Continuing with CDs?

one of my fave elvin impulses...

http://www.birkajazz.com/graphics2/jonesHeavySounds.jpg

i have a nice copy of Everywhere. sounds so good.

60's impulse vinyl....mmmmmmm.....oh MP3 peoples i wish i could play you some records...........

I do remember my copy of Everywhere sounded great, and all the Impulse records I've seen are super heavy.

Reading through this thread nobody has seemed to mention the biggest benefit of physical copy (though not really vinyl) over digi - browsing, keeping track of what you've got

― Arctic Noon Auk

Read again - this concept is central to my argument against hard drive stacks and mention it at least 4 times. Never new they made records without spine labels; too bad.

i challenge any1 2 read a record spine from more than 50 cm a way

When you know your LP collection the spine only has to remind you of the album it is, not tell you specifically. Colour, tatters, etc.

When you know your LP collection the spine only has to remind you of the album it is, not tell you specifically. Colour, tatters, etc.

a well worn battered spine = classic album.

One actual risk is that a good but kinda beat spine gets overlooked when you're just kinda browsing your collection deciding what to throw on. Especially if it's alphabetically next to a big chunk of one artist - the eye can kinda whisk past the "Beatles section" etc. But then when you do stumble on this record you've forgotten about for ages, it's a treat.

One of the most beaten spines in my collection is the white-label promo of Kick Out The Jams. I wince every time I see the spine, because I always forget how beaten it is (I've had it for 30 years).

Wish all spines were so easy to read. That Grouper CD Dragging Dead Deer is easy to miss.

This thread has inspired me to, with no clear direction in mind, consolidate my bindered CDs from two binders (a big honking 128-er that I picked up when I was DLing Survivor episodes from IRC and burning one at a time as Video CDs a decade ago, and a 72-er that i've had since forever), down to just the one small one, to contain only things of Sentimental Value, or just ones where the album really WOULD be missing something without the gloriously lavish 24-page lyrics book or whatever.

As projects go this is a fairly stupid one, since it'll take me days and reduce my storage and future-moves footprint by only the size of a biggish 3-ring binder. Also, it means my hard drive is rapidly filling up with the music I listen to least these days and which would give anyone who saw it the most distorted image of my tastes. But... it's oddly satisfying to throw the damn discs and booklets into the trash. Letting go of baggage you didn't know had become baggage and all that.

i still download instead of streaming, but if i was 20 years younger i'd definitely be streaming.

― rushomancy, Thursday, April 23, 2015 12:40 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

curious as to what you mean by this. Why is streaming a young person's game?

I think it mean that downloading is an old habit from when streaming was rubbish, and now they can't quite break away from it.

I also identify a bit with the "But I need to have something!" impulse.

I just am surprised by the idea that twenty years separates "those who are cool with downloading" and "those who are cool with streaming", esp since I'm in my mid-30s and have always thought dling was a gyp compared to CDs

For me (legal) downloading has proven a skippable part of music distribution's evolution

I never purchased a download. My iPod contains stuff that I get from labels and publicists who send me them even though I don't do shit anymore. If I like something, I buy it physically; if I do not, I delete it.

I did just sign up for Spotify which will make for listening to new things to check for quality and I'll buy the stuff I like.

I buy downloads all the time. There's a surprising amount of stuff available from Amazon MP3 that's not available on CD.

in the 90s it was probably more moral to pirate music than actually buy it off the record companies. Not sure what's changed.

These last few entries bring about some good points; one of which is value. A hi-bit mp3 has less than ¼ of the data present in a wav - so the pricing should START there. Lack of physical media brings the value down even more -- so a downloaded mp3 is only worth 15-20¢ on the dollar as compared to an actual CD. Add in the requisite portion for marketing and royalties and i still can't get much higher than 30-35¢ on the dollar.

So, a $12 CD offers about the same value to me as a $4 mp3 download.

Seriously; mp3s cut out distribution expenses, retail margins, shrinkage, the need for inventory, printing and materials cost, etc. I don't think the illegal download boon would have been so industry-shattering if the fat cats had simply allowed the price of CDs to go down as their costs became far more advantageous than that of LPs -- manufacturers could have easily made new CDs in the $6-8 range and may have kept the ship from sinking alltogether.

Not sure what's changed.

― Arctic Noon Auk

One thing that hasn't changed is that the record companies are still too greedy -- looking at the latest Kendrick Lamar album (via Amazon) puts the CD at $15.88 and the mp3 at $14.49 -- the record companies are the ones saying that these formats are of the same value (or maybe they say they have to keep the mp3 price that high to offset illegal dl's). Either way, this pricing structure forces more mp3 customers into seeking illegal sources.

every new cd ever sold on earth should have been $9.95 as of jan, 1, 2000. i'd still be buying CDs if that had happened. also, every top 40 single should have been available in stores for $3.99 on CD too. would have bought a TON of those.

They should have been priced that way for economic or for philosophic reasons?

in the 90s it was probably more moral to pirate music than actually buy it off the record companies.

