Continuing with CDs?

Can I be the only person who buys music from itunes?

With the rise of Amazon's DRM-free, higher bit-rate downloads?

You might rabbit. You might.

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?

i have been thinking about a big purge lately, but i find it really difficult to part with archives. like others here i still enjoy the physical artifact though organizing and moving it all is a chore and not nearly as exciting as it once was. i think the best way to purge is just to continuously edit. i am sure that eventually i will convert everything to flacs and be done with the physical objects.

Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?

maybe. it is fun to find random half-remembered boxes of media.

Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

yes, but i am not a completist except in very rare cases. i use a few digital music shops and i use p2p. anything i really like that i freely download off the net i buy or try to buy, either on cd or vinyl, from an actual physical shop or any of the good online shops of esteemed record stores from around the world. with mp3 i also go the other way where i will buy vinyl and then download a digital copy off p2p.

god i wish we had amazon mp3 store in the UK

have bought some DRM tracks out of impatience. i lived with low-bitrate mp3s for years so a few more won't really hurt altho the big general 'under-192kbps' purge continues and i've deleted thousands of mp3s in the last 2 years having replaced them with better rips (inc. many from 2nd hand CDs).

Can I be the only person who buys music from itunes?

the man who put the 'I' in 'itunes'

I think the only thing that sabotages the argument is artists that don't deliberately set out to make an album per se (and are, by design singles artists).

That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular.

hahahaha

"That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular."

Yeah how dare they release brilliance in three minute spurts. If a musician can't produce an entire 7 or 8 albums of pure unadulterated melodic genius then I SHALL CLOSE MY EARS TO THEM.

lol@people still falling for "Geir"

He's still FUNNY!

That kind of artist doesn't deserve to be popular.

As Stephen Colbert might say, "nailed it!"

If a musician can't produce an entire 7 or 8 albums of pure unadulterated melodic genius then I SHALL CLOSE MY EARS TO THEM.

Ditto.

Perhaps I shouldn't have, so late in the evening, "wholeheartedly" agreed with the sentiment that ...people need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks. People don't "need" to do anything; in some/many ways I'm glad most of the music I buy is unpopular, album-oriented, fill-a-CD-oriented music.

However, in my view, it's unfortunate that people in general, i.e., measured in terms of record and/or MP3 sales, tend to reward the immediate, one-hit, here-today, gone-tomorrow artists (Fergie, anyone?) to the exclusion of those that demonstrate the creative prowess required to bundle together a collection of eight or more songs over the course of one album (versus over the course of a career). It's the sustained attention an album requires that requires 45 or so minutes of a listener's undivided attention that appears to be going further by the wayside.

Of course some singles-driven artists return to popularity (i.e., the top of charts) with regularity, but the disposable nature of their product and, in my view, people's gravitation away from album driven artists (or, really, albums themselves) isn't, in my view, a positive development (assuming, it's still a "development"). But then I can't imagine artists with a nascent or established penchant for albums, versus those predisposed to singles, will tailor their decisions according to what people want or will buy.

Put another way (and, admittedly, as the most patently obivous/obviously lazy example): would The Beatles have been as demonstrably influential had their career ended with "Help!"?

do not tempt me with such visions

Put another way (and, admittedly, as the most patently obivous/obviously lazy example): would The Beatles have been as demonstrably influential had their career had started with "Help!"?

one-hit, here-today, gone-tomorrow artists (Fergie, anyone?)

Fergie just saw her fifth straight single from The Dutchess go top 5, which no one's done since Mariah Carey in 1990-91. So she's hardly "one-hit." Not sure how you can be so sure that she'll be "gone tomorrow," either, unless you know something I don't.

This is all I know.

For those losing the same battle with inference deficit disorder: "gone tomorrow" could be interperted (and or meant) literally, or figuratively.

But maybe that's a semantic debate for a different thread.

I know that you don't literally mean she's going to die, but poor reviews don't necessarily kill off careers, especially not when the object of said reviews is lighting up radio airplay and iTunes sales.

Um yeah, I think five Top 5 hits pretty much means that we're going to be hearing from Fergie for a little while longer.

(Corporate) radio airplay as counterpoint?

I equate "gone tomorrow" with career longevity beyond one album of five hits ("London Bridge," truly today's "Eleanor Rigby"). In the unfortunate and likely event Fergalicious enjoys fame and fortune beyond "The Dutchess" it'll only reinforce my suspicion that the public's attention span parallels its appreciation for disposable commodities (aka waste).

Btw, Fergie is the first solo female artist since Toni Braxton (93-94) to pull five top 40 hits from a debut album.

