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CD Sales Still Shrinking; Digital Distribution Still Growing

Posted 01/05/09 at 02:31:09 PM  by Andy Salisbury

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As digital music stores become more common and convenient, the age of the compact disc as the preferred medium is coming to a close. In fact, according to year-end sales figures released by The Nielsen Co., sales of CDs are down a whopping 20 percent.

The sales of physical discs have dropped from 450.5 million in 2007 to only 362.6 million in 2008. And during this time, digital album sales made a gigantic jump of 32 percent over their previous year’s sales.

Apple’s iTunes music store has been particularly successful, having broken the 1 billion song mark with 1.07 billion sold. Along with this, their sales went up 27 percent over the previous year.

 

Image Credit: Apple, Inc.

COMMENTS:7
TAGS: apple, itunes, digital music, CD
COMMENTS
avatar"Answer..CD's media has a

Submitted by I Jedi on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 6:01am

"Answer..CD's media has a limited life span and a limited 700mb data capacity..thats 10 to 15 songs max.."

I think you're grossly underestimating the CD's compacity to hold music. 700MB of storage compacity can fit well over 130 songs if each song is around or a little over 5MB, which most are. 

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avatarCD Media is dying

Submitted by Bravo_18 on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 9:58pm

CD's are cheap now a days...but why burn it on a cd..whe you can just save it as an ISO or convert it into a more playable format to your choosing..

Answer..CD's media has a limited life span and a limited 700mb data capacity..thats 10 to 15 songs max..

while on the other hand an Ipod has a min of 4GB of storage for songs or mp3's...you do the math

 

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avatarBUt compared to CDs, MP3s

Submitted by eday_2010 on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 12:48pm

BUt compared to CDs, MP3s sound like crap. If I have a high end sound system at home, I don't want to be playing some garbage mp3 or aac file that I downloaded from PureTracks or iTunes. I want a good quality recording; at least CD quality; APE, FLAC, or an actual CD, or better yet, Audio DVD. As long as digital distribution consists of 5meg files for 3 minutes songs or what have you, CDs won't die off.

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avatarBut...

Submitted by Cabal468 on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 9:00pm

People still argue the same thing about CD's and vinyl, that the sound from vinyl records is superior...Of course the difference in sound between CD's and MP3's is undeniable but the music I listen to is mostly lo-fi garage rock stuff so the point is moot! :-D 

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avatarI'll happily buy ISOs.

Submitted by yagisencho on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 6:33pm

I've never bought a digital-only version of an album, but thanks to Amazon, the prices are coming down to right about where they should be ($5-10). I'll make the switch just as soon as they sell CD ISO images instead of MP3s.

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avatarI still buy CDs

Submitted by EvilHomerGD on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 1:59pm

I still prefer to buy CDs...  Of course, I rip them to my computer as soon as I get home...  I like being able to rip to a format of my choosing and still have physical media in case my computer dies on me.  It also doesn't help that I still have an old CD player in my truck and here in the Philadelphia area, it's hard to find an available FM station for an FM transmitter and my iPod.

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avatarDigital distro

Submitted by Cabal468 on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 1:33pm

I think I bought my last CD about a year ago and may or may not have gotten some of my music through p2p services for a while.  I think that the prices for digital music are extrememly reasonable and I have been getting Tons-O-Stuff from Amazon's MP3 download service and I'm very pleased with it.  I tried Itunes and they have a great selection but it's a pain to get the music to work on my Winamp.

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