CDs, Vinyl Are Outselling Digital Downloads For the First Time Since 2011 (mercurynews.com) 136
Digital downloads had a short run as the top-selling format in the music industry. It took until 2011, a decade after the original iPod came out, for their sales surpass those of CDs and vinyl records, and they were overtaken by music streaming services just a few years later. Now, digital downloads are once again being outsold by CDs and vinyl, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. From a report: The RIAA released its 2017 year-end revenue report on Thursday, showing that revenue from digital downloads plummeted 25 percent to $1.3 billion over the previous year. Revenue from physical products, by contrast, fell just 4 percent to $1.5 billion. Overall, the music industry grew for a second year straight. And with $8.7 billion in total revenue, it's healthier than it has been since 2008, according to the report. Nearly all of the growth was the result of the continued surge in paid music subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music. Those services grew by more than 50 percent to $5.7 billion last year and accounted for nearly two-thirds of the industry's revenue. Physical media accounted for 17 percent, while digital downloads made up just 15 percent.
Amazon autorip (Score:5, Informative)
I've been buying CDs and never opening them when the CD version is cheaper or the same price as than the streaming version due to Amazon offering "AutoRip" on many CDs.
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Kids are using YouTube to listen to music, they don't buy music anymore.
Re:Amazon autorip (Score:5, Insightful)
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Owning legal copies of music is cheaper in the long run than paying over and over again for streaming it. .
It is?
Buying one CD a month cost more than what I pay for streaming each month. And who bought just one per month?
To each their own - I prefer to pay a nominal fee and have a giant catalog at my fingertips, that I don't need to worry about storing, backing up, converting, dusting off, agonizing about whether I want it anymore or to throw it away, etc.
I've been through having to switch services (miss you MOG, sniff) and yeah, I had to build new playlists, etc. but it wasn't a big deal for me.
I can unders
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Not if you enjoy a large variety of music. Man, if I were to buy the records, just my in interest in jazz from the late '50s and early '60s would cost me enough to pay for streaming for 10 years. And that's only one of the many types of music I like.
Also, I'm able to sample a lot of new music without having to lay out the price of a CD or digital download. If I want to hear what Destroyer's new album,
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I wish you the best of luck finding all of the old jazz albums on streaming.
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I wish you the best of luck finding all of the old jazz albums on streaming.
You're way off-base. They're on Spotify. DigitalDust's Rudy Van Gelder playlist is 500 tracks long and that's just the Rudy Van Gelder Editions. jazzwhat has a playlist of records on the Impulse label from the 60s and 70s that goes 2,364 tracks deep. That's just one label.
There are jazz records on Spotify that aren't even in print any more so you can't buy them on CD or vinyl at any price. European and Japanese editions that
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That's great then. I'm still struggling with finding certain R&B albums for sampling.
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Really? I'm surprised. I listen to a lot of R&B and I haven't really found big holes in the catalog.
Back in the early 80s, I did some keyboard work on house records made in Chicago and released on boutique labels for club-use. I can imagine some of them aren't available, but the real sample-worthy stuff should all be there.
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I wish you the best of luck finding all of the old jazz albums on streaming.
You're way off-base. They're on Spotify. DigitalDust's Rudy Van Gelder playlist is 500 tracks long and that's just the Rudy Van Gelder Editions. jazzwhat has a playlist of records on the Impulse label from the 60s and 70s that goes 2,364 tracks deep. That's just one label.
There are jazz records on Spotify that aren't even in print any more so you can't buy them on CD or vinyl at any price.
Same here, but with things like Irish Traditional Music and 80's rock. It would cost an insane amount of money to buy everything I listen to. And I would need a room just to keep the CDs in.
Who needs that?
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Here's some synchronicity: As I was reading your comment, I can hear Van Morrison singing "She Moved Through The Fair" with the Chieftans playing on my wife's computer in the next room. I know that's probably not the kind of traditional Irish music you might have been talking about, but it's still a clever coincidence.
