15 ms·

There Is No CD Revival

112 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

dusted 5y ago
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.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  FYI not this format shifting was legal in the UK but was made illegal again (a few years back), seemingly at the request of media companies. Programmes like iTunes appear to be unlawful as they enable and encourage this infringement. UK copyright law isn't fit for it's alleged purpose.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > UK copyright law isn't fit for it's alleged purpose. This is true of copyright law everywhere.
- oofabz 5y ago
  That used to be true, but these days there are many sites selling legal FLAC downloads, like HDtracks, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Bleep.
  - bigiain 5y ago
    While that's true, those don't come close too having the range of music I'd like to own.
    - spacexsucks 5y ago
      With streaming, you own nothing
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        Chances are he isn't streaming it either if he can't find legal downloads.
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    Only having experience with HDtracks, they don't really have much. Sure they have the most popular stuff for the most part but I often find that albums are missing for an artist or entire artists are missing. Not sure if it is a geographic restriction or if its like that everywhere.
    - Semaphor 5y ago
      > Sure they have the most popular stuff That sounds like you need to try bandcamp, because they are missing the most popular stuff ;)
      - Cockbrand 5y ago
        Bandcamp really is a treasure trove for finding releases of established and new independent artists. It seems that their business model is quite fair towards artists as well. It also seems that their acquisition by Epic games hasn't negatively affected them so far. [Edit]: And they offer all downloads I've encountered so far in several lossy and lossless formats, including FLAC and WAV
        Semaphor 5y ago
        Pretty much every metal band I discover, nowadays, is on bandcamp. I’m at 75 albums* and growing :) I really hope Epic won’t ruin it. *: Mostly albums, some few are EPs or single tracks
        slothtrop 5y ago
        The acquisition is still quite fresh. I'm not looking forward to the policy changes once they do roll out.
- CrlNvl 5y ago
  Qobuz allows you to download High Fidelity music without any DRM
  - omnicognate 5y ago
    Yeah, there are lots of places selling DRM free, lossless music. However, between the lot of them they fall far short of comprehensive coverage and I frequently have to buy and rip CDs to get the music I want.
    - iggldiggl 5y ago
      And occasionally you run into weird issues like where all online offerings are missing the pre-gap material from the CD, i.e. the bits between the tracks that are shown with a negative timestamp and which are only played when you play the disc straight through without hopping between different tracks. Plus liner notes are often omitted online, and occasionally that, too, is a little bit of a shame, even if the main thing is of course the music itself.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Apple Music and iTunes are lossless, high quality (often higher than a CD as they have multi-channel masters) and work offline, for example.
  - z3c0 5y ago
    Do you retain ownership of the files upon cancelling your membership? If not, I wouldn't consider that "acquiring" so much as "borrowing".
    - zekica 5y ago
      You do. They have some kind of a watermark or metadata specific to your copy but don't have DRM.
      - ubercow13 5y ago
        Only for iTunes ones, not Apple Music.
      - z3c0 5y ago
        Nice! It's about time. Too bad they spent almost two decades doing the opposite, or I'd still have my account.
        pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
        iTunes music has been DRM free since 2009 (with some exceptions, probably).
        z3c0 5y ago
        Was that retroactively applied? Because my music from pre-2009 remained DRM'd, but maybe I just needed to re-download them. On top of that, it was all AAC, and I regularly had to convert the files to be usable anywhere but Apple's products. It became such a chore, that I gave up on the Apple music ecosystem entirely, and I don't really have any regrets about it.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Making a COPY from the CD to your computer is not legal us unless you have a license that allows you to do so.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    That depends very much on where you live. It is legal in Canada and most of Europe.
  - rob74 5y ago
    IANAL, but ripping a CD that you own and then using that digital music yourself is legal - providing the songs to someone else (who hasn't paid for the album) isn't.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > IANAL, but ripping a CD that you own and then using that digital music yourself is legal - providing the songs to someone else (who hasn't paid for the album) isn't. I am also not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that providing files you ripped to someone else ISN'T legal, even if they"ve paid for the album: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.com,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.....
      - needle0 5y ago
        Of relevance: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
        webmaven 5y ago
        Oh my. Fruit of the Poisoned Tree gone amok. Thanks for sharing that.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      It depends. If the CD has DRM, bypassing that DRM for a personal copy is a crime. If there's no DRM, I believe creating a personal copy is acceptable.
- danjc 5y ago
  Came here to make this observation. Is this what the ethical DJ would do? Adjacent question: what’s the legally correct way to license music for public use (e.g. DJ set)
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    You'd probably buy the music as a download file from an official store (like Beatport). In fact, a lot of good electronic stuff on there never saw a physical release, so ripping CDs is not even an option. Licensing probably depends on your country. In Germany, you need to register with GEMA and pay a fee depending on the size of your audience.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      >Licensing probably depends on your country. Yep. In the US, it’s the venue that is responsible for the license. Technically, even playing a radio station in a public space requires that license, which is why most stores that have background music pay for Muzak or some similar service which bundles all the licensing costs along with the music stream itself. The license covers not just pre-recorded music but live music. I remember reading an account of a cover band which switched to playing originals because their venue didn’t have the licensing for them to play covers.
- andjd 5y ago
  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 format instead of the lossless one if you have the choice ... but the point is that you'll probably have just as good an experience with a high-bitrate lossy-encoded file.
  - dmonitor 5y ago
    That's also dependent on your headphones. I might have shitty earbuds today, but in the future when I might have 3D "puts the sound directly into your brain" phones, I might tell the difference
