According to The Lefsetz Letter, a blog that I totally enjoy reading, I am reaching the point where my cd collection is obsolete and will be worth a total of, oh, around $347 by the end of this year.Sometime in the next twelve to eighteen months CD sales are going to decline so precipitously as to cause the major labels to rethink their digital strategy. With the iTunes Store no replacement for discs, they’ll be forced to authorize a new method of distribution, just to maintain their bottom lines.Would someone remind me why I sold off all those records twenty years ago?
You’ve seen this movie. With film. For fifteen years seers predicted digital would eclipse the old format. This finally happened a year ago, when Konica Minolta exited the camera business and Nikon essentially stopped making film cameras. Same thing is going to happen in the music business, with CDs, it’s just a matter of when.
I'm becoming increasingly frightened that my idea of music is completely archaic that I'll become yet another forgotten hold-out that record companies will eventually write off.
And this after moving nearly 2,000 individual discs into a new home while people can carry double that in an iPod.
I have no right to make fun of 8-tracks, RCA SelectaVision, or Betamax tapes any longer.
2 comments:
Hombre, that's some of the scariest predicting that Lefsetz could do. Basically, it means that we're going to have to suffice with really compromized, lossy music files, with no artwork, no tangible, physical product, and the notion that music is utterly disposable. Even back in the day, with the Madonna and Huey Lewis records that were purchased back then, as disposable as some might see them, we still have 'em on CD (well, some of us do) to immortalize what we were groovin' to when we were 13. Now, with all of the mp3's and downloads deletable with the click of a button, today's teens won't have any permanent record (pun unintentional, but hell, I'll run with it) of what lit their fires these days. Even though the cynical side of me might not bemoan the loss of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan music, to not be able to have the music you grew up with is gonna be an incalculable loss. Not to mention, it's gonna be harder for US fogeyists to get all of OUR music in a format we can hold in our hands.
Johnny Thunders was right; you can't put your arms around a memory.
Remember the smell of opening a new record?
Good times...
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