JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Industry Message Forum Bestbuy to stop selling CDs

Discuss.

http://thesource.com/2018/02/03/cds-dead-best-buy-stop-selling-cds-soon-target-may-follow/

Well,
I think the Last CD's I bought in a store was Wal-Mart. I do buy CD's out of the Catalogs from time to time. We used to have a Music Store here in the Mall but they are no longer in business. I get Music Catalogs all the time so the CD is far from dead and practically all the music from the past is available somewhere.

The CD pressing factories (Is that the right term?) must be crestfallen.

If we ever loose the internet it will be like a Twilight Zone episode.

I do my song checks on CD after CD. I can navigate them while still focusing on my driving.
If I loose the ability to burn a CD, due to lack of blanks, watch out I'm trying to play it again from my phone.

Ronnie,

You have a great point. One major Sun burp and all electronic data and machines may be gone in a blink losing anything not on a preserved hard copy forever. We're moving into a dicey age where too much dependence on a source that is ever changing and sadly ever more under govt control is threatening to erase our history as surely as the many lost civilizations from pre-Sumeria are being denied and banned from being taught or even written about in many countries. I've been learning, often FIRST HAND with my own eyes on ancient sites and artifacts that we've long been lied to about nearly everything. We've all heard the victors write the history, but I am blessed to have researches among my friends with direct evidence that disputes many of the historical canon BS that are being taught to us all our lives. And it isn't remotely hard to imagine our entire existence being long forgotten by survivors of the future who restart this whole sad process again. The worst is so much of these fragments of history either WERE available and destroyed on purpose or still ARE available, but under lock and key of those in power. It has weighed heavily on me since having my eyes opened to so much of it in the past few years. I spent so many years in ignorant bliss, just working hard and going about my life without awareness and I am most others are the worse for it.

Brian

By the way, the great irony here is that Best Buy is almost single handedly responsible for killing commercial music earnings than any other entity. Like Amazon has done to almost all other stores, big and small, they undercut pricing until everyone else had to do the same until they died off one after another and the market for music never recovered. And it was so weakened by Best Buy's loss leader strategies that when file sharing hit back to back with it, it was over. This brief window of time where music creators and makers for the only time in history could make a living at their craft was over. It was less than a single lifetime.

Actually STREAMING and CELL PHONES killed CD sales. And both were what ended the ability of songwriters to be paid. When you could get endless supply of music on your phone, right at your fingertips, the storage capacity of stores to stock CD's (just like years before in Vinyl) as well as people wanting to store those big bulky things in their houses or cars, the CD was mostly done. And while Vinyl has made a comeback, it will never replace the conveinece of streaming (or the ability to get it free).

The vast majority of the listening public are NOT audiofiles, or could care less about artwork, liner notes, or the plight of songwriters. They think we are all rich any way. There is a complete disconnect between the creators of the music and the listening public. It's always been there for them, always will be there for them.

But streaming killed the CD star, just like video killed the radio star.
MAB

Kids today.

Not kids... just a society with no interest in the past or how they go to lead such easy lives... but someday they'll realize they're lost and won't know how to save themselves.

Opportunity knocks. Let's open up a small, private chain of "Record Stores" selling CD's. Probably best done on-line 'cause the monthly rent and utilities would consume all profits until the biz model takes off... if it really is a workable plan. LOL! Stinking streamers! ----Dave

A stick in a personal player is to be expected. Hopefully the physical inner sleeves of the album or cd will be thought of in the packet.
I guess that McDonalds will start servicing through the computer. The human is left under the machine.

But yet in some scenarios LP albums are reviving in a niche market. Let's just hope that YouTube never goes away.

Best Buy was the true beginning of the end of self contained artists putting out a CD and making a living because as labels tightened belts they hired less people on the fringes or smaller fan levels and dumped anyone not in the mega level successes, while simultaneously lowering what indie artists could sell a CD for since you had to be well below or no higher than Best Buy's major artist price point and though some progress was found in the early days of CD Duplication/Replication quickly it became moot with the Internet and of course digital doom. T Shirt (and other non musical item) sales are the only ways Indie artists make money and that's far more scarce than it once was. People won't leave their houses so even cover bands can't make a living in tourist towns which have seen even their night lives shrunken significantly. How big multiplex theaters stay open is a mystery to me. It has to lose money nearly everywhere. You can only sell so much 10 dollar popcorn buckets.

For songwriters it was a better deal until Spotify and the like because few real sales were lost due to early file sharing. It is highly exaggerated. Those kids were never going to buy those artists (and mostly because of Spotify in their adulthood never did/will). Sucks for you guys but you've just joined the artists. Only a handful of artists can carry a tour anymore and most of them have to nearly be wheeled out on gurneys to play. I've paid for only one non-past their prime concert in 20 years and that was a sold out show in the massive 120K seat soccer stadium in Paris by Lady Gaga with an unknown metal band (and a good one) opening and she put on a good show, about an 8 out of 10 which is the most you can hope for these days unless you're a rabid fan of an old artist you idolize yourself into believing the show was great. In that category, John Fogerty's show at the Radio City Music Hall was really enjoyable, but the person I was idolizing wasn't Fogerty, it was his drummer Kenny Aronoff, an Indiana native I had never gotten to meet which I was fortunate to do so backstage because long time JPF member and our Music Awards Music Director Bob Malone, who plays keys for Fogerty, invited us backstage. We briefly met Fogerty but didn't even ask for a pic, but got to hang a bit with Aronoff which was awesome. The show was great for 3 reasons: Fogerty could still look and sound like he was in his prime (it was freaky how he looked so young, even up close and sounded like a recording it was so spot on his old recordings), Aronoff rocked out on drums with an awesome extended solo and back and forth with Bob in addition to give John time to rest (I think he only sang about 45 minutes of the nearly 2 hour show) and Bob Malone who stole the entire show including 2 standing ovations, one for his keyboard solo and back and forth with Aronoff and the other for his opening after a break doing, of all things, a solo accordion jam that resulted in the biggest applause and ovation of the entire show by the sold out house. (a side note, he'd never touched an accordion except once when he stayed at our house and played around with the two I have in the studio) until Fogerty asked him to do the solo at the start of the tour and by the show we saw you'd have thought he had played it all his life... he's a literal music savant, but that's another story.

Where was I... oh yeah, the concert tours are making the least money (inflation considered) ever and no one buys anything music wise unless they like to go against the grain or for a collectors item/souvenir from a friend or long time fanhood, and with Spotify, it is never getting better unless we start valuing musicianship and well done works, but alas with machine learning we're a year or two away from AI just making all the music that pushes our emotional buttons at max level, customized for us individually based on the 2K page dossier they have on everyone alive and living in a country with the Internet. Even people who never have gotten on line have deep files due to the insidious spying they do on discussions where people offline are talked about, and their purchases history and any time tech touches their lives, even without permission, they have more info on even those people than any pre-1940 in history.

Who says I am not wordy! ha!

Brian