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There Is No CD Revival

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131–140 of 201 posts

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#131
post #62
post #11

This take seems very slanted towards new CD sales. I listen to a lot of underground music (namely black metal, hip-hop, and the like), and not only are CD's selling out regularly, so are cassettes. Once they've sold out, they hit Discogs and Ebay at severe markups that people are happy to pay. Several CD's that I've bought in the past few years have compounded many times over in value, as the supply can be very limit…

> Once they've sold out, they hit Discogs and Ebay at severe markups that people are happy to pay. No one is happy to pay a scalper.

I'm not happy paying scalpers, but I WILL pay a Discogs merchant to sell me specific region-locked media (for example, Japan-only releases which often feature special remasters, or often bonus tracks and extra media). The cost of buying from them is often the same or slightly above paying through the real site (plus translation headaches), and cost of a reshipper.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#132
post #117
post #2

Many times, buying the CD and ripping it to FLAC* is the only way to legally acquire* music for use with your computer. * It must be lossless and high quality. * It must work offline.

Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one? At that bitrate, the AAC file is lossy in the sense that you can't recreate a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the original, but most humans shouldn't hear any difference. A decent proxy to know that this is true is that at those bitrates, a FLAC file is often smaller than the AAC one. Yes, this makes you wonder why you'd want to use an lossy f…

The advantage of storing in FLAC though is that if you do want to encode to a more lossy format later you are not going to make the file worse than if you were to originally go from say .wav to mp3. Or if you wanted to manipulate the file later for use in a movie or something. Given that tons of players do FLAC these days and storage is relatively cheap I don't really see any advantage to using AAC.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#133
post #45

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry. However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any ti…

I ditched all 400+ CDs and 300+ DVDs (and some 50 LPs). They just took up space, and never got used. I've just recently paired down my book collection to 20 from 250. I just don't need all this physical stuff that I rarely use.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#134
post #45

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry. However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any ti…

I had ~1100 CDs in 2000. Now I have close to 0. I don't even own a device I could play a CD in nor rip it. None of my 4 PCs (3 Macs, one Gaming Windows Box) have a CD (nor DVD nor Bluray) player. Instead I have about 9000 mp3 files. I find streaming services frustrating because their recommendation algorithm suck. I tried playing "Swing" and it gave me "Volare" by Dean Martin. (that's not Swing), I pick Prince Radio…

If you can organize and manage 9k mp3 files could you not just as easily setup your own playlists on spotify?

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everybody did the same amount of listening the two schemes would be the same. Since they don't, your proposed scheme gives an outsize vote to people who listen less. The current scheme gives a bigger vote to those who listen more. Spend more time than average listening and your preferred bands will get more money from the royalty pool than you put in.

That math is incorrect. Imagine a simplified world with 100 listeners. They are all average listeners and listen to 10 songs per day, for a total of 1000 plays per day. 99 are pop fans and listen entirely to top 20. 1 is an outlier and listens entirely to jazz. Royalty payments are $10/mo per user. ie every month there's $1,000 to be split between artists. Under Spotify's current scheme, top 20 artists receive ($1,00…

>> top 20 artists receive ($1,000 * (999/1000)) = $999 dollars

This is where your math seems wrong, how come there are 999 plays of pop songs from 99 fans? should be 990, right?

However, if the pop fans listen to 10 songs per day, and jazz fan only listens to 1 or 2, then yes, some of jazz fan's money would go to pop artits.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#136
post #23
post #20

I moved house with 3000 CDs once. I bought an iPod the month after and sold them all. Eventually this turned into Apple Music. I hope there isn’t a CD revival because the cost, logistics, transport and storage for the things was abhorrent. There are literally only 5 tracks from my entire collection that weren’t on Apple Music in the end and more than one member of my family can listen to the same CD at the same time.…

My strategy against this is listening to music on Spotify first, but if I really like an album or an artist and keep returning to them, I'll buy the CD.

Same here. Or more likely I just buy digital FLAC downloads

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#137
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My strategy against this is listening to music on Spotify first, but if I really like an album or an artist and keep returning to them, I'll buy the CD.

That's a reasonable strategy. I do the same thing with movies. I collect 4k UHD discs for my favorite movies, rent movies I want to see in the highest quality, and stream the rest.

I'm waiting for 8K to become more mainstream before I do that

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#138
post #45

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry. However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any ti…

There are a few good providers of lossless audio files, so you can get still get a lossless, DRM free version of your music to own forever without having to have a printed CD. The two that I frequent are: - bandcamp.com - mostly indie, but I've actually purchased a few more "mainstream" artists from here in the last couple years. - hdtracks.com - have a wide selection, but tend to be pretty pricey.

> - bandcamp.com - mostly indie, but I've actually purchased a few more "mainstream" artists from here in the last couple years

Sadly bandcamp has been bought by Epic, so it's unlikely to live long :(

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#139
post #45

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry. However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any ti…

I do something similar. When I'm actively listening to an album I'll put on a record, if I'm driving or putting on some background music while I do chores or work, I use apple music. I know records are bulky and finicky but I like the ritual, the bigger album art, and little things like reading the liner notes and dead wax markings. I'm not really an audiophile or anything, my setup is pretty middle of the road, I just really like the ritual and the closes I've come digitally was discovering new music in the soulseek chatrooms and organizing my mp3 collection and foobar skin.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#140
post #11

This take seems very slanted towards new CD sales. I listen to a lot of underground music (namely black metal, hip-hop, and the like), and not only are CD's selling out regularly, so are cassettes. Once they've sold out, they hit Discogs and Ebay at severe markups that people are happy to pay. Several CD's that I've bought in the past few years have compounded many times over in value, as the supply can be very limit…

> It's also not uncommon for me to go hunting for CD's that originally sold in the 80/90/00's, so as to get around "re-masters" that undo the lo-fi sound underground music fans enjoy so much. I doubt my copy of The Cramps' first compilation* is going to reflect in last year's CD sales.

I'm into pop and rock, but it's not uncommon for me to go hunting for CD's that originally sold before 1996 or so to get around "re-masters" that compress the life out of the music and undo the hi-fi sound that I enjoy so much.

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