Continuing with CDs?

i wouldn't really part with them unless i had one of those fancy things that lets you use your mp3s on a good stereo, but it's like i just picked u a real nice old NAD cd player for only $30 off craigslist so why bother.

plus yeah like ned said it's gonna be sweet in the next few years, lots of crewsh older stuff for dirt cheap.

although...it is weird seems like some CDs are really picking up in value on ebay, out of print stuff...

Yeah I don't see anything that indicates that rare CDs are any less valuable then they ever were.

I am keeping my cds because I want backups in case I have hard drive failure. Even with two hard drive copies of my music, I prefer to have the backup. Also, I may want to rip at a higher bitrate later once hd prices come down.

I'm going to keep my CD's in case I ever need to build a fortress of solitude out of them, Jor-El stylee

a) no, except for ones i get sick of.
b) no
c) i download tracks and sometimes albums, but if i really like what i'm hearing i'll buy it in CD or vinyl form. artwork, liner notes, etc.

i'll never say never though, because maybe someday in the distant future i'll sell everything and have it all digitized.

I'm keeping my CDs.

I'm too lazy to sell and also I have a suspicion that some kind of new digital format will emerge (MP5?) that will make MP3s sound tinny and useless, and that I'll want to re-rip my CDs.

I still buy cds and vinyl. I will keep them all unless I needed the money.
I barely download now, but like always, I still try to buy what I downloaded as long as I liked it.

im continuing! cd's are beautiful

1. No, never.
2. I will keep them as the art objects/media that they are.
3. Until I can buy whole albums from iTunes or Amazon as .wav files, I will continue buying essential CDs.

A lot of good reasons to hang onto CDs in this thread. I still enjoy cases and liner notes and having a good thing around to throw my disposable income at. In a lot of ways, I also find them easier to store and maintain than digital music, where you need at least two forms of backup and need to keep an organized file/folder structure together if you're going to find stuff easily. Finally, I still can hear the difference between reasonably good-quality CDs and mp3s, and with formats, storage methods, etc. changing frequently keeping CDs around seems like less of a long-term headache.

I'll still buy a lot, taking advantage of the lower cost and because I like having the little cardboard boxes from Caiman in the post to look forward to after returning from work.

I keep the price stickers on my CDs, and it amazes me just how much I was paying for music in the 90s. £15 - £16 for some CDs was not unusual.

ridic

its like 12 bux tops for me now. unless its brand new and too good

I'll continue keeping 100s of cds in a sock drawer which I occasionally pull out for a car ride. I wont sell them. But I oughta clean them all. I hate when a cd skips and I hate how I lost some of my cds even though I dont listen to any of my cds much. But I did lose Roxy Music - The Early Years and Tangerine Dream - Rubycon. I broke Thrakattak. And I can't remember what else at the moment. Kinda sucks. Kinda not.

Those of you who sell off your CDs, someday your hard drive is gonna fail. If you're lucky, you'll have it backed up to another drive. But then that one could fail as you're trying to dump it to your new hard drive. Then I will point and laugh.

i hate that too, captain -- i'm actually making a list of CD's i have that are too scratched up/missing. i replace a few ever year

it's like i just realized how to properly take care of a cd.

Fastnbulbous accurate enough, which is why the CDs I sell back are the ones I never listen to, or have only heard once and thought, "Nice" and never went back to at all. Ergo, why keep 'em around?

I moved into a new place two months ago and never bothered taking my CDs out of their boxes. I have a few lying around that I've bought recently, but there's no real reason for me to have them out, since the majority are on my iTunes/iPod, anyway.

Back when I started to download albums, I told myself that if I really liked something I downloaded I'd buy it on CD. But then it just seemed silly to go to the trouble of buying it, only to put it on a shelf and forget about it as soon as it was out of its shrink wrap.

Now the albums I buy are the ones I simply can't find online. I don't use p2p, but I can find most major new indie releases on a couple of choice websites or through friends. So what I buy ends up being not necessarily indicative of what I'm really excited about. A lot of times this amounts to used CDs I stumble across and take a chance on.

