Best Buy to stop selling CD's in July
 

The end of an era, Target to possibly follow suit:

https://www.billboard.com/articles/b...-cds-only-when

The all digital future is probably going to be a thing shortly. It might get to the point where blu-rays no longer exists either, all movies/TV shows will be sold digitally or streamed.

I stop buying CDs ever since I jumped on iTunes bandwagon. Digital era.

"Who still buys CDs?" - Nick Wilde, Zootopia.

I used to spend so much money on CDs, it's where all my money went even though I could download albums on broadband when I was a teen. I stopped buying CDs 12 years ago.

Not surprising at all. Though I hope the idea of an "album" doesn't become lost to time.

If CDs lasted this long, you can bet DVDs/BR will last another decade easily but it'll continue to become more and more niche as cd's were. I've said this for over a decade now and people called me crazy but look whose right ten years later. I have the right to gloat.

If I can't stream or easily pirate a movie I already own on dvd I just prefer not to watch it than get the movie out, I know it's the same for many, I don't even have a Blu-Ray/DVD player connected to the tv or any blu-rays for that matter . I put my entire DVD collection in a box which I bought so many because it was the cool thing to have in the early/mid 00's. I don't even know what to do with them.

Hell not buying any BRs ended up being a good idea since now we have 4K blu-rays. I may buy some of my favorite films like Jurassic Park on whatever 8k format is eventually released in the future. The eye cannot see beyond 8k so it has to stop there besides other gimmicks like we saw with 3D.

The last conventional CD I've bought was back in 2009, and it actually was from a Best Buy. I didn't exactly shut the door to buying CDs, but I just haven't been compelled to buy a CD in so long. I have bought six CDs since then, but they were actually reissues of existing albums I already owned, and they either had a bonus DVD or extra tracks. So basically, 2014 was the last time I bought a CD. There are actually two more of those I'd like to get, but I can easily adapt to the ceasing of conventional CD production. Anyway, I guess I'd say my purchases of CDs have slowed since 2005, when I decided to end my BMG Music Service membership since I noticed I wasn't buying as many CDs.

Maybe donate them?

Aren't records really big right now too?


(Just give it about...30 years...CDs will revive with the new wave of Them Young Hipsters)

Come to think of it, cassettes are actually making somewhat of a comeback.

https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/...-make-comeback

Man, all of this AND polaroids.

Next thing you know there will be "special edition" VHSes

I don't see any CD renaissance coming. CD's are just data burned into a disc, same as an .MP3 file on a thumb drive (every track on a CD is just an uncompressed WAV file, literally)... records are more tactile. A record player is "feeling" the music it's playing, the needle doing its thing.

It's all bullsh**, of course. Invest in a good, $2,000 Bose sound system, and play those HQ .MP3s at the right level, I guarantee it will sound better.

Watching a DVD on a good HD TV vs. Blu-ray is like night and day. I don't mind the 4k movement. What is frustrating is the streaming movement not keeping up with the quality that's able to be delivered.

What do I mean? You watch a 4K blu-ray, you aren't seeing any compression. You're getting the raw movie, in full quality, at only the limits of your player and TV. There exists no streaming outlet right now that is able to deliver that same guaranteed solid quality without compression via streaming. At all. And if your daughter or buddy starts screwing around on FB on your wi-fi connection while you're watching your movie, it's going to dip down even more.

Last album I bought was Trevor Something's "Synthetic Love". Mainly because I wanted to support the artist.

What worries me about a completely digitialization of all media is they might stop producing alot of bonus features since that's whats generally used to sell DVDs.

That's already happened. And most of the features they do just end up on Youtube, anyway. At this point the studios are actively aiding in the killing of physical media to get to a world where it's the Adobe business model... rent to watch, never own.

Look at "The F8 of the Furious." You want to buy the blu-ray? You can. You want the "Extended Cut"? You have to buy the blu-ray... and the "Extended Cut" is only available to watch via a code within the blu-ray case. Truly infuriating.

God bless pirates, amirite!!

Well there you go. I still want to transition into 4K myself.

Mine was Silversun Pickups' "Swoon". The one I bought in 2014 for the new track was Soundgarden's "Superunknown".

