I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will "Hit" for me. I generally don't like "Artists" or "Genres" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day.
However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists.
It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught.
Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly.
It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.
While I'm thrilled that kids are experiencing the thrill of buying physical media, I'm not sure CD's are the best way to go. Most of my CD's from my teenage years are no longer playable (partially due to poor upkeep, but some literally from disc rot). But hey, they'll learn the same lesson in a couple of decades haha.
I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.
Personally, I haven’t stopped buying CDs or in certain cases DVDs and Blu-Rays - not of movies but of music. I find it interesting these “went away” but I can see why: nobody I know has a cd player to begin with. A lot of laptops nowadays don’t come with disc trays, and nobody buys a dvd bluray player. Yes, the PS or Xbox can play it but everyone just streams movies or music. So somewhere along the way it disappeared and I doubt it will genuinely come back. It’s a needless headache.
I think it’s because they are more convenient: CDs are cheap, you own your music. With iPods you save hundreds of dollars per year, and you get to keep your music (and the iPod shuffle is perfect for working out).
A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors.
Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.
The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!
Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!
Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.
When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.
Funny because the CD player in my car has been dead for like 16 years but the cassette player has never been better. Wonder why the cassette player lasted much longer, guessing the optical drive in the car is damaged because CDs will fail to read after like 10 second.
One of the hobby projects that I want to do, and hopefully will find the time for before we get rid of my wife's car, is to retrofit it with a CD player, powered by a Raspberry Pi or something alike. It could nicely live in the glove compartment and I believe the in-car entertainment system is already equipped with an aux port.
I did the same for a friend's birthday recently: put together a bunch of mix CDs as a present. My concession to the fact he probably doesn't use a CD player much was a QR code, with a link to a matching Spotify playlist.
Playing a physical CD is a bit like going to a movie theatre instead of Netflix.
It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work.
You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.
There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive.
So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees
All we really need is a solid system for adding all of the 100k+ internet radio stations to a synthetic radio spectrum that can be easily navigated with a rotary dial just like local radio.
None of the things you listed are free of middlemen. Record companies were the OG villains of the music industry. Livenation has a monopoly over event venues.
Sometimes you can't just outrun the bad guys. You have to fight them head on.
About 10 years back I figured that this was coming. CDs are the best of both worlds. Near perfect audio quality, not too big physically, cannot have the rights revoked, no subscription fees but really easy to rip and put on your phone or whatever.
A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean.
If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.
There are people who do this at scale, often reselling online. It's definitely for those who are truly passionate about it, and enjoy discovering new things.
I gave it a shot, and while profitable, just not for me at all.
slotMusic/slotRadio has tried to sell music through SD cards. They never took off, but a full SD card would probably be the best balance in terms of reliability, size, and capacity in my opinion. Plus, a surprising amount of media devices still carry SD card readers.
Flash storage developments came too late, but the spinning disks and risk of physical damage to the plastic are an annoying risk to have to deal with. Even Minidisc still required some form of physical motion.
I have a sizeable collection of CDs and during last year wrote my own CD reader and a ripper CLI.
As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.
recently I bought my 8 years old a cheap new cassette player as a birthday gift which I want to get when I was child
Turned out he really love it and I also bought more cassetee as requested from him, and the cost of those cassetee seem surpass the player itself
What I find the child seems feel more real if the music play from some gears instead of digital ones, and he know well how to use and find a track in the middle
I also want to buy a new cd player which is also I want when I was youth...
Maybe people are just tired of the streaming and I also find that there seems to be a surge of new album and music in youtube music now, the album's cover seems being generated by AI, and maybe also the music itself is generated by AI
> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth.
Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.
Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.
I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.
In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl)
I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest.
Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.
It is always nice to take younger folks to the used DVD/CD store and let them explore. It is not expensive.
There's also a strange paradox, where the better stuff is cheaper. (technically it is probably popular stuff is cheaper). The dvds of season 1 of Friends is usually $1.
Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.
Vinyl records were a pain in the back, tapes were a pain in the back, CDs were a pain in the back.
I still remember the day when mp3 became publicly available. I immediately started ripping and converting everything, and never looked back.
Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's.
And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?
I grew up in the eighties. Tapes, records, cds, etc. I've seen it all. I haven't used a device that can play any of these in over two decades. I have more music at my fingertips in Spotify than I ever had on these. Love it.
I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing.
There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really.
And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.
Sorry but vinyls don't offer anything but nostalgia for "old, good times", and approach to the audiophile crowd of insane people.
I don't buy into these crackles. I stopped using MP3. A high quality OPUS file format is the way to go for me. I can take the whole music library in my pocket to the places with no internet, listen through good enough in-ear headphones, or with a small speaker (if for more people), and charge that stuff with a small foldable solar panel on the go, next to the tent. Try this with your gramophone.
Its so funny, after this vinyl revival a couple of years ago (well…10-15?) I jokingly told my friends CD’s would be next, I even produced some CD player prototypes in anticipation (sadly all the transports I got were mostly faulty+dead lasers and I shelved the project…maybe I should pick it back up again?)
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 53.8 ms ] threadHowever, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists.
It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught.
Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly.
It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.
I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.
Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.
The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!
Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!
Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.
When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.
That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!
It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work.
You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.
So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees
Sometimes you can't just outrun the bad guys. You have to fight them head on.
A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean.
If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.
I gave it a shot, and while profitable, just not for me at all.
Flash storage developments came too late, but the spinning disks and risk of physical damage to the plastic are an annoying risk to have to deal with. Even Minidisc still required some form of physical motion.
As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.
Turned out he really love it and I also bought more cassetee as requested from him, and the cost of those cassetee seem surpass the player itself
What I find the child seems feel more real if the music play from some gears instead of digital ones, and he know well how to use and find a track in the middle
I also want to buy a new cd player which is also I want when I was youth...
Maybe people are just tired of the streaming and I also find that there seems to be a surge of new album and music in youtube music now, the album's cover seems being generated by AI, and maybe also the music itself is generated by AI
The internal forum.
https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/noise
Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.
Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.
I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.
I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest.
Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.
It is always nice to take younger folks to the used DVD/CD store and let them explore. It is not expensive.
There's also a strange paradox, where the better stuff is cheaper. (technically it is probably popular stuff is cheaper). The dvds of season 1 of Friends is usually $1.
and sometimes you can get 4k UHD disks for cheap.
Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's. And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?
In some case I do buy MP3 directly from online stores, if not available as CD, and burn the CD as well.
Never had a Spotify account, nor plan to.
I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing.
There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really.
And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.
I don't buy into these crackles. I stopped using MP3. A high quality OPUS file format is the way to go for me. I can take the whole music library in my pocket to the places with no internet, listen through good enough in-ear headphones, or with a small speaker (if for more people), and charge that stuff with a small foldable solar panel on the go, next to the tent. Try this with your gramophone.
YMMV.