Those of you who sell off your CDs, someday your hard drive is gonna fail.
This is exactly right — CDs have become nothing more than backup.

http://www.sevenoaksart.co.uk/images/record1.gif

1) nah, I'm the kind of person who saves everything
2) ???
3) I never exclusively bought CDs, it was always a mix of vinyl, cassette (back in the day), or mp3 formats. I see no reason why this will change for me in the near future.

1) too lazy really - and they're not worth that much anyway
2) never completely stopped buying vinyl, so it's not even an accurate record
3) I''ve bought maybe 6 cds this year and maybe 300 LPs (and some cassettes, second hand for the car)

Also, I may want to rip at a higher bitrate later once hd prices come down.

yeah i thought about that. A couple weeks ago I embarked on digitizing my collection, starting with albums I didn't like that much; I ripped ~ 30 cds @ 320 which is fine for those but my main collection I'm probably gonna want to do in flac or whatever for posterity but i haven't done the math on what i'll need for space. I got 2 500G drives on black friday and I was gonna send one back but maybe I won't. than again i've been latched to rhapsody pretty hard lately and soon even the mp3s might be ancillary to how i'm listening to music. so much up in the air.

soon as I'm satisfied with backing up, and keeping the habit, I'm selling all my CDs. I need the space and I need the money.

i've sold all of my cds. still buy vinyl, which i also sell sometimes. while it's impractical, it retains its value better (and escalates in value far more often) and is more 'fun'. sue me

I keep the price stickers on my CDs, and it amazes me just how much I was paying for music in the 90s. £15 - £16 for some CDs was not unusual.

We still quite frequently pay $25-$35 AUD for some CD albums in this country. And they wonder why ppl use torrents.

resolved, did you just rip your CDs into FLAC format and keep them on your hard drive or something?

i ripped the ones that deserved it to FLAC + mp3 (for ipod), most of them just to variable rate mp3. and then a lot i just sold without bothering.

Will you bother trying now to sell off your existing CDs?

maybe. next year I might be compelled to "monetize" my vinyl collection.

Will you leave them as a record of 80s/90s to early 00s buying?

hate to say it but after sitting there unplayed for awhile they just take up space.

Will you continuing buying CDs selectively alongside downloading, for reasons of completing certain artists or genres?

Barely. I stream music on my computer, listen to old CDs less & less often. CDs/itunes I buy as gifts.

First off, CDs are still the primary way i listen to music, and I don't download very often.

1.) I'll hang onto my CDs for a long, long time, until they rot away (none of them have). I stopped selling back CDs a few years ago, because I tend to regret it later on. I used to regularly purge my collection of stuff if I hadn't played it in awhile, but there are too many CDs that I'm kicking myself now for selling then.

Plus, it always killed me when I tried to sell stuff that I knew was of really high musical quality or that someone would love to have, and the clerk would offer a pathetic couple of bucks (usually less!) for it. Most used stores never offer very much for CDs, and now when I think about it, the best offer I've ever received (about $3 for a CD, not common at all) is just not worth it to me. I'd rather hang on to the album, sorry, then take your 50 cents.

2. I'll keep my CDs as much more than just a record of this particular time, as they have fucking music on them!!

3. I'll probably buy CDs for quite a while. As others have mentioned, there are so many good finds on used CDs right now, it's great. So much stuff that I would never expect to find in used shops. It's only going to get better over the next few years, too.

Newbury Comics usually gives about $3 per CD.

1) No - mainly because CDs are not worth much now, particularly when trying to trade them in at a record store.

2) Most of the CDs I listen to regularly have been ripped now, but I'll keep them as a backup and also because of the possibilty of ripping in higher quality formats/higher bitrates later.

3) I still buy CDs sometimes but nowhere near as often as I used to - I've gone from half a dozen a week in 2001 to a couple a month now. But if I see a box set at a cheap price I'll probably buy it.

Those of you who sell off your CDs, someday your hard drive is gonna fail. If you're lucky, you'll have it backed up to another drive. But then that one could fail as you're trying to dump it to your new hard drive. Then I will point and laugh.

I've never had a hard drive die on me ever before. Meanwhile in that time a lot of my records and CDs got damaged in a flood. Life's funneee.

