EMI Exec Says 'The Music CD is Dead'

Anonycat writes "Alain Levy, the chairman of EMI Music, made a speech at the London Business School declaring 'the end of the music CD as it is.' He went on to say that most CDs are simply used for ripping onto digital audio players. Levy adds that by the beginning of 2007, all EMI CDs will come with additional material to make them more attractive to the consumer. Revenue from CDs still outranks revenue from downloads by better than 6 to 1. Would it take 'additional material' to get you to keep buying CDs? What material would you like to see?"

What Is He Smoking?

Would it take 'additional material' to get you to keep buying CDs?

I think that EMI executive found his way into one of his recording artist's 'secret stash' because his perception is not only different from statistics (6 to 1 is still a large advantage) but also different from what I desire as a consumer.

There are three letters that keep me buying CDs: DRM. As long as the only legal route to purchase music online is DRM encrypted music, I won't take part in it.

Granted, there are a ton of people out there that don't realize that they rely on iTunes to decrypt their music for them, I don't know how people can spend so much money without physically receiving anything. They aren't even getting a guarantee that they can play that file for the rest of their lives! They would have to burn it to a CD to ensure that.

I'll appreciate the added content to a CD but you don't need to do that to convince me that I should keep buying physical media. Hell, if you want to win back people, maybe you should get the word out that the iTunes TOS is downright shady [macnn.com]?

I will admit that the first thing I do with a CD when I buy a new one is CDex [sourceforge.net] it to high quality MP3 format. Then I put it on the shelf never to be played again. Why? Because that's my master copy that won't ever be scratched or stolen or lost. I may use MP3s to play my music, but I don't distribute or download them illegally. I'm well aware that I am copying them without consent but the only person that ever uses those copies is myself so I'm not afraid of a court case. Not one bit.

If the CD format is dead, you're going to have to figure out some way to get a physical master copy to me or I'm going to be upset mighty fast. I think if you remove this from people, some will start to miss it. And the second people realize that Apple's 99 cent deals were set by Steve Jobs & guarantee you nothing, I think there will be quite the demand for the 'ancient' physical media.

Is this just a case of 'I have it so hard! We need to change our business model, please feel sorry for us!' or am I the only one that thinks this dude is crying that the sky is falling?

Re:What Is He Smoking?

The CD will not be dead, so long as people still wish to hear a higher quality than they can get from compressed audio.

Or until record companies stop producing them.

Re:What Is He Smoking?

Yeah. Or until somebody creates a Free Lossless Audio Codec... That would be sweet. I wonder why nobody has done that yet?

Re:What Is He Smoking?

Oh come on. The codec programmers don't need that kind of FLAC.

He's smoking $100 bills

Or he would if CDs were actually dead. DRM'd music files are the wave of the future, after all. They get all the "buying multiple copies" syndrome that they did with Vinyl/cassette/CD that they did before without actually having to produce anything physical. Did you buy music from napster/rhapsody or whatever and now want an ipod? Great! Now buy it all in FairPlay format!

It looks like the record execs finally found a way to profit on this new business opportunity that everyone was saying to evolve to. They did, but only because they found a way to squeeze us a little harder.

Re:What Is He Smoking?

Since Weird Al put videos on his music CDs, and I discovered mix mode discs in my CD burning software, I've thought that most audio CDs should come with data tracks. That's before DRM was common on music CDs though, and I've nearly changed my mind, thanks to malicious companies like Sony Music who release rootkits to damage your computer.

Re:What Is He Smoking?

From the article:
...all EMI CDs will come with additional material to make them more attractive to the consumer.

Isn't that all was Sony was trying to do, give you some free software when you bought their CDs? ;)

Re:What Is He Smoking?

I really hope people return to this comment in five to ten years, if for no other reason than to ask "who was Bloc Party?"

Novel idea

Record companies will need to make CDs more attractive to the consumer

Instead of including a pile of other useless stuff that I don't care about with the CD, how about charging less than $20 for something that I (as someone who buys music online) consider to be worth at most $6, and can probably download for roughly that amount? This is of course assuming I actually want all of the songs on a given CD, which is rarely the case.