Toni who??????

Put another way (and, admittedly, as the most patently obivous/obviously lazy example): would The Beatles have been as demonstrably influential had their career started with "Help!"?

Subtle; touché.

That came out wrong, what I meant to say was,

In the unfortunate and likely event Fergalicious enjoys fame and fortune beyond "The Dutchess" it'll only reinforce my suspicion that the public's attention span is inversely proportional to its appetite for disposable commodities (aka waste).

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?

Nope and likely never. I recently bought a hi-fi CD player that's given my collection new life.

Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?

My CD collection is a record of most of the music I've ever liked; mostly I maintain it now with thought of handing it down to my kid(s).

Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

I occasionally download to preview but until downloads provide audio quality equal to CDs (i.e., consistently and legally), I'll continue to rip 320kbps/LAME MP3s for the iPod, but keep listening to my discs at home.

And in further effort to get this thread back on topic, I read an interesting "special report" in the latest Rolling Stone (aka the Yearbook 2007 issue) last night, relevant to reason why some folks that poo-poo the downloading have a superiority complex.

The article is "The Death of High Fidelity" by Robert Levine (and until this blogger gets a takedown notice from said periodical, you can read it here.

http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/2835/im003778qr4.jpg

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?
Absolutely not. I'm no more likely to sell all my books and buy a Kindle. I think it's ridiculous.

Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?
No, I'll keep buying them as I come across stuff I want. As pointed out above; they have music on! They're not ornaments.

Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?
No. I don't really download and I'm not particularly completist about individual artists / genres etc. I'll keep buying them because they're my favoured method for listening to music.

A CD arrived in the post on Friday. I've just ordered another two new CDs. I'll probably receive a handful for Christmas, too. I love music and my primary method for listening is through very good a hi-fi; I don't use an iPod anymore as I don't commute on the train anymore. When I'm choosing what to listen to I like to be able to see all my music together with images to prompt my memory. I like the idea of 'albums' where songs are ordered deliberately. I like to be able to look at artwork and credits in a CD case as I listen to an album. I like that we've got shelves in the livingroom with 1,500 or so CDs on them. The harddrive on our MacBook died a week or so ago, and we've lost a lot of files and photos of stuff we never got round to backing up. I like the tangibility of a physical object with music on it; I think losing the physical object can cause you to lose some... respect, or love, for music, lose some sense of its value. It just becomes lists of data to be collected and never listened to, tagged, ordered, and ignored. I did the downloading thing and didn't enjoy it. (Link.) I want to listen to music because I enjoy it, not because I feel obliged or compelled to form an opinion or to be able to say "I have listened".

I would have taken you for a vinyl fetishist.

Too young! Plus there's never been a decent place to buy new vinyl in Exeter since I got into music.

"Do you have many CDs?" That was the first, and refreshingly insightful question, the owner-slash-salesman of the local hi-fi shoppe asked me when I began my search for an upgrade to my crap-to-begin-with carousel. The implication being that if I hadn't, maybe there'd be no point in making such an investment. Fwiw, I went with a Rega Apollo.

The Turn Me Up! organization, referenced in the article I cited above, has an interesting goal and Web site; I'm curious to see what becomes of their objective(s), "to make the choice for a more dynamic record an option for artists."

Btw, Turn Me Up! hearts the Nick Southall piece, Imperfect Sound Forever, under the "Music Dynamics In The News" header at the bottom third of its homepage.

I sold of a bunch of CDs recently, but it was mostly stuff that I'm just not into all that much anymore and haven't listened to in years. My flow of incoming CDs hasn't really abated all that much, save for budgetary reasons. Other than that, I don't really see much reason to dispose of what I've got. I take a lot more pleasure in going down to the record store and finding an unexpected used copy of something that I'm interested in than I do in just going online and downloading the files.

Plus, I always seem to forget what music I've got on my computer. It's much easier to keep track of the physical CD's, even if I do have to lug them all around whenever I move. I will admit, though, being unable to properly keep track of my digital music does indeed lead to some enjoyable moments of (re-)discovery of its own.

mac data recovery worked pretty well for me in this case as well along with prosoft's data rescue.

I'm quite anal retentive about how I organise my file tree/tag individual mp3s/etc.--but that's dealing largely with music ripped from my own CDs, and will be for as long as physical media is sold. CDs/LPs may be largely "archival" functionally, but I'll never plunk down money for a download in my lifetime, if I can help it. Mp3s and hard-drives are great conveniences, but I trust them very little to hold up.