I wonder how homeowner's insurance would cover a hard drive filled with burned FLACs. Are you just screwed or could you reasonably claim the full value of replacing them on iTunes or whatever?

i sold them on amazon btw, the run of the mill ones at least. you get a lot more money that way if you're prepared to go to spend an hour going packing/going to the post office every few days.

x-post
but when your hd dies it's all gone. and the probability is much higher than all your cds being destroyed at once...

word. i'm still reeling from getting over £30 for a tatty Sasha & Digweed CD. xp

what is with you hd-failure doomsayers? you have to fuck a hd up pretty bad before the data on it is completely irretrievable.

Oh I'm just curious from an insurance standpoint. Like what if someone broke into your house and stole your HD. Can you only claim the HD or could you reasonably claim the cost of replacing the MP3s (I just talked to my boss-a former underwriter--and he's gonna find out for me)?

once i had a hd which seemed perfectly ok. but suddenly it crashed. it had been formatted a couple of megabytes too high. when i reached the limit it was all over.

presumably it might differ according to the original source of the mp3s. like if you've bought them from digital sources in the first place you'll have the receipts etc to demonstrate this. if you've just ripped your cd collection i assume you'd be shit out of luck.

The downloading thread is bad for music. People need to see an entire album as an artistic statement, and not just pick single tracks.

The only positive thing is that people are at least less fixated on singles, able to see that there may be good tracks that aren't hit singles too. But generally, downloading is bad bad bad bad!

BAD!

Bad?

bad bad bad bad

On the insurance thing, pretty sure the only things that would be insurable would be receipted downloads, as you don't actually legally "own" the ripped mp3s if the CD is gone, thus they have no insurable value.

xpost

People need to see an entire hamburger as an artistic statement, and not just pick off the pickles or eat the grilled onions.

http://www.baronbob.com/hamburgercdholder.jpg

Snacking is destroying the meal preparation industry

home cooking is destroying the fast food industry.

The hamburger analogy isn't so hot. I prefer to think of an album as very much like a box of chocolates.

I don’t like Ornate Coleman; his playing is too fancy.

lol

A good friend was the manager of a local Barnes & Noble's music and video department back in the late-90s to mid-2000s, and seemingly he was given cart blanche to run it as basically a pretty fantastic independent CD and DVD shop. Got so many crucial albums and films there (with an occasional "family discount"). I remember him saying his B&N media department was like the most profitable in the US or something like that, because he actually made it a legit music geek hub. Then I moved away, and sometime in the mid-2000s it went under centralized corporate control, became unprofitable, and he hated it and quit. Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then.

― Soundslike, Friday, April 26, 2024

This was my experience! I bought so many Rykodisc reissues at B&N in the late '90s/early '00s: Big Star, Richard Thompson, for example. I could always find a more obscure Dylan album like Planet Waves. Bought some Robert Wyatt too.

"Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then."

they still have dvd/cd/vinyl sections at B&N.

they all suck unless you are really jonesing for a criterion title and can't wait for the half-price sale that they have every week online. (okay, not every week, but it seems like they have one every week. and you want to ask...maybe make those half price prices your regular prices...???)

They only officially do the half-off Criterion sales twice a year, but they are always doing sales on other labels or doing BOGOs, 3 for 2's, stuff like that.

I actually haven't been in a B&N since the pandemic, but by then the music selection was mostly vinyl, and a small selection of CDs, with a emphasis on budget ($5-7) catalogue titles.

everything seems really expensive when i look. and not just the vinyl. CDs too.

it really seems like criterion does those sales more than twice a year! i feel like i see them on my facebook a ton. but maybe it just feels like it.

Well, there are other retailers doing sales too (including Criterion themselves).

The big problem with B&N is most of their stuff is MSRP because they want to sell memberships to their "Reader's Club" or whatever it is for the built-in small discounts.