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > That's also dependent on your headphones. It's not.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    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.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > storage is relatively cheap Server storage is relatively cheap, mobile storage is a different kettle of fish, and even with a lot of storage, if you have a large music collection it's much easier to blow way past with FLAC as it's at least an order of magnitude larger than even high-quality lossy tracks. I can't put my entire collection on my phone even after having converted it to a lossy format, putting the lossless masters is plain not an option. And since conversion is easy to do, and to automate, really the only reason to put lossless tracks on a device other than the storage server where they live is sheer laziness.
theshrike79 5y ago
If I'm buying physical media in 2022 that I actually need to find from a shelf and put into a player it either needs to be of higher quality than the digital option or have something else going for it. Thus, it's LP's for music in my case. The cover art alone is worth it. For movies and TV, I have the cream of the crop on physical Bluray or DVD, the ones that I want to see even if there is a license pissing contest between streaming services and rights holders going on. The rest I just either stream or buy digitally. 3.99€ for a digital movie is worth it for me so I don't have to drive to my storage unit and dig through 20 boxes of old DVDs to find my copy of Stardust to show my kids =)
- rob74 5y ago
  Ok, I guess the "something else going for it" differs from person to person. I grew up with LPs too, but I don't have a lot of nostalgia for them. All the ceremony of carefully taking a record out of its sleeve, checking for dust, putting it on the record player etc. is too much hassle for me. A CD I can just pop in the good old stereo I have sitting on my desk and listen to it, or rip it and copy the files to my phone. With LPs, you're stuck with the format. I guess the music industry is happy with that, but for the consumer it's not the best deal. Ok, you get a digital download code with some LPs, but I'm not sure how common that is...
  - bengale 5y ago
    > All the ceremony of carefully taking a record out of its sleeve, checking for dust, putting it on the record player etc. is too much hassle for me. This is what I like about it really. It's quite a deliberate focussed thing. For most of my music listening when I just want noise in the background I stream it because it doesn't matter. But sometimes when you just want to sit down and enjoy something special, the ceremony seems to add something.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    There are only about a few dozen records in the world worthy of the ceremony to me, to be honest. They're the ones you can listen from start to beginning in order every time. The ones you never get bored of and if you do, you have a need to listen to them again pretty soon. The chance of me grabbing an LP off the shelf and listening to 6 Underground by the Sneaker Pimps from their Becoming X album is exactly is zero. It's a banger yes, but the rest of the album is decidedly not worthy of the ceremony.
Kaibeezy 5y ago
OP pointing out the author is Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500, Magic Hour, and Damon and Naomi.
- Kaibeezy 5y ago
  Here’s “Passing Words” by Magic Hour, 1995. https://magic-hour.bandcamp.com/track/passing-words https://magic-hour.bandcamp.com/track/passing-words
z3c0 5y ago
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 limited but the demand isn't diminishing. The spread on my collection per Discogs ranges from $800-$2500. That lower bound has been continuous, but I saw the upper bound increase by $1000 in just the past two years. 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 aware that this is a niche interest, but it's a growing niche. There are a few subreddits that I've followed in the past (/r/CDCollectors and /r/CDKvlt), and in my time there, I saw those groups grow considerably. There IS a CD Revival, if you look in the right place.
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  > This take seems very slanted towards new CD sales. Yeah, because the articles that it's commenting on are about the supposed "increase in sales" of CDs this past year. Which only includes releases in 2021.
- Tao332 5y ago
  > 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.
  - thisisjasononhn 5y ago
    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.
- 5y ago
Guthur 5y ago
And yet the author uses figures to also generate a false dichotomy. Just because a gap in income might be wider does not mean everyone is worse off, it is not a zero sum game. There is now far more music variety available than ever before, and I'm sure it's more and more difficult to stand out. What has probably been lost is some word of mouth for music, the algorithms have taken much of that over for better or worse.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > And yet the author uses figures to also generate a false dichotomy. Just because a gap in income might be wider does not mean everyone is worse off, it is not a zero sum game. It is, in fact, zero sum. Spotify puts the money for music streaming into a pot and payouts out proportionally to how much time a particular artists is listened to. Given there (a) a finite amount of money in the pot, and (b) a finite amount of time that people can listen to Spotify (per person, and cumulatively), it stands to reasons there's only so much 'pie' that can be sliced. Listening more to one artist means listening less to another, thus one artist gets paid more than another Add to this that Spotify is creating/contracting music itself, such that is is both distributor and "artist", thus paying money out of the pot to itself.[1] Further Spotify controls the recommendation system, so it can send people to its own music, thus increasing the money it pays itself. [1] https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/spotify-denies-creating-fake-artists-although-multiple-sources-claim-the-practice-is-real-1202492307/ https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/spotify-denies-creating-fa... The author of the linked HN article, Damon Krukowski, recently did an interesting interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots about streaming music services and basically how they screw over small time musicians: > Earlier this year, there was a growing movement among some musicians (lead by Neil Young) to remove music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. And it has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Damon Krukowsky, the former drummer of the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and one half of the duo Damon and Naomi. He gives us his perception of industry economics, and explains his frustration as an independent musician with how the service works. * https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6c58550a30 https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski
uuyi 5y ago
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. That’s a pretty big admin and versatility win.
- rob74 5y ago
  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.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    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.
    - Kaibeezy 5y ago
      I do that with books. I read mostly on my phone, but I'll search for a hardcover 1st edition of favorites and try to get them signed by the author. That's worked pretty well with Stephenson, less so with Dostoevsky.
    - Melatonic 5y ago
      I'm waiting for 8K to become more mainstream before I do that
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Same here. Or more likely I just buy digital FLAC downloads
mtts 5y ago
