I just bought a new turntable today with USB, Can’t wait to start listening to my vinyl again. It’s been decades.
I never took to CDs. Look how worthless they got so fast. Whereas I’ve got LPs worth $100. Punk vinyl and ephemera for some reason are really valuable. My Beatles LPs are still "thing"s to me that I can’t part with, but I wonder if millennials will ever feel that way about a CD, or any medium, or even have an idea of why you needed a medium.
Think how much thought, emotional effort and commitment you have put into the mediums of music you wanted, intended to get, weren’t able to get etc. Without comparison to others, if I was born now I would have been without all of those experiences. And that was half of what I did!
CDs are just a medium. Obviously nobody cares (too much) about the physical disc; that’s the point of digital recording.
What should make a difference is the production quality. CD sound is not the ultimate pro highest-resolution format, but it can sound good, in the hands of an engineer who knows what he or she is doing. That is not always the case. For example, I wanted a copy of 13; the CD was poorly mastered, whereas the vinyl record sounded good, so that is what I got, not because LP records are intrinsically higher-fidelity or anything like that.
Note that if your music comes over streaming, but you really need to burn a CD or DVD for some reason, they still sell blank recordable ones.
LPs are only “worth” $100 for the same reason a mint 1971 Hemi Barracuda convertible is “worth” 3 million dollars. the Boomers who wanted them when they were kids have money now and can afford to blow it.
Punk is from a vinyl era and those things are taking some kind of cultural meaning as seen in the interest in them, by boomers, (in relation to other kinds of vinyl recordings of their time, for which there is much less interest.) I was just pointing out the outsized interest I’ve seen in those artifacts and I wonder what the artifacts of the future are.
Here in Korea, it’s getting harder and harder to find stores that sell physical CDs and DVDs. It’s a much different game than 8 years ago. Here’s why that’s a problem: I’ve just begun to notice that a lot of albums I bought through iTunes have tracks missing. Some (“Wind Beneath my Wings” from Bette Midler’s It’s the Girls) I don’t give a crap about. Others (The Roches’ “Hammond Song,” from both** The Roches** and one of those Oxford American compilations) were probably deleted by Clean My Mac. Anyway, think twice about ditching your old discs en masse; you never know what you’ll wish you could still dupe onto your computer.
As other posters to this thread have mentioned, sales of CDs have absolutely tanked over the past 15 years (see these charts from the RIAA). Many (probably most) younger music fans see no problem with not owning physical copies of their music, and many have no access to a CD player.
Undoubtedly so. They also analyze how rapidly merchandise in different sections of the store sells; big-ticket items don’t turn over as quickly, but justify their floor space in the store with their high profit.
I’ll guarantee you that the CD section of a Best Buy sees comparatively lower profit-per-square-foot of space, as well as being shopped by fewer visitors, than most other departments in the store, because more and more consumers simply don’t buy CDs any more (or, if they do, they buy them online). It was likely a very easy decision for Best Buy.
Partial albums on iTunes are labeled as such. The tracks of a partial album can only be bought as singles, so you probably never bought the missing tracks in the first place.
FWIW, neither iTunes, Google Play nor Amazon include Wind Beneath My Wings on It’s the Girls, nor is it on any of the 11 versions of It’s the Girls listed at www.discogs.com. I know you don’t give a crap, but it looks like it was never on that album in the first place.
Either way, while it’s probably a good idea to hold onto old CDs, it’s also fairly safe to buy digital tracks because you can always redownload accidentally deleted purchases like Hammond Song.
I’ve been carrying around a Best Buy gift card in my wallet for some time now. I recently wandered into a store - hadn’t been in one in at least a couple of years - and found *nothing *I wanted/needed; I left empty handed.
I did notice how small the CD section had shrunk and wondered to myself when they would eliminate it altogether.
mmm
I haven’t been inside a Best Buy in a long time*. Recent major appliance purchases have been from Lowe’s (Giant Eagle sells Lowe’s gift cards and the purchase gives you gas points. We buy a stack of $100 gift cards on our way to buy an appliance). Phones, computers, TVs, etc I buy from Amazon or possibly Sam’s Club.
*The last time I was in a Best Buy was when I needed an oddball computer cable. They did not have it, so I ordered it online.
In what format? If it’s some proprietary or DRM-encumbered format that doesn’t allow you to, say, play them with a media player of your choice, move the tracks between the devices you own, or lend/sell/give the tracks away, then CDs are not obsolete.
If there’s an artificial limit on the number of tracks you can move to a device, then CDs are not obsolete.
If there’s an artificial limit on which devices you can use, then CDs are not obsolete.
CDs may be inconvenient in that you need to manually rip, encode, and distribute the tracks to your devices, but they do preserve your freedom to listen to your music how, when, and where you want to. Don’t get me wrong—I also prefer getting my music online in digital format. But I refuse to use services that don’t give me at least the same freedoms I have with CDs. (I find Bandcamp is good for this; the music there tends to be sold directly by the artist, and is provided in free, even lossless formats such as FLAC.)
I haven’t listened to a CD in probably 10 years. I buy my music in digital formats (non-DRM mp3s I can play on any device, so I can have multiple copies). The last time I was in a Best Buy was to pick up a sim card for my phone and I went directly to the pickup desk for that.
Case in point: when I bought my (used) car five years ago, I went to Fry’s and bought a new stereo for it. All I cared about was that I could plug a flash drive in. I wanted to get a stereo without a CD player, but for some strange reason that type of stereo was more expensive than those with CD players.
So, my car has a stereo with a CD player that has never once been used in five years.
If by “endless dough” you mean $9.99/month, then you may have some kind of point. It would cost me enormously more than that if I bought all of my listening in CDs. That doesn’t even include the tons of stuff I play once to see if I might like it.
I went there recently to buy an Ethernet switch. They didn’t have one, so I got it at Walmart instead. It really seems strange to me that Walmart has electronics that Best Buy doesn’t. And I don’t think Ethernet is outdated, obscure or “oddball” technology or anything.
Heck, these days it’s probably more about being able to connect via Bluetooth or at least an Aux cable. Although the USB port is still a desirable feature (both for playing music through or for device charging)