They keep calling themselves record companies, which pretty much explains the problem: just like records, they are trapped way back in a time before the age of the internet.

What material would I'd like to see?

$100 bills would be pretty frickin' cool

disconnected from reality.

Yup all cars now have ipod capable stereos and NOBODY uses CD's in a car stereo anymore.

I guess the guy is either mential or chooses to ignore the millions of people that make below $40,000 a year and cant afford a new stereo with ipod and ipod adapter or mp3 player plus rf transmitter...

Most everyone at my kids highschool still uses CD's in their CD player.

Bullshit

All I buy are CDs, so that I can listen to them in my nice home stereo. I can't at this point see myself buying a music download from, say, iTunes. CDs are convenient, sound good, and last a long time since I take care of my stuff. This exec is either living in the future or is out of touch with the average music buyer!

EMI Moderation System

Can we mod his comments -5, No Shit; or how about -5, Too little too late?

These ivory tower execs should have realized almost 7 years ago with the advent of Napster that the CD was dying. Frankly, I don't think the iTunes Music Store should have ever happened, they should have realized the market then and adapted, now they'll have to play catch up to those innovating the non-physical media market.

Lawsuits are not value added

Today I bought my first CD in over a year and it had big FBI copyright warnings all over it and a mail in questionaire with many survey questions that could be seen as incriminating and a good lead for the RIAA to follow up with a lawsuit.

If this is what they see as value added, I think they got the eqation backwards... it's supposed to be value added to the consumer's experience, not the record company's legal squad.

Simple:

"Unrevocable permission is granted by (insert name of record label here) to the purchaser of this CD to store the contents thereof in the digital medium of his or her choice in perpeturity and to use said contents without altering their length, content or intent for any non-commercial purposes the user so desires.", or something like that.

And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.

If they know 60% of their users..

"The CD as it is right now is dead," Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players.

If they realise that 60% of CD purchasers are ripping content then why on Earth are they trying to make it more difficult? If this guy is correct then increased anti-piracy measures will alienate more than half of their target audience.

Either he's wrong (I doubt it) or the music industry is trying to commit business suicide.

But I suppose we already knew that when they signed Ashlee Simpson. ;P

Hmmm

Lyrics and sheet music. Or tab. And a flash drive with properly-tagged high-bitrate mp3s on it.

Good music?

How about to put some good music on the CD? For a change...

Re:statements...

Customers are like me.

I don't think they are. The average person on Slashdot may be, but not the average consumer. I think a more accurate set of statements for most customers is:

1. I will pay for music that I like.
2. I do not know what DRM is.
3. I do not know how to remove DRM, and don't know why I would.

Probably the biggest boon for the record companies right now (at least in regards to DRM) is iTunes. For most people, iTunes just works. It's easy, it's cheap, they can listen to their music on their iPod which connects to their car and home stereo, etc. Most people don't have the issues with iTunes that are pointed out on Slashdot all of the time. And as long as iTunes works, the record companies can point to it as a successful, consumer-friendly implementation of DRM.

My wife doesn't know what DRM is. My mom doesn't know. Neither do most people I know. As long as the average consumer can access his/her music the way they normally do (via iPod/iTunes or on a CD), they won't know and won't care about DRM.

-dave

Bye bye Ms. American Pie.

CD's are in a weird limbo, because their adoption of a fricking solid digital format is still hanging fire. The only formats record companies agree on are awful...No good to consumers at all. Consumer unfriendly formatting pretty much keeps me buying CDs.

Besides, I'm not sure what CD profits being 6 times online profits actually means...I buy one CD, that's going to cost the same as what? 10 songs on iTunes? At least? So, maybe it's just that online sales, being mainly single songs, are exposing the obvious fact that most albums only have one or two good songs.

Rather have leprosy

Wasn't the last additional material we found on a CD a rootkit [eff.org]?

DVD: $9.99 Soundtrack CD: $17.99

To keep me buying CDs (or, rather, get me started again) the industry would have to lower prices drastically. When the CD of the "Bride and Prejudice" soundtrack costs twice as much as the movie itself, there is a serious problem with pricing.

Easy Sony

What material would you like to see?"