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I want my music to go with me. What I need is the ability to listen to my Music when I am out in the middle of the boondocks with no cell service at all. I still get Sirius/XM most or the time, but while they do have a great cross section, when I want to hear Thelonious Monk, I want to hear it now, and I rarely ever get a chance to hear Gamma, or Blue Oyster Cult. If I buy the CD I can rip it to mp3 and then I can listen to it when ever, where ever I I am at. I absolutely love being in my Jeep, on top of a
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Spotify allows you to download the music you want as part of the subscription. I'm pretty sure Google Music does too.
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Really that would be worth looking into. I am Amazon hooked, I've prime, video and a Kindle E-reader on kindle unlimited that I use the heck out of. I've got hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music still on 4 track and cassette, not to mention many, many cd's and GB's of mp3 on a spare PC I use for that purpose alone. One of these days my cassette player is going to quit and I am not going to be able to recover it. I finally gave up on 8 tracks a few years ago because I could not find replacement parts but
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I can relate. I've got my old Tascam 4-track deck in the basement with a cabinet full of reels. My wife keeps after me to clean them up, and by clean them up, she means, "throw them out". I figure when it comes to original music, I can always make more, so I might just do it some day.
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I wish I had the talent to make more original music. The closest I can come is making original instruments that I can barely play. I've managed an Irish Harp, a mandolin and a square banjo in the hillbilly style. I can read music so I can test the notes but I could not play anything beyond scales to save my life.
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Those are all very cool instruments. The thing about playing every day is that you get better whether you want to or not. Make some kind of music every day, even if just for a few minutes.
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I want my music to go with me. What I need is the ability to listen to my Music when I am out in the middle of the boondocks with no cell service at all.
So is that when you sit down under a tree, pull your turntable, amplifier, speakers and stack of vinyl out of your backpack, set up the solar panels, and play some Dixieland?
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LOL, hardly I pull out my stand alone mp3 player and pop in an earbud, or more often I plug the thing into the radio in the auxiliary slot and listen to what I want. The point being there is no radio beyond the satellite service, and no cell service. When we get out into the canyon lands, even the satellite radio becomes unreliable and all communication breaks down to very local CB service. Just because I choose to listen to an eclectic variety of music doesn't mean live in the past. I personally don't subs
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Only if you don't buy very much music at all. I used to spend $50-100 on music every month, sometimes more. Compare that to Spotify, which charges $10/month (and sometimes offers a reduced yearly payment).
Now I just buy a lot of merch instead.
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It's cheaper just to rip them from YouTube. It's not like digital is less popular. You can't count this sort of thing just by sales, lol.
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If I understand you correctly you are suggesting pirating as the cheaper option?
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Of course he is. Welcome to Slashdot. Let me give you some points of how things run around here:
Re:Amazon autorip (Score:5, Funny)
As long as I can drink rum and have a parrot, I don't care what you call it.
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As long as I can drink rum and have a parrot, I don't care what you call it.
The eye patch, peg leg and that all the music is shanties is kinda a downer though.
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You forgot one point: " I'd pay the artists something if I had a chance, but the majors eat up all the revenue along the way, so why bother? " /. regarding copyright, indeed.
Otherwise it's a good sum up of the last 10 years of
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Bored enough to refute this
-Piracy implies personal profit from infringing material, which 99% of "pirates" do not do
-Record stores don't create content, the artists create content, and there are a myriad of ways to support them without middlemen
-Content creators, outside of the independent scene, are paid by publishers/labels before their content is released, and even then they only receive a small percentage after the record store/label takes their cuts
-There have been multiple studies proving piracy does
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-Piracy implies personal profit from infringing material, which 99% of "pirates" do not do
listening to music is your profit. You made use of a service, even if you didn't deprive someone of property.
-Record stores don't create content, the artists create content, and there are a myriad of ways to support them without middlemen
99% of "pirates" do not do this.
