just a joy to operate.
I miss tapes the most. They were so physical (being able to rewind using a pencil)! Also the ease of recording music from the radio, CDs never really matched that.
I have asked some musicians bluntly: What's the best way to buy your music, so that you get the biggest cut of the money? The answer is always: "Buy the CD right here."
The CD's go home, get ripped onto a network drive, and converted to MP3's that fit onto a flash drive that gets plugged into the car stereo.
Could not afford one but later splurged out on a Sony Discman - my first CD was Kate Bush "Hounds Of Love".