Tag: cds

The Burn Pile – Remembering The CD-R

On By bigbadburchIn collecting4 Comments

For those of us at a certain age, the blank tape is a fond reminder of how we “shared” music in the distant past. You could make a mixtape if you wanted, or you could copy entire albums onto tapes. Often you could get two albums on one tape, one on each side, and be truly ready to jam out.

The cassette tape went away (thankfully, as far as I’m concerned) and the CD came along. That would slowly be phased out by digital files and then streaming services. Those two totally fulfilled and made obsolete the concept of “sharing” music – just tell someone to look up a song or album, send a link to it over a text message. It’s light years beyond the blank tape shuffle of the 1980’s.

But there was another medium for sharing music that ran concurrently with the rise of the MP3. The CD itself offered up a writable disc and by 2000, most PC’s had CD-R drives in them. Copying an album to CD was a process that didn’t take a lot of time and was super reliable, only very rarely going wrong compared the potential headaches of the cassette.

I do remember “burning” a CD in 1997 or thereabout. It took several hours and the CD wound up not working right in spots. A few years later allowed the technology to catch up and become more practical for the typical home user. Just as the idea of keeping digital music on computer hard drives was becoming a reality, it was very easy for someone to burn a CD and play it at home, in a car, or wherever.

I would take to burning CDs in the early 2000’s and wound up generating quite a pile of stuff. A lot of mine came from a friend who worked in radio at the time and was getting promo stuff from record labels. Some labels were already sending promos via digital distribution, but others sent physical CDs and I would copy a lot of those. Otherwise I was borrowing stuff out of friends’ collections and making sure I had my copy of that, allowing me to concentrate my purchases in focused areas.

My horde of CD-Rs, first time I’ve had them out in eons

The CD-R was a currency of music but it also didn’t quite take off the same way tapes did in the ’80’s. This was because the digital music revolution was happening at the same time. The time and material needed to burn a CD, while nothing that would set someone back a lot, was more than the simple act of ripping it straight to the hard drive. For more die-hard music fans like myself who are album-oriented listeners or who enjoy long mixes spanning a lot of songs, the CD was an ideal format. But for the more casual fan who is generally just into songs, simply having them on a hard drive was good enough. And with the advent of smartphones, even needing a PC was eventually phased out.

I would join the digital age somewhere around 2008, scoring my first iPod. This would naturally phase out the concept of burning CDs for me. Over the years I have occasionally made a copy of something for someone else but the days of buying spindles of blank discs were long over. And now with streaming I almost don’t even use my digital collection now, though it does have its uses from time to time and isn’t something I’m ready to part with yet. It’s not like it’s doing anything other than taking up disk space that I’m not using anyway.

What really inspired me to write this was me going through stuff and still having my two containers of burned CDs laying around. I haven’t even gone through them in over 10 years, they haven’t served a purpose for me at all. It’s finally time to send these relics of the past to the recycling center. I do have to remove them all from the paper sleeves I keep them in, but that would take all of 15 minutes if my lazy ass would get to actually doing it.

As I go through these I’ll probably check to make sure I’ve ripped everything I want to my PC. It’s probably not a big deal, some stuff I burned is stuff I now own, and many of the promos I had access to didn’t really excite me in the end. I might throw one or two on to see what I think now, but I’m not gonna spend a ton of time with it. I’m also curious if any of these degraded over time, the conventional wisdom on writable CDs is that they might not hold up over many years. But I’m not going to conduct a survey of the total pile I have.

The CD-R doesn’t really come with the nostalgia factor that the blank tape does. The CD thing was a practical matter that was no fuss, there was no need to time things right like would often happen with tapes. Just set your burn list and let it go, get out the sharpie and there you have something to listen to. People do still fiddle with CD-Rs, in some cases it’s to play music in cars and in others it can be to make and send mixes out. The full arrival of the digital age has ended the practical use of CD-Rs for most, but there are still holdouts out there, just like there are still people using blank cassettes. I won’t be joining them, for me the age of the CD-R has come and gone. But for several years it was a great tool to expose myself to way more music.