The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income Why? That ship has sailed. In 2022, as in 1922, 1822, 1722 etc musicians will have to earn their income by playing live.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > musicians will have to earn their income by playing live Yes!! This is how it's supposed to be. The music itself is not scarce, it's the artists who are scarce. Society doesn't need this copyright rent seeking system. If artists want to make money, they should need to actually perform.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I think the last recent time musicians had to play live often to get income was during the peak of file sharing networks. Now that everybody is willing to pay for services like spotify to listen to their music, live concerts are becoming rare again.
  - chha 5y ago
    Musicians need to play live now more than ever to make an income; the sale of physical records are going downwards and have been doing so for the past 20 years. [1] Unless you happen to be amongst the absolute minority of people having a hit single on your hand or a popular back catalogue, you can't expect to make a lot of money from online streams. Several sources [2][3] report that Spotify pays around 0.003 USD per stream on average. Supposedly your musics share of everything streamed in a given month will also impact the actual payout. [1] - https://gloriousnoise.com/2022/data-2021-total-music-sales-and-streams https://gloriousnoise.com/2022/data-2021-total-music-sales-a... [2] - https://subjekt.no/2020/08/09/som-musiker-er-det-nesten-umulig-a-tjene-penger-gjennom-spotify-og-det-hjelper-ikke-a-gi-ut-mer-og-oftere/ https://subjekt.no/2020/08/09/som-musiker-er-det-nesten-umul... (Norwegian) [3] - https://www.orpheusaudioacademy.com/spotify-pay/ https://www.orpheusaudioacademy.com/spotify-pay/
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  The thing with CDs today is that they are merchandise, as with cassettes or vinyl or whatever. You don't buy them to listen to them, but to have them. I think this understanding is crucially necessary for musicians hopping on this "trend". Like they could make action figures or mood rings or whatever. What the fans want are buying is a tangible thing, a keepsake. So first they need an actual fan-base that may be interested in a keepsake, and the keepsake should be worthwhile, feel luxurious. Like it doesn't need to actually be expensive, but it shouldn't feel cheap.
coldtea 5y ago
>I don’t think any of the writers or outlets publishing these headlines are out to mislead. But none of them seem to have consulted anyone actually trying to sell CDs, either Nobody even bothered to read the original source report, much less make sense of it, or even gave the article they wrote a minute's thought. They saw the story somewhere else (perhaps got it from a wire service too), and rewrote it just enough to appear as an original article. They could not care less about the content of the article, or what they were reporting. It's just another thing to post within a day to make the meagre salary they're paid, or to boost one's BS blog.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  You're being a little harsh, but essentially correct. I worked at a newspaper for about five years, even wrote a weekly column for a couple. Lemme tell you, coming up with something interesting to say every week is really hard. "CD sales are up a tick? Oh, something to write about, which incidentally is my job, thank god." That's it.
  - iamdbtoo 5y ago
    This is something that frustrates me about large news/content sites. So much of it reads like it was written because someone needed to write something and not because this particular thing needed to be said.
    - Crabber 5y ago
      I realized a while ago that a good 90%+ of news stories are about a) things that affect my life in 0 way whatsoever and b) things that I have absolutely no control over. I thought, if something fits these two criteria then what exactly is the point in me spending time reading about it? So I no longer read the news.
Jaruzel 5y ago
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 time soon. All my CDs (over 1,000 of popular/rock/metal and about 400 of classical, at the last count) are ripped in a lossless format, and on my file server, to be enjoyed in a modern way. I do dislike jewel cases, and all my CDs (and inlays etc.) have been re-homed into archival bags, which take up a lot less space. I think while CDs (and DVDs, and Blu-rays) are still being sold, they should 100% shift to carboard packaging instead of plastic. I know I'm showing my age, but there's just something enjoyably tangible about physical media, as opposed ephemeral files stored in a cloud.
- whoisthemachine 5y ago
  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.
  - cliffwarden 5y ago
    I was pleasantly surprised recently with Merge Records. I bought a few lps and they came with digital downloads of mp3 and flac!
    - prepend 5y ago
      I like this trend with LPs. You get a physical totem and lossless digital copies. I bought some Peter Gabriel records and they came with a code for downloading multiple formats including huge, lossless. And the site for one wasn’t working because it was too old and I had to email someone. But an actual human responded and send me a code to the new site. Not sure if that’s just for RealWorld or for all Geffen LPs. I think this is a good model where you get some limited release physical world thing and then the digital version to go along.
pjmlp 5y ago
Revival or not, I keep buying CDs from all artists I care about. I own a copy of the music, and can put it in any device I own capable of reproducing it.
throw0101a 5y ago
The author, Damon Krukowski, recently did an interesting interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots about streaming music services and basically how they screw over small time musicians: > Earlier this year, there was a growing movement among some musicians (lead by Neil Young) to remove music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. And it has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Damon Krukowsky, the former drummer of the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and one half of the duo Damon and Naomi. He gives us his perception of industry economics, and explains his frustration as an independent musician with how the service works. * https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6c58550a30 https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski
spacexsucks 5y ago
A CD is hand is worth more than a stream that expires every 3 days or so without internet
em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
Good article except for this part of the conclusion: "The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income" For centuries before recording, regular musicians made income without it. And even when regular musicians made money recording, only a few survived solely on recording. I think we need to dispell the presumption that musicians must make money recording.
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  > "For centuries before recording ..." Yeah but today there's no live music income without recorded music though. Try putting a tour together without anything released. Try telling people, "We only play live." The only time that works is if you're playing covers. Which works because the music is circulating in recorded format.
tonetheman 5y ago
I am actively looking to purchase on CD still and have gotten even more so as I have gotten older. Renting music from online services sucks. So I want to own the CD and I can rip and do what I please with it. This is especially true for musicians. I want to be able to slow the music down or manipulate it which cannot be done with online music. So for me CDs are a better choice and getting better.
softwarebeware 5y ago
There's two separate things: 1. The "music industry" which is a carefully controlled mafia of an elite few, yet which consumes as much oxygen as possible in popular media. 2. Every other musician and artist. The best thing you can do is go around the corner and hear a local band. Go to their merch table at the show and buy the cassette or vinyl they have for sale.
