The CD died for me today…

April 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

Today is a sad day for me. I’ve finally come to the conclusion I’m never going to buy a shiny musical disc of music ever again, putting a stop to the denial I’ve had for the past decade as I’ve watched the rise of digital media and the fall of physical editions.

You might think I’ve gone slightly mad – for years I’ve been watching and writing about the rise of digital technology, and lamenting the lack of change in creative industries, particularly the music industry which still tries to hamper innovation with licencing rules from the era of piano rolls.

And yet I have to admit to a personal state of denial inspired by my obsessive librarian tendencies.

I’ve long enjoyed alphabetically and chronologically ordered entertainment collections, whether CD, DVD or videogame. I bought the books and magazines to find out more about bands and then became the guy who would research every song he liked on Wikipedia and Last.fm. My music habit runs to the £1000s in vinyl, CDs, and attempting to elevate my nerd status by playing guitar and bass, and occasionally DJ’ing to try and legitimise it!

But if you want to experience what it was like to be a scribe when the printing press arrived, or a blacksmith who saw cars driving past his workshop, go and buy a CD in the average town.

Image courtesy Hoveringdog on Flickr (CC Licence)

For some reason, I fancied buying a CD today. Despite the availability of Spotify, Soundcloud, Last.fm, Youtube, Mflow, Blip.fm and Myspace, I thought I’d save a little bandwith (For American readers – when you complain about bandwith restrictions on broadband – we’re lucky to get a quarter of the harshest American cable monopoly). So I thought I’d browse alongside picking up some food essentials in some fairly sizeable shopping outlets…

And CDs don’t exist any more.  Outside of the ‘chart’ of 10, 20, or 30 albums, noone stocks anything. At the same time, I can buy gift vouchers for every digital music service while I’m at the checkout till.

Dan’s Tipping Point:

To get an album in even the right genre, it was easier for me to drive home, go online, and purchase music rather than journey into the centre of town to visit the one specialist music shop and be able to browse more than 30 CDs in one location.CDs are gone…

 

And yet…

I still belive that vinyl will continue to do well in the future, because it’s a great ‘artifact’. In the same way as I still buy print editions of books I love after reading them electronically, there’s something in the delivery of a vinyal album that encapsulates art, emotion, memories etc, and whether or not it’s an audiophile lie, there’s something in the ceremony of dropping a needle onto a record.

CD’s don’t do that. They were a luxurious convenience that arrived around the time I bought my first ‘proper’ stereo seperate system, but they don’t provide a great memento.

And now I wonder when we’ll hit on the right format for film. If print provides the physical archetype for text, and vinyl is the physical high point of music as digital is the most convenient form for both, could anyone argue the VHS or DVD offer anything to film fans? I’d hate to think the laserdisc was a good idea, or to go back to projectors, so perhaps film is still missing a medium (For videogames it had to be a cartridge!).

I wonder how many of us are writing about embracing technology, yet still get surprised when we see it passing?

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How I found music – and how that’s changed

August 28, 2008 By 2 Comments

When I was a child and teenager, I was as obsessive about music as it was possible to be. I combined aspirations of becoming a professional musician and DJ, with the compulsive behaviour of a serial librarian and collector. So you can imagine how many music magazines (NME, Melody Maker, Metal Hammer, Kerrang, Record Collector, Mojo, Q etc), and how many records and eventually CDs I consumed – just to make it clear I’m not completely over the hill, CDs came into circulation when I was about 11 or 12 I think…

And just as my interest in videogames and comics have both waned during early adulthood and resurfaced now due to meeting likeminded people online, my interest in music has seen a healthy resurgence. In the meantime, I still listened to all my old purchases, but I rarely found anything new. That’s changed a lot thanks to the internet.

There are basically three sites I use for all my music needs (although for the moment I still only have a radio in my car!)

  • Blip.fm – There’s been a lot of buzz around Blip recently. In fact, I even suggested it shows the best method of monetising Twitter, as it’s essentially a cross between a microblog, and an annotated John Peel show. You simply tell people what you’re listening to, and if it’s available on the site they can listen as well – and that’s all filtered by who you follow, with the option to buy MP3s if you like something enough.  It’s perfect for a quick blast to find songs I’d have never heard about, or listened to, unless it was recommended by a trusted source.
  • Last.fm – It’s essentially the only real option at the moment if you’re outside of the U.S. We can’t access Pandora (but founder Tim Westergren has stated it’s close to closing anyway), and Meemix seems to have focussed on extras rather than a reliable player.
  • Myspace – Yep, it’s hard to believe in the age of Facebook dominance, and open source Muxtapes, but if I hear a bands name, and I want to hear their songs really quickly and easily, I tend to end up going to Myspace even before last.fm – mainly down to speed. It’ll be interesting to see if that means I use it more when the Myspace streaming radio finally appears. It might replace last.fm, but only if it offers a stream of my favourite choices without a need to subscribe

And that’s about it for music. I very occasionally catch a music show on TV (I’ve been looking at 4Music as it’s co-owned by Bauer Media where I work, along with Kerrang). I hear the radio for about 10 minutes in the car (and that’s only until I replace the stereo so I can listen to podcasts), and my only real radio use is to listen to live football if I can’t watch it. Three online services, and the recommendations I receive have replaced pretty much all my other musical inputs.

And incidentally, all my latest CD and MP3 purchases have all been songs that I would never have heard on the radio, were all things I generally struggled to find in most music shops, and once again persuaded me how much easier it is to find music online.

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