Back From The Dead? The CD re-examined

On By bigbadburchIn collecting8 Comments

One thing I’ve meant to write more about but haven’t got to much of is the topic of collecting. Though the issue of collecting is not necessary to discuss music, it is an important part of music for me and many other people.

Music collecting looked to be going the way of the dinosaur roughly a decade ago as digital music and streaming took completely over. But just as the digital revolution seemed to be ready to deal physical formats a death blow, something happened – vinyl sales shot up. They shot up big and are still going strong today. In fact, the industry is plagued with delays and shortages. The secondary market has become a nightmare of price gouging and watching stuff that was once a dollar in the bargain bin go for $20 or more.

While vinyl saw a new life in the 2010s, one format that looked to be on the way out was the compact disc. The CD revolutionized music in the 1980’s and especially the 90’s. It bulldozed cassettes and vinyl records into near oblivion, then saw itself outmoded in the face of digital formats. People sold off their CD collections, the prices tanked, and stores tied to the format faced extinction.

2021 delivered a bit of favorable news for the CD – sales were up a bit over 1% for the year. This article from Pitchfork gives the stats breakdown – the CD moved 40.4 million units in 2021, up from 40.1 a year prior. Though not the biggest sales spike ever, this is the first year CD sales increased since 2004.

One wonders how much life the CD truly has in it. The sales spike was prompted by the two biggest names in music – Adele and Taylor Swift. A new Adele album will cause sales to soar, and Taylor is re-recording her music to escape unfavorable rights management of her old catalog.

Is this sales surge a flash in the pan or a sign of a shift back to the nearly-dead CD format? Adele doesn’t release new music that often and can’t prop up the music industry on her own. And Taylor will run out of back catalog to re-do at some point. Are there other sales drivers to sustain a renewed push for CD’s?

A fair portion of my disorganized CD collection

It is easy to write off the CD surge as a one-off event. After all, the CD format is outpaced by the convenience of streaming. While streaming is not generally of the same quality as a CD, it is obviously good enough for the masses. There doesn’t seem to be an indicator that people might move from streaming back to the CD.

Except, well, there are a few. The jump back to CDs might not have anything to do with streaming – it lies in the current state of vinyl.

Vinyl is in the midst of a huge renaissance right now. Sales are huge, record stores have opened across the land and collectors are gleefully shoving handfuls of cash off for the sweet new limited pressing of their favorite acts. It was an unlikely resurrection, fueled in no small part by the much-reviled hipster of the late 00’s and early 10’s.

But there are signs of trouble on the horizon. Right now vinyl is expensive and only growing in price, much like everything else these days. The secondary market is out of reach for most collectors of modest means. And manufacturing plants are backed up enough that some albums are getting their vinyl release almost a year after the same album dropped on CD and streaming. Major players like Adele hogging limited production resources only exacerbate the vinyl supply problem.

I know this shit is getting expensive

I don’t have statistical data in the same way we can track the rise in CD sales but I do have anecdotal evidence that some collectors are backing off vinyl and returning to the CD format. A little money goes a much longer way on CDs than on vinyl. Especially for back catalog collecting – imagine the amount of money someone would need to get, say, the Scorpions extensive catalog on record. Now have a look at used CD prices for the same band the next time you’re out. Much, much cheaper.

There is another issue looming – again anecdotal, but some independent and underground labels are having such fits getting vinyl pressed that they are considering abandoning the format. That might be a bit extreme but there is a realistic possibility that vinyl becomes a very niche and expensive high-end market while the masses may have to find content in CDs or streaming.

I don’t want to be a prophet of doom, except maybe when I’m plugging the doom genre, but it might be looking a bit hairy for vinyl. I’d guess it still has legs under it for awhile but the market forces do need some correction before a segment of the marketplace turns their backs on it. I don’t know if that will equal a new boom for CDs or not, or if this new advent of the format is just a glitch brought about by a few major artists releasing albums at once.

I do know that I and many others will maintain collections no matter what happens with the market at large, but the present and future states of affairs do shape and inform what we do. I hesitate to say that the CD is on the way back, even with some promising signs. The unfortunate part is that the most positive indicators for a CD revival are at the expense of the vinyl resurgence. Only time will tell.

No theme here, posting this just because