elbasti 5y ago
> And streaming is not returning enough to musicians for them to survive; it is only serving to increase income inequality in our industry. The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income - and that revival is not coming from silver discs. The fundamental problem is that streaming income is distributed as a percentage of total (worldwide) plays, instead of being normalized as a percentage of plays per listener. Let's say that Olivia Rodrigo accounts for 2% of all plays on Spotify this month. Even though I have never heard one of her songs, she's going to get 2% of whatever percentage of my subscription goes to royalties (75% I think, or $7.50). So even though I have never heard her music, she's getting my money. By the same logic, even if I spent 100% of my time play Obscure Band, they are getting basically nothing. Instead, Spotify should pay artists as a percent of plays per listener. So if 10 indie artists this month account for most of my streams, they would each get ~0.75 each. Which is starting to look reasonable.
- ectopod 5y ago
  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.
  - elbasti 5y ago
    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 ($1,000 * (999/1000)) = $999 dollars. Jazz artists get $1. Under my proposed scheme, top 20 artists would receive 99*10 = $990, while jazz artists would receive $10. In other words, multiplying the income of "smaller" artists by 10x. Artists shouldn't get money from people that don't listen to them.
    - 5y ago
ufmace 5y ago
Aside from CDs themselves, has anyone noticed a severe lack of CD players these days? I might be off-base, but as far as I can tell, basically no laptop computer and rather few desktops come with any type of optical media drives these days. Haven't shopped for a car in a while, but I don't think I've seen one with a CD player either. Most music seems to be consumed on phones and tablets, where it's basically impossible to have a CD drive. I would expect you can still buy standalone home theater-style CD players, but I bet the sales of them are pretty low these days. The only reason I have a optical media reader at all is that I homebuild my PC. I bought an optical drive for I think like $20 or something like a decade ago on my first build, and just kept the drive and case through multiple upgrades. If I did a new build from scratch tomorrow, I'm not sure I'd bother. My current drive, the door doesn't open half the time, and I haven't bothered to try and fix or replace it, since I basically never use it.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The baseline radio in many cars is an AM/FM with Bluetooth or Audio in. CD is usually still provided with the upgraded package, but many people don’t have stereos at all anymore - let alone one with a CD player.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  > Haven't shopped for a car in a while, but I don't think I've seen one with a CD player either. They're still somehow around (don't know for how long). A friend of mine bought a MY2020 BMW and the original owner specc'ed a CD player. My car also still has one (MY2013). I care about my physical CD collection but I don't care about actually putting them in a CD player: as long as I can rip them to FLAC, I'm happy. Virtually any el cheapo ($20 USD or so) desktop DVD reader/writer will work to rip CDs. And these are still selling everywhere.
  - antifa 5y ago
    > I care about my physical CD collection but I don't care about actually putting them in a CD player: Indeed, get into an accident or hit a rare bump and now your CD is scratched. Not sure if this would still happen in 2022, but at the least back in the day an entire music collection of original CDs was worth stealing in a car break in. Only put easily replacable copies in your car.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Purely anecdotal but I bought around 8 CDs this year. The first time buying any in many years. I just want to listen to an album and not fuck with playlists on my phone. I want to hear what message an artist has to actually say not just slap corporate approved pop hits on the way home. I don't want my listening to be a point in some dataset to be later sold.
donatj 5y ago
I was buying CDs to rip lossless right up until Apple Music added lossless. Now I am down to just very special releases/extremely loved albums I wouldn’t mind being my “car cd” when I don’t want to listen to the radio or fiddle with my phone The crazy part of my brain, every time I add a cloud album to my Apple Music library wants to set away $15 for when this all comes crashing down and I have to actually buy it.
pipeline_peak 5y ago
I think journalists are forgetting that vinyl has a distinct sound, also to millennials, they are simply cool as fuck. They come in giant sleeves you can hang in your wall, bookshelf. CDs are just burned digital data. Maybe someday they’ll gain a retro appeal, but for now they have this ugly recursive consumer status. They’re reminiscent of the dial up era where you had no choice but to compress to MP3 to fit on your 2gb SanDisc player. To me, CDs were always a burden. We’ve just been fortunate enough to have larger bandwidths and more storage to do away with them. I get the appeal of box art, photos, and lyric sheets, but who wants to put up with changing discs and physical conditions like scratches and finger prints? >They can’t take ‘em away from me! Same applies to local storage
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > vinyl has a distinct sound Aside from the cracks and pops, it's because it's mastered that way because of limitations of vinyl. But I agree that vinyl makes sense as the last physical medium because the playback technology is so simple and the covers make them large enough to be statement pieces.
- NoSorryCannot 5y ago
  And jewel cases were and are garbage.
  - pipeline_peak 5y ago
    Useless cracked cases, mechanically shrunk plastic wrap. It truly must've felt like the dead end of physical media.
taylodl 5y ago
I've been buying albums off of iTunes for 10 years now. I've verified I can playback the AAC file on a machine not having my Apple ID setup. Apple claims you "own" the music you purchase from iTunes and this test verifies the claim. I have all those files backed up. I typically buy an album every two weeks, so I've been buying 26 or so albums per year. I'm old-school - I still like to own my music. I used to have a large CD collection but now that's all been ripped and imported into my digital music library. I typically use my iPhone for playback. I've now taken to playing back through BT speakers at home, BT headphones while mowing, and my BT sound system in my car. It's highly convenient and I've been listening to more music than ever. I don't understand the infatuation with physical media, or analog for that matter, but if the medium helps you better connect to the music then that's cool. Different people enjoy music in different ways. I grew up with vinyl but I really enjoy going to my uncle's house and listening to his reel-to-reel tapes of classic 70's rock. I really wish those clamoring for analog skipped vinyl and created a resurgence in reel-to-reel. They sound better than anything. BUT - I can't really listen to a reel-to-reel while mowing the lawn, can I? But boy it'd be nice to have for a few special albums! But CD's? What's the point?
jmrm 5y ago
Have you ever thought that most brand new cars does not have any CD/DVD player to listen to music? But hey, all of them have USB connections and have Spotify. I think that this is a big deal because a lot of people only listen to music while driving.