No it probably wasn't.

they should have been priced that way so that people kept buying them! people - myself included - got so sick of those 16.99 CD prices. and those are still standard prices in the 3 or 4 CD stores that still exist. i would buy 5 ten dollar CDs any day, but i have a problem buying ONE $17.99 cd. in a lot of cases, i would end up not buying any at all. the 2000's were not the go go 90's when people were spending hundreds of dollars on CDs at stores. huge stacks of CDs going out the door.

x-post

i was buying tons of records (both new and used) AND tons of CDs in the 90's. i bought so many CDs it was crazy. anything that wasn't rent/food/beer money went to records and CDs. mostly cuz i would go to tower or wherever in philly and be stunned by how much stuff was finally available. there was an electronics/record store in philly back then that had like 20 shirley collins CDs in their shirley collins section! they had a shirley collins section! so, i went a little overboard back then.

every new cd ever sold on earth should have been $9.95 as of jan, 1, 2000.

I'd put it earlier, like starting around 1989. That's when manufacturing costs of CDs were lower than those of LPs, but of course the price of CDs was nearly double.

Since everyone was buying CDs -- new shit and, most crucially, re-buying old shit -- what incentive did the labels have in 1989-1998 to lower prices? Not only did they go in the opposite direction -- I think retail prices topped out at $18.98 for a single CD -- but the majors colluded on price-fixing.

also, every top 40 single should have been available in stores for $3.99 on CD too. would have bought a TON of those.

Ditto. And that's why the majors killed the single. Why make a $3.99 single available when it's vastly more profitable for the $18.98 album to be the only way to own the song?

i was buying tons of records (both new and used) AND tons of CDs in the 90's. i bought so many CDs it was crazy. anything that wasn't rent/food/beer money went to records and CDs. mostly cuz i would go to tower or wherever in philly and be stunned by how much stuff was finally available. there was an electronics/record store in philly back then that had like 20 shirley collins CDs in their shirley collins section! they had a shirley collins section! so, i went a little overboard back then.

― scott seward, Sunday, April 26, 2015 2:42 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I did this, too.

re: the Shirley Collins section!, I vividly remember when the ESP-Disks were first reissued. Tower in Chicago had a huge display, complete with the usual Tower huge mock-ups of the label logo, dedicated to ESP-Disk (which a friend told me about, and I didn't believe him until I saw it). It was completely surreal.

xp

Clearly they had an incentive not to lower prices - but in retrospect it's just as clear that any short-term gain they got from jacking prices up to near $20 was more than outweighed by what happened after those prices became uncompetitive.

I was thinking about the excessive price of CDs the other day, along the same lines of how the biz might have been saved. Wonder how it could have gone differently though, really. I mean in such an overheated market, what shareholder at any of the companies would have nodded along with charging less for something that's clearly selling like hotcakes at the inflated price? And what if the retailers just kept the prices of Company A's discs up at the level of Company B and raked it in? I don't know how that stuff really works though. In hindsight, they definitely might have experimented more... offer simultaneous bare-bones and 'deluxe' versions of big releases, see which does better, see if the low price gets made up on volume, see if you can dial back some of the big marketing expenses too.

I 100% agree that a lot of albums that got pirated would have been purchased had the price been lower. Downloading + burning was a hassle, even with Napster etc. It would have slowed the shift, at least, or given them time to harden fence-sitters into staunch anti-pirates.... or more importantly, to establish and nourish the habit of buying a record via an even-cheaper download system before everybody got used to doing it through piracy. The industry was just such a lumbering machine, though, and they happened to be selling something that was, by bad luck, incredibly easy to pirate even by 56K modem: 2-3 megabyte MP3s, in an industry largely built around the use of two or three songs to induce buying an entire CD, without half as many lost aspects of the experience as would keep people from pirating books (for example).

As well, outside of the reissue market, the CD as a package didn't offer other inducements, simply because of how they had come to be used socially. The fancy booklet was nice to look at once, or twice, but basically irrelevant once the disc makes its way to the rear-view mirror, the binder, the disc changer. The jewel case was convenient but ugly, fragile, and unsatsifying to manipulate in many ways. Future generations will never understand the small irritations of jamming a thick booklet back into a case and having the edges caught and torn up by the ugly little plastic tabs. The vinyl resurgence ultimately benefited a bit from having this convenient negative examples of things no one had previously rhapsodized about with regard to LPs. Meanwhile, everyone was ready to believe the pirate ideology because they'd already been grumbling for ages about paying $16 for a CD with three good tracks and a bunch of filler and skits. The Napster-Limewire era has many of the same roots as the short-lived boom of dedicated used-CD stores in depreciated strip malls.

Same experience when Tower opened a store in fall '98. Columbia House used to do a decent job of offering John Cale, Funakdelic, and Raincoats records, and I recently discovered Amazon, but the Tower was a big deal -- suddenly everything I wanted.

Don't underestimate the CD selections at Barnes & Noble too, also the home of hard to find stuff like Ryko reissues.

(Ground covered better by others, sorry for the long post!)