Why rootkits and virii for my computer of course!

Three letters...

What material would you like to see?

Anything that's not DRM'd.

I know, what are the chances of that, huh? On the other hand, what's the point in including extra fluff that's DRM'd in a package where the primarily content isn't DRM'd? "Here's the cake you ordered, sir. And to thank you for your patronage, we've included a bonus poisoned pill. It's sugary though, yum!" "Umm, thanks... I'll just eat the cake."

A fair price would be nice.

I still buy CDs. Now, let me say, what would attract me to purchase more of them would be a more justified price on them. I'd buy a hell of a lot more CDs if they were $5. I like album art. I like having a physical copy of my music... and I like albums, not just songs. My biggest worry about the explosion of downloadable music is that it will forsake the album in favor of mass-produced, repetitive singles.

The record labels keep trying to add shit to CD packages (dualDisc? yuck) and cut costs by using crappy cardboard cases, when they could just stea-- I mean, charge less money. I mean, how much do you think it costs to stamp a CD? It's not like a lot of that money gets passed on to the artist anyway...

CD alive, CD PLAYER is dead

He went on to say that most CDs are simply used for ripping onto digital audio players.

Traditional CD players may be dead, but the CD continues to be useful as a distribution medium. Clearly online distribution does not eclipse the traditional CD, in quality, in fundamentals (no DRM so you can rip to any player in any format, copy on all of your players at once [car, portable, PC], you get a permanent high-quality copy, particularly in DualDisc options, printed jacket + lyrics), and in extras (promotional material such as special editions with included DVDs etc).

The fact that listeners continue to buy CDs only to rip songs from show that the CD medium is very much alive and that online distribution can not match the value of CD-ripped music.

The traditional CD PLAYER on the other hand, may be dead.

Material

"What material would you like to see?"

How about starting by discontinuing litigation against your customer base? I stopped buying CDs when the lawsuits started. Granted, I was helped out by the music business itself. The stuff being sold today sucks so badly that I may not have bought it even if there weren't any lawsuits.

How could anyone ask for more?

The Musical-Idolatry Complex already controls me completely, just like Hunter S. Eisenhower predicted.

It feeds me proto-literate lyrics, expertly Photoshopped images of poseurs, titillating videos that don't make any sense, the instrumental talent of digitized samples and vocal harmonizers, and -- if I can afford it -- maybe a ticket to a lip-synched World Tour performance with a team of 30 dancers and some fireworks.

People who download music miss all of this. They aren't cool. They hurt the Artists.

That's why Mariah Carey made "Glitter", you bastards. She was hurt.

What about quality?

If not for CDs, where do I get "original" quality for my digital rips? I don't care about extras on CDs and crap. And yes, when I get my new CD home, I rip it, and really, the MP3s are the only method I actually listen to the music. But I like being able to a)know that I can rip the tracks at whatever bitrate and whatever method I want, and b)the original "master" recording is still sitting there on my shelf.

If the CD goes away, where will the baseline of quality be? Will 128k be where the bar is set?

Stop the "Only 1 good song" BS

OK I've been reading through this thread and I'm getting a little annoyed. Every other post I see is that "Maybe if there was more than one good song on the album, I'd buy it" crap. Ok for a lot of music out there this is true, but if you also pay attention, you will also realize that the one or two songs that are supposedly good are in fact utter dog shit. I guess I'm a little more critical of music. When I hear a catchy song, I recognize the fact that it is a catchy song and not really a good song. A catchy song means that there probably aren't any good songs on the album and the likelyhood of a second catchy song is slim. Buy an album by someone who puts out a song that is truly good, and by good, I mean is unique and requires talent to produce (both lyrically and instrumentally) and you will find that there are a lot of songs on that album that is just as good if not better (I'm one of those people that kinda likes the ten minute epic towards the end of the album that radio will never touch). I'm a very passive listener when it comes to CD's. I pop the cd in the car stereo and it will play until the album is over. Some I like, some I don't like, but overall I have a good idea of how talented the artist is. How can you say an artist is good when all you have heard is one song? One hit wonders get remembered for their songs, but no one remembers who performed it, and then some other band comes along and does a cover and the one hit wonder is forgotten, obscured by the shitty (usually) knock-off.