112 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

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.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
FYI not this format shifting was legal in the UK but was made illegal again (a few years back), seemingly at the request of media companies. Programmes like iTunes appear to be unlawful as they enable and encourage this infringement. UK copyright law isn't fit for it's alleged purpose.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > UK copyright law isn't fit for it's alleged purpose. This is true of copyright law everywhere.
oofabz 5y ago
That used to be true, but these days there are many sites selling legal FLAC downloads, like HDtracks, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Bleep.
- bigiain 5y ago
  While that's true, those don't come close too having the range of music I'd like to own.
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    With streaming, you own nothing
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      Chances are he isn't streaming it either if he can't find legal downloads.
- _Algernon_ 5y ago
  Only having experience with HDtracks, they don't really have much. Sure they have the most popular stuff for the most part but I often find that albums are missing for an artist or entire artists are missing. Not sure if it is a geographic restriction or if its like that everywhere.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    > Sure they have the most popular stuff That sounds like you need to try bandcamp, because they are missing the most popular stuff ;)
    - Cockbrand 5y ago
      Bandcamp really is a treasure trove for finding releases of established and new independent artists. It seems that their business model is quite fair towards artists as well. It also seems that their acquisition by Epic games hasn't negatively affected them so far. [Edit]: And they offer all downloads I've encountered so far in several lossy and lossless formats, including FLAC and WAV
      - Semaphor 5y ago
        Pretty much every metal band I discover, nowadays, is on bandcamp. I’m at 75 albums* and growing :) I really hope Epic won’t ruin it. *: Mostly albums, some few are EPs or single tracks
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        The acquisition is still quite fresh. I'm not looking forward to the policy changes once they do roll out.
CrlNvl 5y ago
Qobuz allows you to download High Fidelity music without any DRM
- omnicognate 5y ago
  Yeah, there are lots of places selling DRM free, lossless music. However, between the lot of them they fall far short of comprehensive coverage and I frequently have to buy and rip CDs to get the music I want.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    And occasionally you run into weird issues like where all online offerings are missing the pre-gap material from the CD, i.e. the bits between the tracks that are shown with a negative timestamp and which are only played when you play the disc straight through without hopping between different tracks. Plus liner notes are often omitted online, and occasionally that, too, is a little bit of a shame, even if the main thing is of course the music itself.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Apple Music and iTunes are lossless, high quality (often higher than a CD as they have multi-channel masters) and work offline, for example.
- z3c0 5y ago
  Do you retain ownership of the files upon cancelling your membership? If not, I wouldn't consider that "acquiring" so much as "borrowing".
  - zekica 5y ago
    You do. They have some kind of a watermark or metadata specific to your copy but don't have DRM.
    - ubercow13 5y ago
      Only for iTunes ones, not Apple Music.
    - z3c0 5y ago
      Nice! It's about time. Too bad they spent almost two decades doing the opposite, or I'd still have my account.
      - pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
        iTunes music has been DRM free since 2009 (with some exceptions, probably).
        z3c0 5y ago
        Was that retroactively applied? Because my music from pre-2009 remained DRM'd, but maybe I just needed to re-download them. On top of that, it was all AAC, and I regularly had to convert the files to be usable anywhere but Apple's products. It became such a chore, that I gave up on the Apple music ecosystem entirely, and I don't really have any regrets about it.
charcircuit 5y ago
Making a COPY from the CD to your computer is not legal us unless you have a license that allows you to do so.
- brazzy 5y ago
  That depends very much on where you live. It is legal in Canada and most of Europe.
- rob74 5y ago
  IANAL, but ripping a CD that you own and then using that digital music yourself is legal - providing the songs to someone else (who hasn't paid for the album) isn't.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > IANAL, but ripping a CD that you own and then using that digital music yourself is legal - providing the songs to someone else (who hasn't paid for the album) isn't. I am also not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that providing files you ripped to someone else ISN'T legal, even if they"ve paid for the album: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.com,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.....
    - needle0 5y ago
      Of relevance: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
      - webmaven 5y ago
        Oh my. Fruit of the Poisoned Tree gone amok. Thanks for sharing that.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    It depends. If the CD has DRM, bypassing that DRM for a personal copy is a crime. If there's no DRM, I believe creating a personal copy is acceptable.
danjc 5y ago
Came here to make this observation. Is this what the ethical DJ would do? Adjacent question: what’s the legally correct way to license music for public use (e.g. DJ set)
- Sebb767 5y ago
  You'd probably buy the music as a download file from an official store (like Beatport). In fact, a lot of good electronic stuff on there never saw a physical release, so ripping CDs is not even an option. Licensing probably depends on your country. In Germany, you need to register with GEMA and pay a fee depending on the size of your audience.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    >Licensing probably depends on your country. Yep. In the US, it’s the venue that is responsible for the license. Technically, even playing a radio station in a public space requires that license, which is why most stores that have background music pay for Muzak or some similar service which bundles all the licensing costs along with the music stream itself. The license covers not just pre-recorded music but live music. I remember reading an account of a cover band which switched to playing originals because their venue didn’t have the licensing for them to play covers.
andjd 5y ago
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 format instead of the lossless one if you have the choice ... but the point is that you'll probably have just as good an experience with a high-bitrate lossy-encoded file.
- dmonitor 5y ago
  That's also dependent on your headphones. I might have shitty earbuds today, but in the future when I might have 3D "puts the sound directly into your brain" phones, I might tell the difference
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > That's also dependent on your headphones. It's not.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  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.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > storage is relatively cheap Server storage is relatively cheap, mobile storage is a different kettle of fish, and even with a lot of storage, if you have a large music collection it's much easier to blow way past with FLAC as it's at least an order of magnitude larger than even high-quality lossy tracks. I can't put my entire collection on my phone even after having converted it to a lossy format, putting the lossless masters is plain not an option. And since conversion is easy to do, and to automate, really the only reason to put lossless tracks on a device other than the storage server where they live is sheer laziness.