As a teen with a $5 weekly allowance it was pretty obvious to me that the action was in budget-priced catalog titles. There WAS plenty of $9.95 stuff available, but they were mostly Paul McCartney reissues. Which was fine for me! Actual 90s albums I got at the used CD stores or off of friends, nine times out of ten, unless I'd gotten a gift certificate as a birthday present. So I do think they missed out on a lot of sales they could have made at, say, $12... but I don't know if it would have made up the difference, or postponed the end by THAT much. There's an alternate history where the Internet doesn't come along for a few more years, and the market finishes adjusting to the CD, and the 'album' actually fades away as the primary unit. I doubt I'd have bought many $3 or $4 singles, but I'd have bought a lot of $6 or $8 EPs if it was clear that they were all killer, no filler.

I remember Best Buy, of all places, having a decent selection (I bought Tim Buckley's Starsailor and a bunch of the Sun Ra reissues on Evidence there), and everything was $11 or lower.

Best Buy had a decent selection until, like, four years ago.

I bought two Yoko albums and X's first four in Best Buy a decade ago. No complaitns.

Yeah, Best Buy CD section was a pretty big part of my teenage life, even just for window-shopping things. And that's definitely where those cheap Paul McCartney discs came from! I think generally things were a little cheaper than at mall stores like Sam Goody, which I went into very rarely and mainly for the small used section. I guess that's just in the nature of big-box stores with more shelf space and bigger volume discounts (maybe?). Anyway, it was a store that my parents would be going to for other reasons so I was more apt to end up there.

$16.99 CD's was nothing compare to £16.99 CD's in the UK! generally discounted CD's cuz they were in the charts were £12.99-£13.99 which was far too much. Tower,HMV,Virgin sometimes had £18.99 CD's.

rip off

Sam Goody's, Record Bar, Camelot -- their prices through the early 2000s were INSANE, even cassettes at the dawn of the nineties. But I bought most of Bowie's Ryko stuff at Record Bar in 1993 when my local record store didn't stock them.

Basically, any record store in a mall was fucking eyes-popping-out-of-my-skull expensive in the 90s and 00s. But Tower always had decent prices, especially for Prestige/Original Jazz Classics and Blue Note reissues. Impulse titles were more expensive. For rock stuff, Best Buy was at least tolerable, plus there was a place on the highway, the name of which I can't remember, that was $2-5 cheaper than any mall store in NJ.

Yeah, I avoided mall stores like the plague. They were the only places I ever saw that actually sold CDs for list price.

Tower Records here was by far the most expensive. about £5 more expensive sometimes. It was great for imports though or the mid-price CD sales like 3 for £15

I guess that's just in the nature of big-box stores with more shelf space and bigger volume discounts (maybe?).

CDs were loss leaders for stores like Best Buy so that people would buy TVs and washing machines.

Really? How lossy? I mean, they were a ton of square footage. Not saying I don't believe it, but my first guess would be that it's more like movie theaters (as I understand them!) - just about cover overhead on the ticket sales, make the profit on concessions. But I really don't know.

I may have bought a couple dozen titles from mall stores when i was in my teens, but once i found the key indie stores (in just about every college town) they were the only ones that got my money. And they usually had fair prices, or at least, a fair used section to peruse. Sure, i took advantage of pricing in the early days of CD Universe (where i think i bought like 8 Fela two-fers when they came out) and a few years at Best Buy (early days of Dick's Picks got me in a bunch of times). But still, most of my cash went to the indies.

Anybody else remember the Planet Music chain from the mid 90s? I spent so much money at the Memphis location when they first opened. A CD store the size of a Walmart...that was a dangerous concept to me. I don't think they lasted too long.

Planet Music was part of Border's, whom they were folded into around '97 or so.

I think I wrote about this on the ask the old-timers thread, but I got my first CD player for 8th grade graduation in spring '97. At the time both Best Buy and Circuit City had promotions where no single disc album would be priced more than (iirc) $12.99. By that winter Best Buy had quietly done away with that, with much catalogue material getting bumped to $14.99.

Didn't the price of cds drop quite a lot in early 00s? I recall a lot of £15 cds in the late 90s then very few things being that high in the 00s. Especially with Fopp, Music Zone and similar cheap stores that followed.

I'm struggling to think when I stopped buying new CDs. Maybe Reveal (spring 2001)... in the $15-16 range feels right. At that point, I was pretty much switched over to vinyl. I only bought the CD in that case because IIRC the vinyl was available mainly as some expensive dumb novelty edition, like $26 for two ten-inches on colored vinyl or something. Or maybe it was just a regular record and really overpriced.

the F.Y.E. store closed across the street from me in january and the son of the guy who started TRANS-WORLD (who owned FYE and which used to be Strawberries) came in and told me that 40% of their business had been video games. which i already kinda knew. son of TRANS-WORLD looked like he really wanted to get out of town. he said they maybe should have paid more attention to the location. oops!

part of me wants to call Gamestop HQ and tell them to move into the space. no place anywhere near Greenfield that sells video games. or CDs now. you have to go to Newbury Comics in Northampton or the mall in Hadley to buy a new CD or DVD.