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?"

Re:Quality

[Nerd4News]

I will keep buying CD's until you can download music at the same or better quality, with no DRM.

Same here. My ears are old and I won't take a 128k mp3 unless it's free. 160k is my minimum, 192k optimal and 256k is great. None match a CD though even with my ears but they're acceptable.

I remember reading a site (too long ago to even dream about being able to find it again) about a sound engineer and the antics around producing an album. Part of the story was how they tried different drum kits, amps and other equipment then tweak it lovingly to get just the right sound. Now all of that is for naught as it gets compressed to hell and sold as a digital download. Might as well hook a couple of mics up to a Soundblaster16, record it and ship it.

Re:What Is He Smoking?

[guap]

Yes, I'm surprised no one has created a FLAC, too... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC) or (http://flac.sourceforge.net/) I salute the insightful humor of your post :)

Re:What Is He Smoking?

[ButHed]

If your idea of music is the latest hot hit by the Doovie Groovie Weenie Wagglers or some such drivel, then the degraded sound quality of lossy formats is probably a good thing. On the other hand, there are people to whom sound (and music) quality are important -- hence the persistence of analog (ie. vinyl). Even though CD's are not perfect, they still sound better (to many people) than most MP3, and so will continue to have a market.

Re:What Is He Smoking?

[DeadChobi]

I do the same thing with my music CDs. That's what makes them attractive to me. Sure, it's a little piece of plastic, but it's also a hell of a lot more resistant to damage than a CD-R, less of a data-integrity worry than a hard drive, and competitively priced when you take the lyrics booklet, discography, and shiney case into account. Not only that, if a better-quality form of compression becomes available, I can just rerip from my originals instead of paying another dollar per song. At that rate, to replace my entire collection if it consisted of iTunes downloads, I would lose about a thousand dollars. Imagine paying that every few years to update encodes. Compared to that buying iTunes songs is like bending over in a prison shower. You don't own the data, the content is locked, and you can't play it on anything other than an iPod without some hacking. Don't get me started on the iPod user interface.