theshrike79 5y ago

If I'm buying physical media in 2022 that I actually need to find from a shelf and put into a player it either needs to be of higher quality than the digital option or have something else going for it. Thus, it's LP's for music in my case. The cover art alone is worth it. For movies and TV, I have the cream of the crop on physical Bluray or DVD, the ones that I want to see even if there is a license pissing contest between streaming services and rights holders going on. The rest I just either stream or buy digitally. 3.99€ for a digital movie is worth it for me so I don't have to drive to my storage unit and dig through 20 boxes of old DVDs to find my copy of Stardust to show my kids =)

rob74 5y ago
Ok, I guess the "something else going for it" differs from person to person. I grew up with LPs too, but I don't have a lot of nostalgia for them. All the ceremony of carefully taking a record out of its sleeve, checking for dust, putting it on the record player etc. is too much hassle for me. A CD I can just pop in the good old stereo I have sitting on my desk and listen to it, or rip it and copy the files to my phone. With LPs, you're stuck with the format. I guess the music industry is happy with that, but for the consumer it's not the best deal. Ok, you get a digital download code with some LPs, but I'm not sure how common that is...
- bengale 5y ago
  > All the ceremony of carefully taking a record out of its sleeve, checking for dust, putting it on the record player etc. is too much hassle for me. This is what I like about it really. It's quite a deliberate focussed thing. For most of my music listening when I just want noise in the background I stream it because it doesn't matter. But sometimes when you just want to sit down and enjoy something special, the ceremony seems to add something.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  There are only about a few dozen records in the world worthy of the ceremony to me, to be honest. They're the ones you can listen from start to beginning in order every time. The ones you never get bored of and if you do, you have a need to listen to them again pretty soon. The chance of me grabbing an LP off the shelf and listening to 6 Underground by the Sneaker Pimps from their Becoming X album is exactly is zero. It's a banger yes, but the rest of the album is decidedly not worthy of the ceremony.

Kaibeezy 5y ago

OP pointing out the author is Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500, Magic Hour, and Damon and Naomi.

Kaibeezy 5y ago
Here’s “Passing Words” by Magic Hour, 1995. https://magic-hour.bandcamp.com/track/passing-words https://magic-hour.bandcamp.com/track/passing-words

z3c0 5y ago

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 limited but the demand isn't diminishing. The spread on my collection per Discogs ranges from $800-$2500. That lower bound has been continuous, but I saw the upper bound increase by $1000 in just the past two years. 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 aware that this is a niche interest, but it's a growing niche. There are a few subreddits that I've followed in the past (/r/CDCollectors and /r/CDKvlt), and in my time there, I saw those groups grow considerably. There IS a CD Revival, if you look in the right place.

softwarebeware 5y ago
> This take seems very slanted towards new CD sales. Yeah, because the articles that it's commenting on are about the supposed "increase in sales" of CDs this past year. Which only includes releases in 2021.
Tao332 5y ago
> 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.
- thisisjasononhn 5y ago
  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.
5y ago

Guthur 5y ago

And yet the author uses figures to also generate a false dichotomy. Just because a gap in income might be wider does not mean everyone is worse off, it is not a zero sum game. There is now far more music variety available than ever before, and I'm sure it's more and more difficult to stand out. What has probably been lost is some word of mouth for music, the algorithms have taken much of that over for better or worse.

throw0101a 5y ago
> And yet the author uses figures to also generate a false dichotomy. Just because a gap in income might be wider does not mean everyone is worse off, it is not a zero sum game. It is, in fact, zero sum. Spotify puts the money for music streaming into a pot and payouts out proportionally to how much time a particular artists is listened to. Given there (a) a finite amount of money in the pot, and (b) a finite amount of time that people can listen to Spotify (per person, and cumulatively), it stands to reasons there's only so much 'pie' that can be sliced. Listening more to one artist means listening less to another, thus one artist gets paid more than another Add to this that Spotify is creating/contracting music itself, such that is is both distributor and "artist", thus paying money out of the pot to itself.[1] Further Spotify controls the recommendation system, so it can send people to its own music, thus increasing the money it pays itself. [1] https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/spotify-denies-creating-fake-artists-although-multiple-sources-claim-the-practice-is-real-1202492307/ https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/spotify-denies-creating-fa... The author of the linked HN article, Damon Krukowski, recently did an interesting interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots about streaming music services and basically how they screw over small time musicians: > Earlier this year, there was a growing movement among some musicians (lead by Neil Young) to remove music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. And it has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Damon Krukowsky, the former drummer of the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and one half of the duo Damon and Naomi. He gives us his perception of industry economics, and explains his frustration as an independent musician with how the service works. * https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6c58550a30 https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski

uuyi 5y ago

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. That’s a pretty big admin and versatility win.

rob74 5y ago
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.
- xeromal 5y ago
  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.
  - Kaibeezy 5y ago
    I do that with books. I read mostly on my phone, but I'll search for a hardcover 1st edition of favorites and try to get them signed by the author. That's worked pretty well with Stephenson, less so with Dostoevsky.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    I'm waiting for 8K to become more mainstream before I do that
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Same here. Or more likely I just buy digital FLAC downloads

