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Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Luddite. I don't hate technology. I love technology. My Ipod is one of my favorite items that I own. Where else can I store 15,000 plus and counting songs in one tiny device and have it with me where ever I go. Yes, I would be devastated if I lost all my CDs and Vinyl Albums to a hurricane (can you tell I'm from New Orleans, our first thought of a natural disaster is a hurricane) or other natural disaster, but at least I would have the music and in the end that's what counts.
But there's something about holding the music in your hands. Opening that cd case (if you can get it opened, they make them about as impermeable as Fort Knox) and pulling it out and marveling at the fact that this tiny little disc holds some great music. I'm one of those people that read all the linear notes too. I want to see who the artist thanks, who helped them, where they recorded the songs...I know kind of dorky, but that's just me.
The music industry is losing sales as if it was the Titanic trying to bail water out with a kids play bucket. Everyday you read the gloomy news about how bad sales on CDs are down. More and more big box stores are either closing, Tower anyone, or cutting back on the amount of music they carry. Most big box stores like Best Buy and Walmart basically carried music more of a device to just pull people into their stores with the hope that they would buy more once they got there. The music wasn't really there to make that much of a profit. But these stores are realizing that the music doesn't have that much of a draw on people now days.
I have to ask though, is it a tail wagging the dog type thing? If they cut back on the selections they carry than they're going to cause people not to venture in looking for the music. I know it's not that simple, but it's definitely not helping.
It's making it where you almost have to buy the music digitally. As you can tell from this site I'm a fan of music that's not considered mainstream or artists that aren't in the top 20, heck they aren't even in the top 200. It used to be I could go to Borders or a few other places and find a lot of these artists. Now when I want to find something that isn't a Big Name or being pushed by the Record Companies in the hope of becoming a Big Name I can't. No matter how hard I search I simply can't find the physical album.
Before I continue I have to say that I don't hate digital music. And I'm talking about legal digital music, not downloading songs off the internet and not paying for them, that's another whole post. I'm talking about getting the music from I Tunes or E Music or someplace like that. I enjoy the fact that I can download a song from somewhere and have it right that moment. But I like the option of having the choice of buying the album if I want.
Nowdays that choice is being taken away. As it gets harder and harder to find the album, or if you do the album is so expensive, it just gets so much easier to buy it as a digital download. From I Tunes you can buy almost any album for $9.99 (and I've read that the record companies have finally gotten them to offer albums for sell for more)and when I find that album I've been looking for somewhere and it's going to cost me close to twenty dollars, what choice do I have? I'll pay some more for the actual album, I just Buddy and Julie Miller's Written in Chalk for twelve dollars at Best Buy when I could have bought it off I Tunes for ten dollars and I don't mind. If I had bought it as a download I wouldn't have had the nice package it came in and the cool booklet in the cd. But when the price starts almost doubling I'm going towards digital.
I've been looking for Kelly Hogan cds for I don't know how long. I never can seem to find them. I went to I Tunes and they had both of them just waiting for me to purchase them. There are mail order sites, and some good ones with reasonable prices. I used to oder from Miles of Music but they went under. CD Baby is a really good one, with lots of great music with good prices and one I would recommend. But when you start adding postage and handling in to some of the prices from mail order, again the price starts to go up compared to the digital version. For under twenty dollars a month I get to download fifty songs from E Music.
The record companies don't help the situation when they continue to raise the price of cds and put out albums that people only want a couple songs off. It makes it easier for someone to want to just download the songs they want. Whatever happened to wanting to put out "albums", not just a collection of songs. Artists used to worry about all the songs on an album, what order to put them in, which ones to include, how the whole album sounded. Now too many just are content to make sure there are a couple good hits on the album. It doesn't help the sales of albums.
If these trends continue I can see a time when cds are almost non existence. If you want to buy music you're going to have to want to buy it in a digital format. Which in the long run, it's all about the music, and I have to appluad the fact that digital does make it easier to find stuff and getting the music is what's important. It's just that I'll feel a little sadder not to have the album itself sitting on my shelf.
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3 comments:
I hate not having something to hold in my hand as I begin to play the music ... albums rock, so much more than CDs...but CDs rock more than digital downloads.
But alas, you are correct...the distribution channels are - a changin' and we older folks need to get in line.
I agree with you 100%. Album better than cd better than digital. I love vinyl albums. When cds first came out I held out as long as I could before I bought a cd player, but in the end there was nothing you could do if you wanted to listen to music. And I think the same thing is happening with the change over from cd to digital.
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