-Content creators, outside of the independent scene, are paid by publishers/labels before their content is released, and even then they only receive a small percentage after the record store/label takes their cuts
Then listen to independent artists that you pay directly if you can't agree to the arrangement in main stream music. If I don't like how gas stations work, I don't start siphoning gas out of random people's tanks
-There have been multiple studies proving piracy does increase sales by providing advertising or allowing people who were otherwise not interested in paying full market price to get a taste of the content in question
Certainly an interesting factoid. But is a society where you can receive a good or service without paying to the agree to price the kind of society you want?
-Music in the late 90s/early 00s was indeed pretty shitty, with the rise of nu-metal and oversaturation of grunge rock
Po
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Demonize the pirates all you want
This is not a religious discussion, it's a discussion on ethical behavior.
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That's certainly a choice an artist can make. And when they do so they generally tell you by offering the music for free. I listen to a fair number of musicians who release under a Creative Common license (CC-SA-BY)
Re:Amazon autorip (Score:5, Insightful)
Geez...does NO one care about fidelity at all anymore?!?!?
Or, is that most modern music is so badly composed, performed and so compressed, that it isn't worth it to buy a good copy and play it on a really nice stereo system?
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That one time I was streaming 128kbps MP3's over stereo Bluetooth, however? That sounded awful, because BT uses it's own compression, on top of what the source is compressed with. Won't do that again.
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Vinyl is absolutely not equal to 12-bit lossless. There is wow/flutter, frequency response and pops/ticks to consider as well.
Youtube has none of that.
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It's a combination. modern music is so badly composed, performed and compressed that there is no difference between the youtube rip and a CD.
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Yes, you're right. Nobody cares about fidelity at all anymore.
When you listen on headphones or cheap bluetooth speakers, there is no fidelity.
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Oh boo hoo, "everything was better in the old days" is absolute bullshit.
Popular music was shitty back then, and it's still shitty today. You only remember the stuff you grew up with as good, because you attach a bunch of emotional memories to it.
Not sales volume, revenue. Buying digital is cheap (Score:2)
The numbers show the record companies got less MONEY from digital than from physical products, not that people listened to fewer songs. Downloads and streaming let the consumer get more music for little money.
If you want FREE music there are millions and millions of songs on MySpace, free. 15 million people post their creations on myspace. If you want professionally produced, highly polished music and you want what the record companies pick out for you, contributing your $1 to the cost of that is not only
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This is true - even outside of Amazon, you will find CDs are often cheaper than their equivalent downloads (whoever thought 99p was a good price for a single download track is off their rocker). Autorip is useful, but it's almost as easy to run your favourite CD ripper (I use Grip on Linux) to get mp3's off your CD, the latter of which you just nicely file away as a backup.
I usually then upload the MP3s to Google Play Music for free and can then download/cache any of them to any of my Android devices very e
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I only buy specific songs instead of those albums unless they have options to buy specific songs in a disc.
No Shit (Score:1)
Between "all-you-can-listen" streaming services and CDs/vinyls coming with free downloads with purchase of the disc, there's very little reason to buy digital tracks anymore. Not to mention they're counting total revenue, and most vinyls are at least $25-$30 minimum these days, compared to $10-$15 for CDs and $1 per track from most digital download stores.
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Well, were I to want to acquire music, I'd prefer a CD because downloads too often die for one reason or another. (E.g., I wipe the partition that they were downloaded into.)
OTOH, due to the RIAA legal practices, I've stopped acquiring music. Since I have many old CDs, I find that I don't miss it. (Interestingly, I don't listen to most of the ones I own. Only about 20.)
I can't imagine this is good (Score:1)
Then again if they're switching to subscription services then as long as those services are profitable it's good for them. Might suck for the bands though who often make money selling those CDs at concerts. I hear they don't make jack off the su
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read the summary again, music services are exploding, taking away share from physical and "downloads"
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So for $120/Year you can play all the music you want.... The average CD cost about $10, so that's like buying 12 CDs a year....... However, MOST people listen to a few dozen artists or a few songs they'll want to listen to over and over again, and before the advent of streaming services might have purchased 2 or 3 CDs per year.... ~$20 or $30/Year in music tops.