Hey, I was 200% willing to buy the F8 blu-ray. The "Complete Fast & Furious Box Set" even had the foresight to include a spot in it to tuck the F8 disc in it when it would come out, 6 months in the future. But buying the F8 blu-ray, a disc I'll never watch because there exists a better version but just buy to get a code... to watch the "full version" of it online? What? Why would I do that? Why wouldn't I just pirate it, if I'm just paying money to buy a code to watch an online version I'm just streaming?

It's kinda trippy seeing vinyls in stores and USB record players, that isn't these small niche hipster corner shops.

Hm, I still buy CDs...I just like having physical copies of things. If your music player or computer or whatever you use for your digital media conks out on you, at least you have the originals to listen to. I also like having cd jacket with the music information and all that stuff for some reason.

I don't think that's going to die out here in Japan, though anytime soon. They still have movie rental shops and CD rentals are a thing here. Ironically, it's still illegal for shops to rent out video games here to my knowledge...thanks Nintendo. >_>

Man, I just bought a new CD a month ago.

Buy external hard drives, which are so big in sizes - like terra sizes, so huge really. Do backup, it saves space too; those CDs are cluttering mess I'm happy to not have at all.

Same with pics you took from your camera and phone. Do people still print ALL of them and put in album books? Nope. You'd print only the necessary ones and the rest goes into the hard drives.

Digital is the future indeed.

I don't think the Best Buy nearest to me has had CDs for over two years....


Honestly I think the only place I've been recently which sold them was FYE and that's because that place is a dinosaur.

I haven't bought many CDs in my life. By the time I got really interested in music, youtube was already around. And nowadays with services like Spotify, I'm even less interested in buying CDs.

Some people collect CDs, though. Many metalheads I've talked to collect CDs and vinyls. So clearly there's still a lot of market for them.

It's probably worth pointing out that... well, you know what Best Buy will also stop selling in about one or two years? Everything.

CD's still do OK for artists mainly aimed at older audiences.

That's a shame. It's been years since I bought one, so I guess it's understandable if many aren't buying, but at the same time, if there's something I really want to own I like having an official hard copy. (Not that those stores are the only source or that they have any say in what gets a hard copy produced of not.)

As if digital is even much cheaper though, right... Digital (be is music, in-game purchases, or whatever) kind of annoys me though in regard to it being such easy money for the seller when it costs them nothing to produce other than the original digital file itself.

As far as music goes, if digital, forget it, I'll just fave it for free on YouTube.

If you go to a concert, it's still fun to buy a CD and get it signed by the artist(s).

I remember when people had to trash their VHS collections when DVD took off. Now people are looking to get rid of all their DVD collections. :lol:

The only VHS tapes I've trashed are the ones I recorded on, although it's more like I sent them to recycling facilities. Otherwise I'd donate them to Goodwill or sell them on eBay (which I've actually been successful in doing). The only time I'll get rid of a DVD is if it gets a Blu-ray counterpart.

Other than TMNT DVDs and a few other things, I don't really own much DVDs anymore. When it comes to newer stuff I just watch everything on the internet.

Exactly, CDs are a digital format so nostalgia will be a bit harder, you can argue with analog music like LPs and Casettes it's a different "feel".

I could see DVD nostalgia as many movies had cool ass menus that their upgrades didn't.

While true, it's also all about convenience and people prefer it over quality, but the general audience isn't as educated or even notices some of the differences that HDR 4k offers, and you can't blame them, I mean it's there but to spend money on a new tv and buy your movies again for a such a small difference to them is just not worth it.

Netflix quality is good enough and better for them. Videophiles are feeling the same thing audiophiles have for 18 years now. With better music formats people preferred CDs, the Super CD and whatever formats failed in favor to sh-tty quality MP3s. Even today people prefer to listen from youtube than get uncompressed music files, hell it's even difficult to torrent uncompressed files because people prefer the compressed files that take less HDD space on the computers.

Bonus content died a long time ago, big releases barely include anything. In the early days of the DVD format it was a huge selling point and they marketed it like crazy. What they found out after a few years that most people didn't give a damn about them so that's also why they've gotten lazy over the years. Sucks for the people who liked them as well as commentary tracks but they realized the mass consumer didn't care and Joe Neckbeard on the internet just wasn't as important to them anymore.

You can get other stuff signed, a shirt, an LP, your boobs.

Piracy is great, it has kept in existence so many things that would've been lost to time.

It'll always exist and all the naysayers will always be proven wrong especially in the digital only era where consumers don't control what will be available or not, it's more important than it's ever been.

