If you love to collect your crystal-case albums with booklets CDs, and sometimes even a bonus DVD, then you might be saddened to hear that the tendency of these is to slowly fade away from the market, as digital sales continue to increase and album sales decrease.
According to the Nielsen SoundScan which were released on Wednesday, album sales are down by 9.2%, while the sales of digital music have increased by 42%.
There isn’t as much collector’s value as there used to be for a CD. Anyone and everyone can and releases music on CD, but only very few are “blessed” with good sales now.
Although I can understand that there is a very big market for single tracks which are hip, or which you feel like listening at the time, but you don’t want to buy the whole album (everyone’s felt that once or twice, right?), it’s a bit sad that as time goes by, all of our music will be stored on our Terabyte hard drives, and the closest thing we will have to the feeling of looking through towers of music CDs, will be using an application like the iTune’s CoverFlow.
Hopefully for those of us who enjoy the pride of ownership, CDs will never fully go away… just like records and SACD/DVDA are still hanging around.
It’s tragic that life has come full circle, and I am now my father… lamenting that my kids will never know and appreciate the brilliance of CDs. Yikes.
Just use one of those online stores that allow you to buy the mp3 album over the net then send you the CD in the post as well.