I just got a new car that has a USB port. It’s also used for connecting my iPhone with Car Play (there is a similar feature for Androids). I use it to make calls and to use the navigation off of the phone. USBs in cars will be around for a long time.
About the only device I have where I can play CDs nearby is my car. And I’ve never played a CD in my (current, bough two years ago) car. I’ve really surprised myself, as back when iTunes started (what was it, like 2002 or something? Looks it up OK, 2001, I guess) I thought there was no way in hell I was going to be buying albums online for the same price or more than a CD I could get at Best Buy, as it doesn’t even come with any of the physical goodies a CD comes with. Fast forward maybe half a decade and everything I own is digitally downloaded. I don’t remember the last time I bought a CD. And the only thing I have in the house that could even play a CD (or DVD, for that matter) is a 2007 laptop. My desktop and two other laptops don’t even have optical drives. (Though I do have an external optical drive reader/writer somewhere in the closet, should I ever need it.)
It’s amazing how quickly my media consumption has changed from physical to download/streaming-only formats. So I’m not at all surprised. (Though I am surprised Target apparently sells CDs. In all my years, I’ve never noticed it – must be a really small section of the store. I’ll check it out today when I go there.)
Do streaming services allow you to permanently download drm-free copies of the music, ones that you can keep even after you are no-longer a subscriber?
Oh sure, like I said it’s still desirable. But, in my old car with a USB, it was a big deal to have it. Now I use my USB (have a drive stuck in it) but I never use it for connecting to my phone and am listening to Google Music or Pandora (or Audible) via Bluetooth more often than I’m using the USB drive.
My sole experience with Android Drive (or whatever it’s called) was brief and frustrating so I can’t speak to that.
It seems that some do allow downloading with some limitations. Don’t know about drm-free though. I’m surprised a bit they allow downloading much at all. Otherwise, why not subscribe for a couple months and just download tens of thousands of songs? I certainly would not expect any streaming service (or moreso, the copyright holders of the music) to allow this without great compensation.
The main stumbling blocks I’ve seen to the shift from physical CDs to purely digital formats are 1)digital restriction management (which is fortunately dying out) and 2)liner notes (it shouldn’t be difficult to attach a PDF, and yet it seems that hardly anybody bothers).
The “smart” entertainment system in our car won’t let me attach an iPod via USB and control playback from the iPod – it insists on trying to collate the iPod library in its own tiny little electronic brain and conks out after a few minutes, and even if it succeeded the entertainment system interface is complete and total crap. Fortunately, Bluetooth accepts and plays whatever is selected from the iPod (after navigating the aforementioned crappy interface to make the Bluetooth connection each time).
Spotify allows you to download but it’s all encypted. You can only play the downloaded songs through the app. You can’t take those file and do anything else with them.
I just realized sitting here that I bought a car a couple months ago and I have no idea if it has a CD player or not. I’m leaning towards no, but it’s not even something I thought about.
What? This is a ridiculous assertion.
Just because Best Buy doesn’t sell CDs anymore doesn’t mean that CDs will be gone from the planet. No major retailers had sold vinyl in years and yet albums continued to be released on vinyl and now you can get them at Target.
And I disagree that streaming won’t help indie bands. A streamed file can be paid for once and reap the benefit of infinite plays. A case of printed CDs cost $X and you sell them for $X+Y and you make $Y profit, only if you sell the whole batch, minus whatever you gave away for free. Streams are also able to reach a worldwide audience, while CDs reach only as far as you can ship them. Nobody is getting rich off of selling CDs at shows and NOT having to get CDs made can be liberating for bands.
And technology’s not going to stop. Nobody’s going to be like “oh we only ever knew how to make CDs and sell them at shows, I guess we’ll just never record any music now.” There will be tech to pay for and download music at the merch table, or buy albums on USB. There will be the ability to buy exclusive tracks with your show tickets. There’s probably already the ability to hear a song at a show, run Shazam, and buy the song on the spot.
Music has gone from sheet music to wax to vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD and now to digital and people are still making money as musicians. People are still forming indie bands and playing clubs. A change in format is not going to kill ANYONE.
And, to my original point - bands will continue to make CDs.
Note that the format one uses to acquire music need not be the format used to play the music.
I don’t play physical CDs very often anymore, but I do still acquire new music in CD form (both new and used); I just immediately rip the CDs and play the MP3s. (Hence, a computer with an optical drive is very much a must.)
And if I had a reason to do so, I could download music and burn it to a physical CD to listen to.
Yeah, if they allowed permanent downloading, they wouldn’t be “streaming services.” There are sites that allow you to buy music in electronic form; if you could download it to keep permanently, how would this be different from buying it?
I’ve been buying most of everything, including music, online since the 1990s. I will notice this about as much as that time my local mall Sam Goody closed down.
especially since historically, bands signed to a label didn’t make jack s**t on album sales.
