The RIAA Armageddon has begun

of course then they invented the CD boondoggle

which ended up completely fucking them so, hey it all worked out!

Marketing: "Hey! We can charge DOUBLE for this new format. It's DIGITAL, so it's better!"

Technology: "What about copying CDs? A digital media can theoretically be digitally copied pretty quickly..."

Marketing: "What part of CHARGE DOUBLE was unclear to you, pinhead?"

Technology: "Pretty quickly. That's all I'm saying."

Marketing: "Copy SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY MEGABYTES? Whatever a megabyte is, that's big, right? Dude, my pee cee only uses floppies!"

Technology: "I'm going to lunch now."

Marketing: "In your FACE! CHARGE DOUBLE! WOOOOOOO!" /fistpump

basically

I didn't add the five years later of: "Marketing: HALP ME RIAA! YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE!" Thought it was overkill.

Can't copy a vinyl. They should have stuck to something you couldn't put in your computer.

the cd biz started long before your average american family had a pc

well the vinyl/home taping thing had them freaked, but there was no way to do that QUICKLY, which was the real reason it didn't hurt their sales too much. digital copying magnified the scale of the problem exponentially.

xp

i was looking at early 80s Billboards and every other article was about a special tax on blank cassettes or whatever.

And anyone who didn't see PCs in every house coming wasn't looking.

yeah well that's like 98% of the american population in the 1980s

the problem isn't that the record industry decided to go digital, the problem is that music can be digitalized

even if they had a top team of futurists being like "no dudes, just don't make CDs" it would just add one not-so-complicated step to the bootlegging process

Does anyone have any vintage record catalogs? I want to see the prices for music in the 80's. I sort of remember CDs being a big price gouge compared to vinyl.

Cheap blank CDs accelerated the process over here, I think. I remember mentioning in a zine in the mid/late 90s what I was paying for a spindle of blanks, and a friend in Ireland was very tempted to have me buy him one and ship it over there.

Hey frogbs Morrison thinks downloading is pretty much just like the shoplifting he did as a kid. You'd better get over there and set him straight.

i don't think he would steal a car

Oh yeah, albums went from $8.99 vinyl to $15.99 CD just like that -- really put a cramp in my style.

Does anyone have any vintage record catalogs? I want to see the prices for music in the 80's. I sort of remember CDs being a big price gouge compared to vinl

http://cdn100.iofferphoto.com/img/item/199/643/608/rolling-stone-magazine-tom-petty-348-1981-4a063.JPG

i was looking at early 80s Billboards and every other article was about a special tax on blank cassettes or whatever.

i'm not sure why this didn't happen in the late 90's early 00's with CD burners and blank discs - IIRC Canada tried something like that and it seemed to work okay. I mean blank discs were always pretty cheap (though the burners used to be insanely pricey)

I remember in 1990 cassettes being as low as $5 or $6.99 in most retail outlets and CD's at $10.99

discs can store multiple media

cassettes can only store sound

xp

I'm a fetishist for chronology, especially other people's, so I'd like to know when most of you stopped buying tapes and switched exclusively to CD's. I bought my last cassingle in 1999 and burned my first CD in early 2000. Keep in mind: when a friend burned a Bob Marley album for another in early '99 I had no idea what "burned" meant or how he got this technology.

I think you guys are ignoring the fact that CDs were seen as being an improvement on a number of scores: no surface noise, more durable, portable but higher fidelity than cassette, able to be used in portable/car eqipment, easy shipping to the track you wanted, programmable & repeat functions

I mean I'm love vinyl but lets not ignore facts...at first, it's very possible, in the very early days, that production costs of a new optical disc technology would have been higher than vinyl or cassettes

You're acting like this was some kind of out and out scam to charge more for music

People myself included thought CDs were amazing

Burning CDs was prohibitively expensive for me until after 2000 or so

xp

no surface noise
okay sure, if you didn't have a high-quality dubbing setup or whatever.

more durable
no

portable but higher fidelity than cassette

I... guess?

able to be used in portable/car eqipment

cassettes do this

easy shipping to the track you wanted, programmable & repeat functions

okay yeah those were HUGE

Tapes used to store digits, but would be a pretty horrible way to store digitized sound, if you even had access to a digitizer at the time. (First one I saw was in 1988 or 89 on a Mac. MacRecorder, if memory serves.)

And sure, the sound quality of CDs was highly touted back in the day. Portability too, to some degree.

Forgot all about the shufflability. IIRC, some artists didn't like that because the user could rearrange track orders or *gasp* skip tracks. Nonlinear listening introduced to a big audience.

I'm a fetishist for chronology, especially other people's, so I'd like to know when most of you stopped buying tapes and switched exclusively to CD's.