mtts 5y ago

The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income Why? That ship has sailed. In 2022, as in 1922, 1822, 1722 etc musicians will have to earn their income by playing live.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> musicians will have to earn their income by playing live Yes!! This is how it's supposed to be. The music itself is not scarce, it's the artists who are scarce. Society doesn't need this copyright rent seeking system. If artists want to make money, they should need to actually perform.
marcodiego 5y ago
I think the last recent time musicians had to play live often to get income was during the peak of file sharing networks. Now that everybody is willing to pay for services like spotify to listen to their music, live concerts are becoming rare again.
- chha 5y ago
  Musicians need to play live now more than ever to make an income; the sale of physical records are going downwards and have been doing so for the past 20 years. [1] Unless you happen to be amongst the absolute minority of people having a hit single on your hand or a popular back catalogue, you can't expect to make a lot of money from online streams. Several sources [2][3] report that Spotify pays around 0.003 USD per stream on average. Supposedly your musics share of everything streamed in a given month will also impact the actual payout. [1] - https://gloriousnoise.com/2022/data-2021-total-music-sales-and-streams https://gloriousnoise.com/2022/data-2021-total-music-sales-a... [2] - https://subjekt.no/2020/08/09/som-musiker-er-det-nesten-umulig-a-tjene-penger-gjennom-spotify-og-det-hjelper-ikke-a-gi-ut-mer-og-oftere/ https://subjekt.no/2020/08/09/som-musiker-er-det-nesten-umul... (Norwegian) [3] - https://www.orpheusaudioacademy.com/spotify-pay/ https://www.orpheusaudioacademy.com/spotify-pay/
marginalia_nu 5y ago
The thing with CDs today is that they are merchandise, as with cassettes or vinyl or whatever. You don't buy them to listen to them, but to have them. I think this understanding is crucially necessary for musicians hopping on this "trend". Like they could make action figures or mood rings or whatever. What the fans want are buying is a tangible thing, a keepsake. So first they need an actual fan-base that may be interested in a keepsake, and the keepsake should be worthwhile, feel luxurious. Like it doesn't need to actually be expensive, but it shouldn't feel cheap.

coldtea 5y ago

>I don’t think any of the writers or outlets publishing these headlines are out to mislead. But none of them seem to have consulted anyone actually trying to sell CDs, either Nobody even bothered to read the original source report, much less make sense of it, or even gave the article they wrote a minute's thought. They saw the story somewhere else (perhaps got it from a wire service too), and rewrote it just enough to appear as an original article. They could not care less about the content of the article, or what they were reporting. It's just another thing to post within a day to make the meagre salary they're paid, or to boost one's BS blog.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago
You're being a little harsh, but essentially correct. I worked at a newspaper for about five years, even wrote a weekly column for a couple. Lemme tell you, coming up with something interesting to say every week is really hard. "CD sales are up a tick? Oh, something to write about, which incidentally is my job, thank god." That's it.
- iamdbtoo 5y ago
  This is something that frustrates me about large news/content sites. So much of it reads like it was written because someone needed to write something and not because this particular thing needed to be said.
  - Crabber 5y ago
    I realized a while ago that a good 90%+ of news stories are about a) things that affect my life in 0 way whatsoever and b) things that I have absolutely no control over. I thought, if something fits these two criteria then what exactly is the point in me spending time reading about it? So I no longer read the news.

Jaruzel 5y ago

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 time soon. All my CDs (over 1,000 of popular/rock/metal and about 400 of classical, at the last count) are ripped in a lossless format, and on my file server, to be enjoyed in a modern way. I do dislike jewel cases, and all my CDs (and inlays etc.) have been re-homed into archival bags, which take up a lot less space. I think while CDs (and DVDs, and Blu-rays) are still being sold, they should 100% shift to carboard packaging instead of plastic. I know I'm showing my age, but there's just something enjoyably tangible about physical media, as opposed ephemeral files stored in a cloud.

whoisthemachine 5y ago
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.
- cliffwarden 5y ago
  I was pleasantly surprised recently with Merge Records. I bought a few lps and they came with digital downloads of mp3 and flac!
  - prepend 5y ago
    I like this trend with LPs. You get a physical totem and lossless digital copies. I bought some Peter Gabriel records and they came with a code for downloading multiple formats including huge, lossless. And the site for one wasn’t working because it was too old and I had to email someone. But an actual human responded and send me a code to the new site. Not sure if that’s just for RealWorld or for all Geffen LPs. I think this is a good model where you get some limited release physical world thing and then the digital version to go along.

pjmlp 5y ago

Revival or not, I keep buying CDs from all artists I care about. I own a copy of the music, and can put it in any device I own capable of reproducing it.

throw0101a 5y ago

The author, Damon Krukowski, recently did an interesting interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots about streaming music services and basically how they screw over small time musicians: > Earlier this year, there was a growing movement among some musicians (lead by Neil Young) to remove music from Spotify as a protest against Joe Rogan. But frustration at the streaming music giant goes back a lot further than that. And it has to do with how royalties are paid, and the lack of transparency about how music gets discovered on the service. On this episode of Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with Damon Krukowsky, the former drummer of the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and one half of the duo Damon and Naomi. He gives us his perception of industry economics, and explains his frustration as an independent musician with how the service works. * https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6c58550a30 https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/ee1d1ad6-b109-11ec-b00b-0f6... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Krukowski

spacexsucks 5y ago

A CD is hand is worth more than a stream that expires every 3 days or so without internet

em3rgent0rdr 5y ago

Good article except for this part of the conclusion: "The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income" For centuries before recording, regular musicians made income without it. And even when regular musicians made money recording, only a few survived solely on recording. I think we need to dispell the presumption that musicians must make money recording.

softwarebeware 5y ago
> "For centuries before recording ..." Yeah but today there's no live music income without recorded music though. Try putting a tour together without anything released. Try telling people, "We only play live." The only time that works is if you're playing covers. Which works because the music is circulating in recorded format.

tonetheman 5y ago

I am actively looking to purchase on CD still and have gotten even more so as I have gotten older. Renting music from online services sucks. So I want to own the CD and I can rip and do what I please with it. This is especially true for musicians. I want to be able to slow the music down or manipulate it which cannot be done with online music. So for me CDs are a better choice and getting better.

softwarebeware 5y ago

There's two separate things: 1. The "music industry" which is a carefully controlled mafia of an elite few, yet which consumes as much oxygen as possible in popular media. 2. Every other musician and artist. The best thing you can do is go around the corner and hear a local band. Go to their merch table at the show and buy the cassette or vinyl they have for sale.