It still feels funny to me when I go to Target that the music section is all vinyl. If only they had a cassette section too then I'd really be reliving my youth.

oh that's what i meant that criterion had sales online. not B&N. and they seem fairly frequent. and i can only imagine that anyone wanting criterion DVDs just waits for a sale to buy them. which makes me wish that the actual price was just lower instead of this *SALE* thing that people do. chains like to do it a lot. i don't know why it bugs me. i either buy Rao's sauce or Victoria sauce because every week one of them is half off. they alternate weeks. they could make them each $7.99 as a regular price and i would be happier. but there is arcane business school retail logic behind it.

x-post

the Target near me is basically 50% Taylor Swift vinyl, with some space reserved for Billie Eilish, LDR, Kacey Musgraves, Pink Floyd, some others...plus Legend by Bob Marley.

It's all so boring. No wonder it seems like everyone get hyped over TS, she's one of like a dozen musicians who are pushed in your face all the time. Sure, the variety is there online but out in the wild it's not the case. I remember going to a local random supermarket in Eau Claire in the late '80s and buying up a ton of Iron Maiden and Dio and rap cassettes because they, like many other random places, carried everything.

it feels pretty evident the music industry just wants to lean heavily on a small number of massive artists rather than bothering with anyone else. it feels like they follow the model of movie studios, sure they'll release something prestigious for the end of the year but it's all superheroes and sequels the rest of the time.

Luckily we don't have to follow the industry and we can find things we do like. Otherwise we end up like boomers wishing for a return to ye olde days.

I do wish Criterion titles were on half price sales as often as Scott thinks they are. Over here in the UK its different.

Isn't a lot of stuff that's on Criterion in the US on some other imprint, like Arrow, in the UK?

there's some crossover but it's hard to know, i think Shout Factory and Arrow also share a lot of the same releases, maybe even moreso.

re the CD section at B&N, i think the one nearest to me has about 100 cds, filed away in a corner, with no rhyme or reason to the selection.

Yeah there's a lot of scattered licensing about, I think. (I'm just glad Arrow and Severin et al are now pretty well established over here -- I would have been indulging in all the recent sales but I need to save up money for a trip soon!)

When I was still growing up, several miles away (like a quick and easy 10 minute drive) there was an intersection with a Borders and Barnes & Noble, and if I couldn't find a new album at the library, I'd end up at either of those stores and listened to what I was looking for at one of their listening stations. Totally pointless now but before high-quality music streaming was a reality, it was awesome. Easily my favorite stores to visit, kind of amazing there used to be places like that all over the country and now they're pretty much gone. I think Fopp in the UK and maybe some stores in Japan are comparable, albeit without the books, magazines and the Starbucks inside.

did anybody here ever order from cheap-cds.com (maybe without the dash) in the 90s? great prices, cheap shipping, extremely bare bones fast minimal user interface, black courier font formatted on white background

I might've but can't remember. I remember a lot of CD shops online like that in the '00s. My favorite was one in the UK that was my introduction to imports - it was surprisingly affordable to buy direct from them since the exchange rate was good and shipping rates were much cheaper then. (They eventually got bought out by HMV.)

RIP CDbaby

anecdotally, my local record store has been selling more CDs lately than they have in decades...

as someone who loves buying vinyl, it's really disheartening to walk into almost every record store now and see nothing i want to buy for the money they're asking. it's akin to the baseball card boom circa the late '80s/early '90s, when the new cards for suddenly hot-shit players were going for $50 apiece, and sports card dealers were starting to only deal w/collector scum or price speculating newbies. i'm not saying you won't get more bang for your buck from a Lana Del Rey record vs a David Justice rookie card, but i feel like it's making a lot of people quit the game in the same way, what you get from the hobby isn't worth the cost anymore. and therefore CDs are the cheap and frequently higher quality path to hearing so much music.

however i've got rules, there are some things i'm always and forever buying on vinyl.

used vinyl in many stores isn't worth the trouble, but new stuff from indie labels still falls somewhere from $14 to the low twenties, so that's what I buy (and used CDs, where they have them). I don't touch the (mostly major label) new stuff that's over $30 for a single lp.

I listen to vinyl because I like the way 50s and 60s records sound on vinyl.

The new stuff scares me, though. I saw a Kiss hits record at WalMart for 30 bucks. I wouldn't sit through an entire Kiss record on vinyl, CD or anything. I'm a singles/ mixes person.