Ok I kinda went on a long rant there (and i don't feel like proof-reading so deal with it), but my point is that people really should think about listening to entire albums again. This is something that has been lost on the CD generation, and now even more on the internet download generation. Now I respect everybody's choice to listen to whatever they want however they want, but I think some of you out there will get a great experience out of listening to an album in it's entirety and have a better idea of what makes a good artist vs. a bad artist.

To give you a little background on what music I think is good:
1. Listening to a single track of Pink Floyd's Dark side of Moon is a crime against humanity.
2. I you ask me what my favorite Led Zeppelin song is (or album) you will get an answer that goes on for about an hour. I don't think I can narrow it down to fifteen.
3. Artists should (and do) earn their living by touring and performing live, and a good artist will not perform any of their songs in the same manner as they were performed on the album. I bought the album, I might have seen the video, so why did i come here?

Additional Material

How about including iTunes coupons for those songs, with the CD. Negating my need to rip the CD. That's about the only thing that would interest me in buying CD format music again.

What I'd like in a CD

If the CD had the following included:

A URL to go to for downloading high quality music videos.

A unique number for each title that lets you see which music videos are currently released for that title. As videos are released, this list grows.

A number unique to that CD that lets you download each of the videos on that list once. If they want, they can watermark the videos and shut out that CD number if they find any copies floating around.

I still buy CDs because...

1) I still believe in supporting artists. If I can, I try to buy non RIAA CDs and/or CDs from bands who have managed to secure contracts that don't screw them over too badly (though that is sometimes hard to find out).

2) No DRM

3) I can rip at any quality I want. FLAC for at-home streaming. Lame encoded MP3 for my ipod.

4) I was raised to believe that I shouldn't take what isn't mine. I don't take that totally literally. I have no qualms about downloading a bunch of CDs off of usenet, but I do that to listen to bands that I might not have heard yet (to listen to the whole albums at decent quality, not a couple of hyper-compressed tracks that the record company or the band wants you to listen to)... and then if I like something I hear, I go buy the CD. See #1. I try to support the bands that I like.

Are CDs dead? Yea, kind of. I don't often pop a silver disc into a player to listen to it very often anymore. But until the music industry gets off this sue everyone and DRM the heck out of everything mode, I don't have much choice.

-S

Sorry, but it is over

The idea of a "music business" or a business based on the distribution of any sort of entertainment is centered around being (a) in control of the content and (b) in control of distribution. Today, the folks in the music business are barely in control of the content and not at all in control of distribution.

When people can "sample", "mix" or "re-edit" your content, you aren't in control of it. Trying to establish a "brand" with any sort of material that can be reedited, repackaged and resold the minute it ends up in a customer's hands is no control at all.

Any sort of bargain that people in the entertainment business might have thought they had with customers ended a few years ago. Today, the only reason more than a single copy is sold is inefficiency in today's piracy. Having global organized crime involved with it doesn't help either. The people buying CDs are generally those on dial-up Internet connections or those too old to have heard of Napster and all of its decendents. The fact that these people are spending six times as much as the people paying for downloaded music should be an important clue that virtually nobody is paying for downloaded music - they are just downloading it.

How will this end? Well, for starters it can be assumed that music distribution on physical media will end pretty soon. No more "record stores". Probably music "promotion" will end as well, and that will take VH1, MTV and most of the ClearChannel radio stations with it. This will have an pretty widespread effect, so if you are involved in a business that in any way interacts with physical distribution of entertainment media - such as selling big bulky CD cases or radio station advertising - you can just kiss your job goodbye.

Yes, the music CD is dead. The "music business" is probably dead as well, killed off by greedy younglings that want to collect all the songs they can for free. Movies? Probably the idea of a movie studio producing a DVD for profit rather than as an advertising vehicle will be gone soon as well. You might see some "theater-only" productions, where the only attraction would be that it is never, ever going to be available anywhere else but a movie theater.

Re:I'd like to see a talking goat

How about a singing goatse?

      Or a goatse-tubgirl duet, in B-fart major. Barrrrf.