BIS sold to Apple Music

[teamsaint]

CDs have existed since the 1980s and require particular devices in order to be heard, and such devices are themselves much less common than they used to be, for example no longer being built into cars or laptops. Books, on the other hand, have been around for thousands of years in one form or another and don't require any such technology (apart from spectacles, in my case), which surely puts them in a very different situation. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned the end of physical media for recorded music ought to be hastened rather than delayed!

Commerce will decide, for better or worse.. Nobody, but nobody envisaged the vinyl revival. And the point remains that commercially, it is really difficult to make many works pay their way without a variety of formats and income streams, and for that reason alone, I think that artists and record companies , especially for the vast majority who sell low volumes in any format, will keep those formats alive as long as they can.
There has been a huge decline in CD sales, but I'd be happy to suggest that the biggest percentage drops are in the volume sectors and biggest artists.Low volume sales at concerts and events can be a valuable income stream for artists and producer.

Predicting the future is a bit of a modern curse really. Who knows what will happen to streaming in the future ? Price rises, internet capacity constraints, record company changes of policy. There is no guarantee that £10 a month will guarantee almost unlimited access to all the music you could ever want indefinitely. And until now the lesson is that people like stuff, and they like to buy, relatively expensively stuff by artists and authors dear to their hearts.

I think that Sony hold the patents for CD players ? ( Bryn will know), so they might make changes. But I doubt they will cut off their nose to spite their fate, and plenty of audio producers are happy to churn out CD units for now, even with modest sales volumes of new CDs And as far as I am concerned ,I'm happy for physical musical media to continue.That sort of choice and availability seems to me to be a positive thing.

Re books, the point about simplicity of use is fair, but it turns out that the cheap and easy ebook didn't take over the world, just added a ( usually) low price buying or rental option.

[RichardB]

Commerce will decide, for better or worse.

Quite so. My feeling is that "it" will decide that CDs are no longer worth manufacturing and distributing, and that the vinyl fad will burn itself out before long also. I could be wrong of course!

[Alison]

Why has vinyl made a return? And could those reasons point to a CD revival in the future?

[teamsaint]

Why has vinyl made a return? And could those reasons point to a CD revival in the future?

Reasons might include

a reaction to streaming, which for all of its positives does have negatives.
” Ownership” and the idea of being invested in an artist.
interest in “ slower” ways of listening.
Interest in album artwork, often for wall display.
people making up for what they couldn’t afford in their youth
replacement purchasing.
smart sales and marketing.( the pop/ rock market is awash with expensive , often colour vinyl reissues.)
gift giving.
artists signing and selling at concerts.

Just to drone on a bit more about CD sales, volumes are very small now. But not all CD sales will register on Neilsen and official sales data and are therefore “invisible”, for example sales at concerts . 50% of book sales not registering on Neilsen is a very common figure. And the small volume of CD sales may be disproportionately valuable to the artists. To give a comparison, authors tend to get about £0.50 in royalties on a £10.00 RRP book, but can easily make £5 on that same book if they sell it at a talk. So a sale of 20 copies makes a tidy contribution to expenses etc. Easy to see how a musician can bump up very modest appearance fees with a few CD/ vinyl sales. As somebody said, you can’t sign a download.

[Bryn]

CDs were the result of a joint project between Philips and Sony. As to vinyl LPs, I read that at least in the USA, many of those purchased in this revival are bought by people who have no way of playing them. In such cases, they are bought simply for display as trendy artefacts.

Getting back to CDs, though PCs and Laptops are sold without optical drives, these days, many different USB CD/DVD/Blu-ray players and burners remain available from the likes of Amazon.

[Ein Heldenleben]

[QUOTE=Alison;n1284022]Why has vinyl made a return? And could those reasons point to a CD revival in the future? [/

For DJ’s vinyls are easier to cue, mix and scratch ( rapid backward and forward movement) . They have a glamour that CD entirely lacks esp the cover artwork. And quite a few people are convinced they sound better- including a lot of Hifi buffs.
As I said on the Casstteember thread went to a big electrical superstore to buy a freezer and the Hifi section had more turntables than CD players.

[teamsaint]

I suspect that reviewers prefer hard copy. Book reviewers certainly do, and what self respecting buyer wants a download as a sample ?

I don’t know much about music distribution, but the costs involved in producing ,storing and distributing a limited run may not be as great as some might think, and there are obvious marketing benefits in having at least a small run of physical copies. Premium pricing and keeping hold of the core market , ( with pre order offers etc) are all to be valued. And artists and agents can have strong views on these matters, as RB has demonstrated ?

I wouldn’t want to be the one telling JEG he was going to be download only……

Old habits die hard.

[Bryn]

CDs were the result of a joint project between Philips and Sony. As to vinyl LPs, I read that at least in the USA, many of those purchased in this revival are bought by people who have no way of playing them. In such cases, they are bought simply for display as trendy artefacts.

Getting back to CDs, though PCs and Laptops are sold without optical drives, these days, many different USB CD/DVD/Blu-ray players and burners remain available from the likes of Amazon.

Oh, and when it comes to the availability of 'Hi-Fi' CD decks, Richer Sounds have one or two for sale: https://www.richersounds.com/catalog...y/view/id/1745

[Dave2002]

CDs have existed since the 1980s and require particular devices in order to be heard, and such devices are themselves much less common than they used to be, for example no longer being built into cars or laptops. Books, on the other hand, have been around for thousands of years in one form or another and don't require any such technology (apart from spectacles, in my case), which surely puts them in a very different situation. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned the end of physical media for recorded music ought to be hastened rather than delayed!

