Comment Re:Its the content, stupid! (Score 1) 295
Yeah, no. Any audio content can be distributed on CD that (at least 3 9s) of human ears can hear. I have yet to see a band, from Radiohead, to Phish, to bands that only play local ~100-person venues, that doesn't have a CD of everything they've ever made.
I love live music, but unless you have a massive and/or high-quality PA system, expert mixers who've tuned to the venue, bartender, and at least 20 friends to enjoy it with you, CD is just plain better, usually even when it's a live show. And it's always available. Maybe there's a niche where that's not common, but that niche isn't going to kill the CD.
50's and 60's mastering was objectively terrible. I don't think there's a single frequency or intensity that record can reproduce that a CD can't. I might be wrong about that, but if I am it's a frequency you can't directly hear. If you think CDs suck, you're a victim of the Loudness Wars. Listen to CDs mastered in ~'92 to ~'96 ('93-'94 was the peak)--some of the best, clearest music you will ever hear, and I challenge you to give a single example of an alternate format that captures the live sound better.
CDs are dying because you have to go to the store or get them delivered. That's the entirety of it, and there's no reason for concern--compressed music will eventually get a no-comprimises engineer combined with a band intricate and talented enough to make it worth it, and incredible speakers are so cheap these days somebody just needs to make one that's Bose-compatible, Base-boosted-monitor-quality, and Apple-easy, and HiFi will be the new rage.
Your Youtube anectote makes me worry I might be wrong, that's straight fucked that anyone could listen to Youtube music and not be annoyed, but I've been right since cassettes, so I'm going to bet on this one as well.