So let me get this straight... the avg. subscriber will now pay 6 TIMES as much per year to listen to probably roughly the same
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eh, I think 1 CD per month at least is more usual given my collection size I mostly stopped adding to about 15 years ago.
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Ok, well the thing is not all people are exactly the same, and there is something to be said to
occasionally buying buying a month of a streaming service to allow easy exploration of a large number of albums without buying them.
But buying music and obtaining permanent ownership seems to have the long-term major cost advantage.
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I have over 3000 CDs/albums I purchased prior to 2012 ....
Having literally millions of albums available to me with a few clicks is huge
Found the addict. Even after building a massive 3000 CD collection, you would still be acquiring multiple CDs' worth a month?
Well, there are a few things to keep in mind here... (1) In spite of "millions" of tracks; I have Albums with songs that are not available available on CD, and i've CDs that are not available on any streaming service i've found --- so the ul
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Out of ~20,000 tracks in my collection (all ripped from CDs or paid downloads from sites like Bandcamp), I found that ~1,500 were not available on Spotify. Most of these are independent self-published artists, rare remix albums and obscure local music that has probably sold less than 1000 albums in total between them. The majority of that stuff I wouldn't expect to find on any streaming service, to be honest.
I was (and am) generally satisfied with my collection, it's full of stuff I really like. Most of it
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How many people do you know who only buy 2-3 CDs per year? That's how many I used to buy every month, on average.
Sure, there are some people out there who only buy one or two "greatest hits" albums once in a blue moon, but those people are sad and boring.
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I'm guessing that it's not that CD/vinyl sales are up but that digital is down.
You're guessing? I'm not asking you to RTFA, but at least peruse TFS.
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That is definitely wrong. I know people in two bands, and both make money by selling CDs at concerts.
stupid title (Score:3)
66% is music services
the fact that downloads are separate and of the same order as CD or Vinyl is rather irrelevant, the main way of getting music is through the internet and physical media is dying.
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Digital downloads are often included now (Score:1)
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Why not just buy the download, instead of cluttering up your shelves with inferior-sounding LPs?
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Sure, buy some albums and stick them in frames for the covers. But the music doesn't have to be on a physical format, it is better in every way as a set of lossless files.
Re:Misinformation as usual from the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
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You know it's possible to differentiate and only subscribe to some things, for the convenience, right? It's not all-or-nothing.
Subscribing to a streaming service is no different to using the library. They can also remove books from their shelves for whichever reason, and they track which content you check out. But the existence of a library does not prevent you from buying books yourself.
Streaming is a library of music. It's curated and has a gigantic selection. Will there sometimes be issues or missing con
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'Streaming' is shit. Why can't you all see that the Corporate world is trying to move everything in our lives to a 'rental' model? Do you really want to live in a world where you can't own anything yourself? Rich get richer, poor get poorer.
Well it's entertainment, most the value is in watching it once so the smart people would probably buy a second hand DVD, watch the movie, and sell it again for essentially the same price. That's in essence how Netflix got started, let's just pass around the same disc as quickly as possible. The movie studios made great money on those who bought the disc, watched it then put in on the shelf because of a pack rat mentality or the idea that maybe some day I'll want to see it again. I have a shelf full to prove
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Exactly! To most people, music is ephemeral. They don't feel the need to build up a collection, they just want to hear the newest music easily. To them, streaming is more like a radio where you get to choose the playlist. They don't linger on specific albums, they just want the radio hits.
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No one is preventing you from buying music. Are there any albums out there that are streaming-only, with no option to download or buy a physical copy? No?
Then stop whining, and don't subscribe to a streaming service if you don't want to.