I buy a decent number of CDs these days, and it feels funny that the reasons are the exact same ones I started buying some vinyl in the 90s. It's a cheap way to access stuff that's non-available or stupidly expensive on streaming/vinyl. (It'd be cheaper and easier to do a digital archive, I know, but I worry if I started I'd have the urge to stockpile every last thing I'd ever liked, and that's not what I want. I want to patronize stores and find things I care about and have them sitting out reminding me they exist.) Instead of old vinyl in the bottom bin costing 10-20% of what a new CD did, now the old CDs down there cost a tenth of what new vinyl does. Instead of records opening up a world of 60s/70s albums that never really hit any other format (exotica! forgotten funk!), now CDs open up something similar for the 90s/00s (IDM compilations! forgotten experimental!). Even the process of looking through used CDs in a store feels like looking at records used to, where everything's basically just a few dollars and you never know what treasure you'll find -- whereas over in the vinyl bins the excitement of finding something fun tends to be immediately deflated by looking at the price. I still buy both, but if I want something for listening purposes and the record is $50, I would absolutely rather take ten $5 CDs, I'm ... not not an idiot, but still

Just went to give the +/- 180 CDs to the book shop with the vinyl-only music section, but the owner wasn't there at the moment. Will try again tomorrow.

But as a CD nerd, I'm excited that I'm going to roughly double their selection, and instantly giving them a whole quite decent CD selection, preparing for the coming Gen Z music geeks who dig CDs because vinyl has become a stupid expensive gimmick as per posts above...

My Target sells the Swift stuff that omar little mentioned plus a few archival vinyl things like Abbey Road, The Dark Side of the Moon, and, of course, Rumours (maybe the most popular of all).

i'm glad i live somewhere where used vinyl is still affordable! all my pals who have stores have awesome prices. well, byron has crazy prices but he's selling crazy stuff. even he has really great used CD prices and even bargains in his new arrivals. i sell a lot of CDs. in my store and online. i've been lucky to have a good source for the last couple of years. i feel like i've always sold a lot of used CDs and i've been around for 15 years. new vinyl. yeah, what are you gonna do? just support labels and bands you like online. buy their vinyl on bandcamp or on their websites. that way they get all the money.

if I want something for listening purposes and the record is $50, I would absolutely rather take ten $5 CDs

NABISCO OTM

Isn't a lot of stuff that's on Criterion in the US on some other imprint, like Arrow, in the UK?

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Monday, 29 April 2024 18:58 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

BFI release a good bit of it.

Arrow do great sales a couple of times a year, too. In fact I picked up a few things in their Easter sale a few weeks ago.

By the by, 4K Blu-rays are region-free, which makes collecting a whole lot easier.

did anybody here ever order from cheap-cds.com (maybe without the dash) in the 90s?

I bought a lot of CDs from that site, one of the first online stores I ever used

I'm really trying to stock up on a lot of electronic music I like before they're no longer available anywhere. Nabisco otm about that genre, there are so many compilations and DJ mixes which have zero presence in the world except on used cds, if you're lucky enough to find them, or maybe a YouTube video upload, which may or may not stay up there forever.

Pulled me up short to think back and realise that the only physical CD I’ve bought in the last 2 years was a small/local thing from a shop in Tokyo, March 2023. I haven’t been 12 months without buying a CD since 1987.

One upshot about expensive vinyl is that it’s made it easier to buy nice gifts for people. There was a long stretch where getting music for anyone I know wasn’t going to be met with an enthusiastic response, but now I can just buy a brand-new reissue of an album they like that they otherwise coveted but didn’t want to splurge on.

just to give you an idea of the allovertheplaceness of what i sell online when it comes to CDs. these are some from this week. all $10 and under except for the KLF which was $35.

Ken Nordine - Colors: A Sensuous Listening Experience

Jontavious Willis - Spectacular Class

Catherine Russell - Inside This Heart Of Mine

Adrian Belew - Op Zop Too Wah

Roberta Flack - First Take

Stratovarius - Elements Pt.2

Meredith Monk - Turtle Dreams

Bob Martin - Midwest Farm Disaster

The KLF - Chill Out

Turtle Dreams is so good, almost as good as Dolmen Music

That Ken Nordine is classic!