So more to the questions, no, not selling off physical media in my life, outside the occasional purge of lesser material.

Always buy physical media because it's solid, real, sounds good, and is durable, and gets me into shops. The thought of completism wouldn't enter into it.

I still buy CD's. Over 6 fatal computer crashes in my lifetime have told me it's worth the $4 extra dollars you pay - plus you get a physical CD, case, and artwork. And it gives you a reason to go to the record store... all pluses for me.

Though admittedly if all record companies began offering "free" mp3 downloads in addition to vinyl I would easily stop buying CD's for that reason. I really don't do much with CD's aside from drive them home and admire the artwork every once in a while.

Used CDs are generally cheaper than downloads and last a lot longer, so yeah. Go CDs, go

i buy more vinyl, but weirdly now the whole market is reversed from the 90s when i used to pick up classic 60s and 70s stuff on vinyl cuz it was cheaper...lots of great deals on super sounding reissue CDs in rock, jazz, etc now, i picked up the reissue of On the Corner by miles for like $5 a while back....even stuff i used to think of as "common" vinyl records are like $20 and up now, rolling stones and beatles stuff

i'm thinking of starting to buy more CDs again--in addition to downloads--but, man, i wonder how long the record stores in my area will continue to be around

not that they stock a lot of the metal i've been getting into recently -- i guess i'll just be using Amazon much more than i already am

I generally have a problem with the thought of going for anything else than CDs. I do a few download purchases (mainly stuff for the mainstream hit compilations that I regularly make to keep up with what's in the pop charts), but generally I am an albums guy. Plus having a couple thousand CDs would probably take months to turn them into mp3s and stock them in a mobile mp3 player.

Record stores, as in physical ones, may be on the way out, but there are still online stores.

Used CDs are generally cheaper than downloads and last a lot longer, so yeah. Go CDs, go

^^^^^^^^

it's getting to the point where new CD prices are also insanely low. High On Fire's new record was $5.99 when it came out

same deal with Julian Casablancas's solo record that came out last year

another thing w/ getting a lot of your music through downloads is, i think it'll eventually come to be seen as a waste of time to have your own personal archives of files, at least for the more popular stuff, because it'll all be available on streaming services, and you'll be able to access a lot of your music in really high-quality from a bunch of different devices

that's still some ways off though

same deal with Julian Casablancas's solo record that came out last year

This one actually cost me $0.00, and should've cost you the same if you chose to avoid it, also.

The record store I work at uses Amazon to price our used items, which is the majority of our business (no "used section" our whole store is basically a used section). So basically most things are extremely cheap, though OOP titles can get pretty high in price. I feel like it is lazy and dangerous to just blindly slap 7.99 on every used item. Plus the online presence allows us to sell items on our floor to people who live across the world. I honestly don't know how any record store besides the Other Musics out there can survive mainly on new items, since you barely make any profit. If more independent stores adopted this used item model they wouldn't be suffering so badly.
So if there were any incentive to buy a CD over a download, it would be because you might be able to buy it from us for the price of 2 or 3 songs on iTunes. If you just illegally download music than there is always the tangible item incentive.
(So if any of you are anywhere near Hoboken, NJ, stop by "Tunes")

ha, i was going to ask if it was tunes. i'll always remember buying an ash ra tempel cd in their 5 for $3 bin and then seeing another album by them for $29.99 used.

Haha yeah thats the nature of the Amazon pricing. We don't have a 5 for 3 bin anymore, but there is always a cheapo bin with all kinds of gems. If anything is mainly selling for below $1.99 on Amazon we cheapo them. Its my favorite part of the store.

I don't know if there's a more recent thread than this one on this topic but I couldn't find one if there is.

I'm currently experiencing something of a dilemma regarding physical CDs; I virtually ceased buying them a few years ago in favour of lossless downloads but am starting to have second thoughts about moving away from physical media entirely (and, before we go down that road, I think the "vinyl resurgence" is mystifying and kind of awful).

I'm even contemplating re-purchasing certain things on CD that I've already bought FLAC downloads of, just so I have some kind of permanent, tangible copy of that music that will stick around even in the event of catastrophic data loss or some other calamity.

What say you, ILM? Anyone else feeling torn about such things?

i don't really understand why you'd want to buy a CD.

I guess at one point I found CDs an attractive format - kind of shiny and futuristic-looking and I liked how you could skip tracks etc but that was a long time ago. There's nothing attractive or useful about the big pile of decaying jewel cases gathering dust behind the sofa in our living room. I can't quite bear to part with them though - I might want to go through all those Beach Boys twofers and read the inlays again one day.