Videotapes dominated between around 1975-2001. DVD for about 10 years. I don't know when DVD sales peaked, but the format never became what it was supposed to be during its peak days because of pirate downloading before the arrival of Internet services like Netflix.

No one wants to rebuild their huge collections every decade, that's the main problem. Even many BR collectors didn't upgrade many DVD movies. And now they have to upgrade to 4K blu-ray and eventually 8k blu-ray which I"m guessing in ten years 8k tvs will be a consumer friendly thing.

People saw DVDs as the "perfect" format when it came out, it was better than VHS by a lot so it made sense to upgrade those huge VHS collections, once BR came out they felt burned, as did I. Sure it looked better but to re-buy everything?

And if streaming hadn't been a thing maybe it would've worked but when you have alternatives the majority of the people don't care about quality, they just want to see what they want to see. Same reason lossless music formats are a niche thing and people prefer to listen to compressed audiofiles on youtube/spotify and even itunes. And when it comes to music it's not even a physical vs digital thing, they prefer an inferior audio format because it's more convenient and they don't care about the "upgrade".

As with traditional TV, DVD and bluray are probably still OK among young children.

Some releases are still packed with content though. Criterion releases are notorious for being the best example for this. And LET'S NOT FORGET the time I picked up American Pie: The Universal 100th Anniversary Edition to discover there was over 5 hours of behind the scenes content. I was blown away. There was pretty much an entirely seperate cut of American Pie 2 included which featured Stifler's dad, Heather and Oz breaking up and cheating on each other... it was like I was in bizarro world watching a whole different movie. Not to mention they included stuff like interviewing the FX guys on how they perfected "floating pubic hair" for the gag in part 3, how they made a "hump rig" for the dog in Wedding... It was literally the greatest 5 hours of my life.

Re: Piracy... Hell yeah, homie. I havent even watched television since Season 3 of Smallville once I figured out how to torrent. TV with no commercials and on my own time? Yes, please! And yeah, tons of niche shows would be lost to the ages by now had it not been for pirates.

I know I'll get called out on this but I feel we've reached the cap of quality that matters. At this point, things can become clearer, sure, but our eyes don't pick up the difference unless we're seated closer to the screen, and most people don't sit that close. The leap of quality between DVD and Bluray is considerable. Between lossless 1080p and 4k? Not so much (at a comfortable distance.)

As for music... I'd love to collect Vinyl releases strictly for their large art. But digital will always be my preferred method, so there's no real incentive outside their packaging for me.

Not surprising considering everyone either buys them digitally or they're all on Pandora/Spotify/another avenue nowadays

As diehard "never digital" as I am, still buying print books and DVDs, I can't remember the last time I bought a CD. 100% digital for my music... mostly YouTube streaming at work or Pandora at home.

I don't mind seeing CDs go away. There's no reason to cling to a media that only holds about 13 songs when the technology to carry around 1,000s of songs in thumb drives or phones or iPods has existed for 15 years. It seems silly.

4K Blu-Rays and the like, entirely different. Again, there is no way to "stream" 4K movies in any way that is remotely loss-less, and even in file form, to get them down to something you can carry around and play you have to compress it way down... and again, you're losing picture.

Yeah it's mostly Blu-rays that have the majority of special features compared to their DVD counterparts. Sometimes it's the DVD versions that are made barebones.

I also still appreciate special features, and the ones I've seen on the recent titles I've bought and rented are rather neat. So I still hope titles continue to get them for a long time.

I just remembered that I bought a CD in 2015, but it was to replace an album I once owned on cassette that got rid of it a while ago. I started selling off my cassettes in 2003 on Amazon, and I was surprised that there were people who wanted them. Then I decided to sell off the whole lot of what I had remaining on eBay, and someone actually took them off of my hands.

I can't even tell the difference between quality on DVD and Blu-Ray unless it's side-by-side and so I don't ever have a preference unless it's something I actually collect like TMNT or The Ring. Hell, before I got glasses I couldn't even see side-by-side differences.

That's crazy to me. You're telling me you can't tell the difference between a resolution of 640 x 480 and a resolution of 1920 x 1080? Maybe on a small, old tube-style TV (or maybe if the blu-rays you're watching are only 720p, which is 1280 x 720)... but c'mon. It is a staggering difference.