When’s the last time you bought a CD — the actual physical media? Do you remember the artist or album name?
I can’t remember either. It’s just not a media format that has relevance to me now, in the age of wifi and online media stores.
When once upon a time I used to have my discs proudly shelved near my CD player, today they are gathering dust in my closet — long since having been ripped to my digital media centre. Especially since the DRM wars are mostly over. Mostly.
Convenience played a large part of the ‘closet migration’ for me. It’s. Easier to download new music. It’s easier to move it between devices, and it’s much easier to carry an entire collection with you.
It’s dead, right?
Not really. Even though these points are commonly recognized advantages, physical media isn’t dead, yet. But As the title suggests, it is declining.
CD sections in brick-and-mortar stores are getting smaller, as more people move to digital music devices — a slow process as consumers upgrade their entertainment systems and portable players.
Digital delivery
Eventually, the CD will be extinct, for the most part, much the same way the 78 LP and record player are mostly extinct (except for niche afficionadio audiophiles).
And I, for one, welcome our new digital music overlords. I’m tired of replacing / discarding media every time a new and better physical media format is developed. We don’t need any more beta / VHS / HD DVD media nor their packaging adding to the landfills.
I’m getting tired of buying another physical object just to acquire a digital copy of some entertainment when it’s not necessary with today’s technology. Direct digital delivery (via wi-fi or G3/4 or bluetooth) to my digital playback devices is somewhat available now and being incorporated into more devices. I’m looking forward to the day when when the CD presses shut down, and digital delivery is the norm.
It’s coming…are you ready for it?
This post of is one of many I publish weekly at the Future Shop Techblog. Read more of my stuff here.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
IMHO, you are wrong.
physical media is not dead, and will not die completely (particular format, like DVD, may die eventually, though). in fact, physical media gives you more freedom than downloads only:
1. you own the media (and it’s not only about psychological feeling of owning something). which means you can sell it, swap it, give it as a present, throw it away. it’s your thing and you do whatever you want to it.
2. in case when there’s no internet, the whole “digital download only” idea becomes useless: you are limited to the stuff you have currently on your hard drive. and in case of some DRM-authorization thing, you even can’t use the stuff you bought. in case if you don’t remember: in Egypt the whole internet infrastructure went down once for a pretty long time.
3. with digital only distribution, you are controlled (all the time) by distributor’s EULA. and you have to “be good”, because if they think you violated it, you can lose anything you bought. with physical, it’s your forever (see 1.). or if a company goes out of business (these things happened before – remember, for example, geocities?)…
4. compatibility and legacy stuff: there’s no guarantee that present-day digital formats (enriched with super-duper DRM-thing) will be readable in like 10 years. or hard drives will hold data that long. as for physical, well, you can still listen to old vinyl records or read paper books printed like hundreds of years ago.
5. cloud computing. yeah, i know it’s a trend. people and companies talk about it a lot. and yes, it’s pretty convenient: to be able to have your stuff from anywhere in the world. but at the same time, there’s a privacy issue: when you trust your (personal) data to some cloud, you are bound by company’s EULA, and you no longer take responsibility for your data. there’s also a security problem: today it is easier to break into a cloud than to break into someone’s house and to find the CD (thumbdrive, whatever) with data.
6. companies like Apple are abandoning physical media. they follow the common trend (trying to be “innovative” by limiting our freedom) forget several things: optical media is resistant to electromagnetic fields, which means that it holds data better than flash cards. and secondly: they now distribute Mac OS X in digital form. what should I do if my machine had some terrible crash and there’s no physical media to recover it anywhere near?
7. one more thing. maybe it’s a great idea to have everything replaced with one super-cool, thin, shiny, metallic gadget like iPad, but I’d prefer to be my stuff _different_: i want to see, take and read books on my shelves, enjoy the artwork of CDs (DVDs, BluRay… whatever)… no digital download can give me that feeling.
being in the cloud is pretty convenient, but don’t rely _too much_ on it.