The lack of CD players in new cars is a real pain. I used to get through a lot of listening with my previous car and its 6 CD player. Now I have loads of CDs, but I can't play them in our cars without a lot of faff converting them to other formats. As for DAB/FM - sorry BBC, coverage in fhe frozen wilds of the far north is erratic - still pretty useless on some routes for mobile reception, even though I noticed tha the car "radio" does switch between DAB and FM.

So much for coverage over "most" of the UK!

[teamsaint]

The lack of CD players in new cars is a real pain. I used to get through a lot of listening with my previous car and its 6 CD player. Now I have loads of CDs, but I can't play them in our cars without a lot of faff converting them to other formats. As for DAB/FM - sorry BBC, coverage in fhe frozen wilds of the far north is erratic - still pretty useless on some routes for mobile reception, even though I noticed tha the car "radio" does switch between DAB and FM.

So much for coverage over "most" of the UK!

Still got on in my nearly 4 year old volvo. £100 option !!
i wonder if plug in USB cd players might work ? Actually I have one, so might give it a try.

[gurnemanz]

I now mainly rely on downloads and streaming but still like to buy CDs that I want to have as an album, especially when they have been conceived as such in an artistic sense. For me this applies mostly to rock albums and vocal recitals where items have been selected to be juxtaposed as a coherent collection or sequence and where it is handy to have a booklet with texts. I don't buy so many rock albums but when I do it is mostly a CD, which makes it more like an album in the traditional sense to me. Eg the latest Dylan to go with all the others on my shelf.

I can offer a BIS recording as an example of a vocal collection of the type which I would usually prefer to have as a CD: The beautiful Lost Is My Quiet disc from Carolyn Sampson, Iestyn Davies and Joseph Middleton.

https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8347925--lost-is-my-quiet

As well as BIS, other labels, eg alpha and naive, make an effort with the appearance as well the sound of the disc. This makes them desirable to own as a physical thing rather than just a load of digits.

[RichardB]

Of course the consolidation of the recording industry to a situation where everything is owned by a few enormous companies has been going on for some years. It's interesting that Robert von Bahr has decided to sell to Apple rather than to one of the established media giants. While Apple is I think unlikely to prioritise physical releases, it has apparently agrees to keep on all the existing personnel, which is certainly something I would regard as very important if I were RvB.

One of the advantages of the move away from physical media is that it is much easier to release recordings than it used to be, and here the Bandcamp platform is showing the way, creating an environment in which "labels" can be set up and their releases displayed, streamed and downloaded. Some Bandcamp labels accompany their digital releases with CDs, LPs or even cassettes so this isn't excluded. I have the impression that many vinyl collectors don't actually put their prized items on turntables but listen to the free download that usually comes with new LP purchases. On the other hand some of them (including several good friends of mine) think they sound better than CDs, which is a matter of taste although if I wanted my digital soundfiles to sound like LPs I could easily compress their dynamic range, filter their frequency range and add a bit of distortion, I mean "warmth", and save myself a few quid. I have the feeling that when relatively old operations like BIS reach the end of their lives when their founders retire, other new ones spring up to take their place. As for the expense, labels with proper international distribution and presence these days, when it comes to music which isn't commercial in nature, ask recording artists to provide a complete mastered recording plus 7-8 grand for production and distribution costs, and not everyone has access to that kind of amount.

Teamsaint is right to say that reviewers pay more attention to physical CDs but, as CDs dwindle in importance, this will change. (Critics have dwindled in importance too! and nowadays the most interesting people writing about music are doing so online, and of course they will be people who don't mind the music they write about being also virtual.) He's also right that musicians can make sometimes significant amounts of extra cash by selling CDs at gigs, although that's a routine I have never got into, for some reason. I still maintain, though, that books are a different case. As some of you know, I published my second book earlier this year, and took a lot of care over its design as a hard copy. (I provided the publisher with more or less print-ready material including the cover.)

[CallMePaul]

The problem I have with the decline of the CD and the prominence of vinyl, downloads and streaming is that it appears to be driven by the chart (single and album) pop and retro rock markets. People whose tastes are different, be they classical, jazz, world music etc often prefer CDs. A CD can play for 80 minutes and while I have old vinyl LPs with over 30 minutes play per side, the new generation of vinyl seems to offer much shorter playing times and single CDs are often issued as 2 vinyl LPs. This is a problem for longer pieces of music, less so for the 4-5 minute pop track.

I do remember the MD of Presto saying on Record Review either last year or in 2021 that CD sales accounted for about 70% of his company's business. As Presto now offers a streaming service, this may have changed but I feel sure that CD remains the preferred medium for classical purchases.

[gurnemanz]

MDT went out of business a few years ago but Europadisc seems to be able to keep going selling classical-only CD and LP.

In Germany jpc is a very large recorded music vendor and doesn't do streaming or downloads but does sell rock and jazz as well as classical. They also sell books and own the very enterprising label, cpo, which in turn seems to do quite a lot of co-production with the radio station Deutschlandfunk. Before I stopped buying CDs and Brexit sent the pound down I bought quite a lot off them.

[Bryn]

CDs were the result of a joint project between Philips and Sony. As to vinyl LPs, I read that at least in the USA, many of those purchased in this revival are bought by people who have no way of playing them. In such cases, they are bought simply for display as trendy artefacts.

Getting back to CDs, though PCs and Laptops are sold without optical drives, these days, many different USB CD/DVD/Blu-ray players and burners remain available from the likes of Amazon.

Oh, and when it comes to the availability of 'Hi-Fi' CD deck, Richer Sounds have one or two for sale: https://www.richersounds.com/catalog...y/view/id/1745