I hauled this woolly mammoth of a shopping bag (CD to show scale) to the post office yesterday, only to be informed by a knowing piece of paper on the door that it was Veteran’s Day, and the post was closed. Cue sad Charlie Brown music. I proceeded to take my mailing to dinner, at which point my friend kindly didn’t comment on our third party.
Physical releases: The expense! The environment! My back!
What’s the over-under on physical CD production, do we think? Five (ten?) years, and we’re all digital, with special-edition physical releases only?
Depends on (a) capacity for practical digital delivery of CD quality, since some of us still listen to music on non-portable devices; and (b) the willingness for suppliers such as iTunes to ensure that every album they sell includes the accompanying “packaging” – by which I mean the “back cover” and the booklet in some digital form, not just the front cover art.
The lack of those two things in digital downloads is what keeps me wedded to the physical CD format. (Aside from more subjective things such as liking the physical aspect of a CD collection and the visual/tactile/spatial side of browsing such a collection.)
Keep in mind that many people in the Western world have a visual/reading bias (vide the education system) and so that element is important even in an aural medium. Hence music video in the pop world and for many other genres the CD booklet.
We may have to accept the fact that the quality of downloads may never equal that of the factory-pressed CD (some believe, as I did at one time, that CDs were already a step down in quality from LPs, but that’s for another time to argue), but that “the vast public” couldn’t give a crap because they can’t tell the difference anyhow.
Sad Charlie Brown music? Wassamatter? Don’t you like Vince Guaraldi??
David–the quality of downloads has already reached, in many cases, the quality of pressed CDs. Many digital music stores still sell files encoded with lossy compression, but increasingly files are being offered with lossless compression (often bundled with non-DRM encoding). In fact, if you don’t think the quality of CDs is good enough, digital downloads may soon be higher quality. The SACD format failed because not enough people cared about the higher quality to invest in the new hardware they would need to play them, but with digital downloads all you need is enough file space and the right codec and you can use whatever quality you want. Modern recordings are often made at 96K but then compressed down to 44.1K because that’s the standard for CD, and losslessly compressed digital downloads are usually 44.1K also as a result. But there’s no reason that the digital downloads can’t be mastered at 96K and encoded losslessly at that rate. We’ll probably see it soon.