Subscription fools, like the cord cutters (Score:2)
What's really going on is the music sellers are moving to the cable company model where they will not let you cherry pick the songs you want to buy and they will boil your frog-like ass for years until you are paying $100 per month for music.
Are any of you cord cutters feeling the heat yet? I thought not, you stupid frogs.
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Just like how the music industry cherry picks the songs it wants you to buy with radio stations.
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What's really going on is the music sellers are moving to the cable company model where they will not let you cherry pick the songs you want to buy and they will boil your frog-like ass for years until you are paying $100 per month for music. Are any of you cord cutters feeling the heat yet? I thought not, you stupid frogs.
"Boiling the frog" is a myth. Thermal regulation by relocation is actually a very important part of any cold blooded animal's survival strategies. Frogs will relocate when the local temperature becomes uncomfortable no matter how slowly it got there.
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Don't listen to music published by the big labels, then.
There is a ton of independent music out there that is just as good or better.
Music as a service (Score:1)
This is all because of Music as a service. We recently found an album that we wanted on CD. We thought, "hey let's buy that on Amazon/iTunes." Nope, only available with a subscription.
How do you even buy music online? (Score:2)
I subscribe to Apple Music. Which has been nice for selection and so on...
But recently I wanted to actually buy a song. Even though it was also available "for free", to support the artist beyond the pittance he would earn through my streaming the song.
How to do so? I still have no idea, I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to get to a real purchase page before I gave up.
You have to think that streaming is killing sales in general though...
Real actual data (Score:2)
ProTip for submitters and editors: if TFA has a source, the source may well be on the web too, and may have real actual data.
Nothing new to me (Score:1)
I haven't bought an MP3 in years but I still buy CDs from time to time.
LK
Always buy LPs or CDs (Score:2)
Look, I support the artists, not the music industry.
I buy my LPs and CDs (and DVDs) direct from the artists at performances, where they get 50 percent of the take, not via Amazon or some digital intermediary who takes 99 percent of the cash and maybe, if they feel like it, gives the artists less than 1 percent.
Oh, check out Giants in the Trees and Golden Gardens, they are excellent!
I'll be buying more at performances like UpStream this summer.
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I don't buy CDs or LPs anymore, they just take up space on my shelves. Especially the CDs, which I rip and then basically never touch again. A lot of the artists I like are on Bandcamp, where 85-90% of the take goes straight to the artist, so I like buying music there rather than at shows.
But I make sure to buy a t-shirt or a patch or even just some stickers at shows instead.
Who wants some SJW (Score:2)
With physical copies that music is safe with the person who enjoys music.
Safe from brands and political SJW who feel they can ban digital music.
CD is still the best (Score:2)
1) Better, uncompressed quality on CD.
2) No DRM crap to block access to the recording, its safely and durably stamped onto disc permanently and playable on any non internet connected CD player.
CDs are sort of becoming a nostalgia item, hearkening back to the pre internet days, the era of fancy hi-fi systems and CD players with fancy controls and LCD readouts, while remaining the most practical and best quality format available, surpassing the durability of other nostalgia platforms such as Vinyl .
Clearly, C
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I never had all that many CD's, maybe 50 - 60. But even I've found a few here and there in the last couple years that won't play anymore in a standard CD player. The disks are in good shape, very few if any scratches, I'll have to try them on my computer and see if I can get anything out of them. They're coming up on twenty years old and been stored along with all my other discs that still play.
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Nah, the CDs is simply an obsolete format for data. Lossless downloads are better.
This just in (Score:2)
Cars with drivers, and horses, combined, are outselling self-driving cars.
How much of the "CDs and vinyl are outselling" is CDs and how much is vinyl? I suspect it isn't 50/50.
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Whoops, the article does say. And it isn't 50/50, although it's far more vinyl than I'd expect.
Lack of digital longevity.... (Score:1)
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That's good. I love brutal slamming death metal, and I want more of it.