elbasti 5y ago

> And streaming is not returning enough to musicians for them to survive; it is only serving to increase income inequality in our industry. The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income - and that revival is not coming from silver discs. The fundamental problem is that streaming income is distributed as a percentage of total (worldwide) plays, instead of being normalized as a percentage of plays per listener. Let's say that Olivia Rodrigo accounts for 2% of all plays on Spotify this month. Even though I have never heard one of her songs, she's going to get 2% of whatever percentage of my subscription goes to royalties (75% I think, or $7.50). So even though I have never heard her music, she's getting my money. By the same logic, even if I spent 100% of my time play Obscure Band, they are getting basically nothing. Instead, Spotify should pay artists as a percent of plays per listener. So if 10 indie artists this month account for most of my streams, they would each get ~0.75 each. Which is starting to look reasonable.

ectopod 5y ago
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.
- elbasti 5y ago
  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 ($1,000 * (999/1000)) = $999 dollars. Jazz artists get $1. Under my proposed scheme, top 20 artists would receive 99*10 = $990, while jazz artists would receive $10. In other words, multiplying the income of "smaller" artists by 10x. Artists shouldn't get money from people that don't listen to them.
  - 5y ago

ufmace 5y ago

Aside from CDs themselves, has anyone noticed a severe lack of CD players these days? I might be off-base, but as far as I can tell, basically no laptop computer and rather few desktops come with any type of optical media drives these days. Haven't shopped for a car in a while, but I don't think I've seen one with a CD player either. Most music seems to be consumed on phones and tablets, where it's basically impossible to have a CD drive. I would expect you can still buy standalone home theater-style CD players, but I bet the sales of them are pretty low these days. The only reason I have a optical media reader at all is that I homebuild my PC. I bought an optical drive for I think like $20 or something like a decade ago on my first build, and just kept the drive and case through multiple upgrades. If I did a new build from scratch tomorrow, I'm not sure I'd bother. My current drive, the door doesn't open half the time, and I haven't bothered to try and fix or replace it, since I basically never use it.

bombcar 5y ago
The baseline radio in many cars is an AM/FM with Bluetooth or Audio in. CD is usually still provided with the upgraded package, but many people don’t have stereos at all anymore - let alone one with a CD player.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> Haven't shopped for a car in a while, but I don't think I've seen one with a CD player either. They're still somehow around (don't know for how long). A friend of mine bought a MY2020 BMW and the original owner specc'ed a CD player. My car also still has one (MY2013). I care about my physical CD collection but I don't care about actually putting them in a CD player: as long as I can rip them to FLAC, I'm happy. Virtually any el cheapo ($20 USD or so) desktop DVD reader/writer will work to rip CDs. And these are still selling everywhere.
- antifa 5y ago
  > I care about my physical CD collection but I don't care about actually putting them in a CD player: Indeed, get into an accident or hit a rare bump and now your CD is scratched. Not sure if this would still happen in 2022, but at the least back in the day an entire music collection of original CDs was worth stealing in a car break in. Only put easily replacable copies in your car.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

Purely anecdotal but I bought around 8 CDs this year. The first time buying any in many years. I just want to listen to an album and not fuck with playlists on my phone. I want to hear what message an artist has to actually say not just slap corporate approved pop hits on the way home. I don't want my listening to be a point in some dataset to be later sold.

donatj 5y ago

I was buying CDs to rip lossless right up until Apple Music added lossless. Now I am down to just very special releases/extremely loved albums I wouldn’t mind being my “car cd” when I don’t want to listen to the radio or fiddle with my phone The crazy part of my brain, every time I add a cloud album to my Apple Music library wants to set away $15 for when this all comes crashing down and I have to actually buy it.

pipeline_peak 5y ago

I think journalists are forgetting that vinyl has a distinct sound, also to millennials, they are simply cool as fuck. They come in giant sleeves you can hang in your wall, bookshelf. CDs are just burned digital data. Maybe someday they’ll gain a retro appeal, but for now they have this ugly recursive consumer status. They’re reminiscent of the dial up era where you had no choice but to compress to MP3 to fit on your 2gb SanDisc player. To me, CDs were always a burden. We’ve just been fortunate enough to have larger bandwidths and more storage to do away with them. I get the appeal of box art, photos, and lyric sheets, but who wants to put up with changing discs and physical conditions like scratches and finger prints? >They can’t take ‘em away from me! Same applies to local storage

dehrmann 5y ago
> vinyl has a distinct sound Aside from the cracks and pops, it's because it's mastered that way because of limitations of vinyl. But I agree that vinyl makes sense as the last physical medium because the playback technology is so simple and the covers make them large enough to be statement pieces.
NoSorryCannot 5y ago
And jewel cases were and are garbage.
- pipeline_peak 5y ago
  Useless cracked cases, mechanically shrunk plastic wrap. It truly must've felt like the dead end of physical media.

taylodl 5y ago

I've been buying albums off of iTunes for 10 years now. I've verified I can playback the AAC file on a machine not having my Apple ID setup. Apple claims you "own" the music you purchase from iTunes and this test verifies the claim. I have all those files backed up. I typically buy an album every two weeks, so I've been buying 26 or so albums per year. I'm old-school - I still like to own my music. I used to have a large CD collection but now that's all been ripped and imported into my digital music library. I typically use my iPhone for playback. I've now taken to playing back through BT speakers at home, BT headphones while mowing, and my BT sound system in my car. It's highly convenient and I've been listening to more music than ever. I don't understand the infatuation with physical media, or analog for that matter, but if the medium helps you better connect to the music then that's cool. Different people enjoy music in different ways. I grew up with vinyl but I really enjoy going to my uncle's house and listening to his reel-to-reel tapes of classic 70's rock. I really wish those clamoring for analog skipped vinyl and created a resurgence in reel-to-reel. They sound better than anything. BUT - I can't really listen to a reel-to-reel while mowing the lawn, can I? But boy it'd be nice to have for a few special albums! But CD's? What's the point?

jmrm 5y ago

Have you ever thought that most brand new cars does not have any CD/DVD player to listen to music? But hey, all of them have USB connections and have Spotify. I think that this is a big deal because a lot of people only listen to music while driving.