Yeah, I checked today, and it’s one side of one small aisle in the store. Weirdly enough, I saw a vinyl LP on sale! It was a “special edition” for the new Justin Timberlake record. I know vinyl has experienced somewhat of a resurgence in popularity since about the early 2000s (or perhaps even earlier), but this is the first time I remember seeing vinyl at a department store since … I dunno, the 80s? Maybe early 90s?
I guess it depends on what kind of people, but I’ve bought more stuff online by downloading from Bandcamp or iTunes or whatnot than I ever have in buying CDs at concerts I’ve attended.
Once again, you can have custom USB drives made for around $2 a pop for 512MB ones (large enough for an album; could probably even go 256MB) or even cheaper based on quantity. Play it in your car on the drive home, upload it to your preferred music cloud account (without the hassle of ripping). It’s not as though your physical media options are CDs or nothing.
Maybe I’m just an old fogey, but I can’t stand the constant degradation of sound quality. Throughout history, music reproduction has continually improved. CDs offered near-perfect reproduction.
And then along came Mp3s. And Beats headphones. And Alexa. Has everyone’s hearing went to shit in the last generation? I guess maybe no one cares about quality reproduction if they’re running their music through a table top speaker or their computer speaker.
Plus vinyl making a comeback. Can’t anyone hear the pops and clicks? I know not everyone has a quality turntable. A decent cartridge alone costs more than any new consumer turntable I see for sale. I used to have a B&O turntable that cost more in 1980 dollars than anything available now, and it still wasn’t perfect. Is Discwasher still available at least? 
I hate to buy downloadable music because it’s all mp3. At least iTunes has ALC, which at least comes close to distortion free. We should be allowed to download uncompressed songs if we choose.
MP3s are winning over CDs based on cost, flexibility/ubiquity and the ability to purchase single tracks. I’d guess that as we turn into an all-digital society, there’ll be more pressure to provide better fidelity just because you need some reason for people to buy from you and not the other guy.
Plus I believe the streams are at a higher bit rate. I know my stuff on Google Music sounds better when streamed into my car than it does when the downloaded MP3 comes up on the USB stick. But, yeah, for commuter listening, the MP3s are just fine.
The stuff I download on Bandcamp is available in lossless formats. Perfsonally, I’m fine with variable rate MP3s or 256k MP3s (although, to be honest, once I get to 192k, I struggle to tell any difference.)
file size and convenience won out. Plus, advancements in compression mean for the vast majority of people there is no practical loss in quality from mp3 or AAC compression. These things are extensively double-blind tested. Rule of thumb for audio- if a difference can be heard, it can be measured. But a difference which can be measured cannot necessarily be heard.
vinyl is “coming back” just because some people are on a vintage kick. I’ve been of two minds on it; I see the point of keeping a turntable around to listen to albums produced back in the day when LPs were the standard of the day. i.e. all of the recording, mixing, and mastering was done with vinyl as the target medium.
new recordings on vinyl? mostly balderdash.
honestly, I work in audio and I’ve done a number of ABX tests with compressed and “uncompressed” digital tracks. The best I could consistently pick out on certain types of music was a bit less in the high frequencies; IIRC lossy codecs low-pass the audio at 16 kHz. but for the most part, the speakers I’m using the vast majority of the time can’t reproduce anything above that anyway, especially not with as off-axis as I am from them. And for the most part, modern pop/rock/etc. music doesn’t have anything in the signal up that high anyway.
I still order CDs occasionally, mostly because it’s the same price as buying the music digitally and, for the music I like, liner notes are often half the fun. Maybe the day will come when that’s a thing of the past. Or not. Hey, vinyl seems to be making a comeback!
I see it as a trendy, hipster thing among younger people, as well. And, while vinyl sales are certainly far bigger than they were a couple of years ago (when it was essentially a dead format), it’s still a small niche in the absolute (take a look back at the RIAA charts I posted earlier).
My niece got married last fall – she’s 25, her husband is 30. When they were growing up, vinyl was something that their parents had. But, for their wedding reception, they decided that they wanted a DJ who played vinyl.
I suspect that, for all the reasons why vinyl wasn’t a perfect medium in the first place, as well as the lack of portability compared to streaming (or MP3s), its resurgence is very likely more of a fad than a long-term shift back to vinyl for most listeners.
If all you are going to do is listen to the music, there is nothing wrong with MP3 (and the format supports up to 48 kHz sampling rate, better than CD, same as a DAT). A properly produced .mp3, let’s say simply using the -V 0 preset, which is what I would recommend, does not have any low-pass filter applied. That only kicks in at lower-quality levels (-V1 and worse).
This all assumes you are starting from a source that sounds good, which is not necessarily the case. If the master is bad, neither the CD nor the MP3 will sound good.