I kept buying cassettes until I got my first iPod in 2004 or so. I was always more into portability and Discmans were far harder to fit in my pocket than Walkmans. Of course, after 2001 or so I was mostly buying used tapes, since they stopped putting a lot of things on cassette.

i hoard sealed high bias cassettes like crazy. always on the lookout. still my duplication medium of chance. i have never burned a cd but i wouldn't mind if someone burned them all.

Bought my first CD in 1986 (lol Songs from Liquid Days) but they were so freaking expensive! I didn't really start accumulating them until 1992-1993, when I all but quit reading comics and had more money to spend on them. There was an intermediate time in the late 80s when I wasn't buying much music at all -- didn't want to buy vinyl because it seemed like the format was dying, wasn't whole hog invested in CDs yet.

Bought Michael Penn's March on CD in early '90 -- a move that infuriated Mom. "A 15-year-old boy on your allowance has no reason to buy something this expensive!"

Eric Harvey aka marathonpacks sez:

Seriously *shocked* that no one's pointed out yet that David Lowery's understanding of music copyright/economics is factually incorrect.

Asked for details, sez more will be forthcoming.

I imagine the guys who did the friends theme song never had to work another day in their life

I think that song had a zillion co-writers though - one of whom ended up being part of The Matrix production group. I remember that R.E.M. and Natalie Merchant turned the song down.

I'm a fetishist for chronology, especially other people's, so I'd like to know when most of you stopped buying tapes and switched exclusively to CD's. I bought my last cassingle in 1999 and burned my first CD in early 2000. Keep in mind: when a friend burned a Bob Marley album for another in early '99 I had no idea what "burned" meant or how he got this technology.

Stopped buying LPs and went to CDs in 1987. Stopped buying CDs and went all-download a couple years ago.

i was looking at early 80s Billboards and every other article was about a special tax on blank cassettes or whatever.

Now in place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

LPs to cassettes in '84 (i should say, my parents started buying me cassettes in '84)
cassettes to CDs in '90
began acquiring LPs again in '93
the internet opened up music awhile ago and

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/webminutes.jpg

Also in the news recently: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120601/07161319164/germany-increases-you-are-all-pirates-tax-solid-state-media-2000.shtml

This truly is the medium of the King of Kings.

morrison def seems like he'd be a cooler dad than lowery

I'm starting to believe that a $100 piracy tax on all computers and mobile phones is worthy enough just so Lowery, Emily from NPR, Lefsetz, etc. etc. will stop writing opinion pieces.

I'm a fetishist for chronology, especially other people's, so I'd like to know when most of you stopped buying tapes and switched exclusively to CD's. I bought my last cassingle in 1999 and burned my first CD in early 2000. Keep in mind: when a friend burned a Bob Marley album for another in early '99 I had no idea what "burned" meant or how he got this technology.

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 7:51 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark

i drove a car with a tape deck and no CD player until 2005, so up until maybe a couple years before that i bought tapes occasionally, and all through that time and for a bit after i very frequently bought blank cassettes and made personalized mixtapes.

guys this debate is just obscuring the core issue, which is that the government should be paying for everybody's food, shelter, and healthcare.

I mean I'm love vinyl but lets not ignore facts...at first, it's very possible, in the very early days, that production costs of a new optical disc technology would have been higher than vinyl or cassettes

― wack nerd zinging in the dead of night (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 4:52 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

CDs were absolutely more expensive to make in the early 80s than were vinyl and cassette, mostly due to the lack of CD manufacturers at the time. But as the production costs became much cheaper (sometime in the early 90s) the CDs got more expensive; that and the decision to stop selling cd singles in the late 90s only sped up their inevitable demise.

xpost -- Don't be silly. I want YOU to pay for it. (I am simple.)

I never did have a prerecorded cassettes phase. I think I bought one or two, and both of those were $1.99 cutout bin items. Mixtapes and taping borrowed albums, yeah, loads of those.

Pretty much vinyl from birth on through the late eighties. I had a very small amount of cassettes as gifts, then I got my first CD player in 1988 after our family got on at the end of 1987 and I was off to the races, didn't buy another vinyl release at all since then, really. (The few exceptions have been limited press things that bands had at spots like Terrastock where I wanted to make sure the groups in question got some money from me somehow and didn't have anything other than vinyl to sell.)

aww you guys can totally picture baby ned with his first fisher price turntable right

first one I played on mine was Mickey Mouse Disco

I remember the prerecorded cassettes phase ('87-'94 for me) with fondness and then I turn one up in a drawer and I'm like what the hell am I supposed to do with this now and then I play it usually

I believe the last Terrastock was the last time I bought a new CD. I've bought a little bit of new vinyl since, but mostly if there is a code/coupon for electronic download versions.

aww you guys can totally picture baby ned with his first fisher price turntable right

That is in fact exactly what I had. (Early albums including something featuring Popeye, Peter and the Wolf/Sorcerer's Apprentice, several Sesame Street albums, Sing! and Free to Be...You And Me.)

Really should've kept the turntable, it played 78s.