BBC Article On Music Sales 2018

[GhostShip]

Some Insight here on the future ?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46735093

Sales of CDs plummeted by 23% last year, as consumers flocked to streaming services for their music.
The picture is the same in America, where CD sales have fallen 80% in the last decade, from roughly 450 million to 89 million.

As a product of a certain generation I like the idea of owning something tangible, whilst mp3's are great for using in a digital player the idea being pushed by the music industry that we should be herded into a pay per play model and in many cases pay more per track than if we had purchased a compact disc seems a bit of a dream scenario for them, you cant trivially sell any digitally purchased tracks (if you actually have any - most folks use so called "streaming" which is in reality downloading but not creating a local copy of a file) and so what do you actually own ?

You can resell your CD and thus in the end the value of it for a popular artist of course can mean you have paid little to enjoy your favourite audio, owning fresh air is just that , and as we have seen over the years if you do actually use a digital track service that goes belly up you  have no legal recourse to allow you access to the tracks you purchased so its a simple choice, plastic or digital fresh air, make your own choice 

I cant remember the last time an artist autographed a digital track  ,   Happy new year folks

[White Stripes]

dont worry about physical formats going anywhere... look elsewhere and you will find that not only is CD collecting still strong, Vinyl made a comeback and even Compact Cassettes are coming back (good luck finding a decent player made in modern times however)....

[GhostShip]

Vinyl is indeed returning from a position of obscurity, many of my friends are taking the time to buy up old albums and scour charity shops for used materials and yet another is going the whole hog with nice sets of portable cases for his new release collection and a not so cheap turntable and stylus, this proves the enduring value of something tangible, even if an LP is by someone who cant sing it can still be warmed up in a pan of water and the sides bent to turn it into a cigarette ashtray 

With the push towards a cashless society and all the talk of streaming I think some people are simply losing sight of gaining value for money and following blindly like sheep into a whole minefield of problems, usually because they now have their heads stuck to their mobile phones, following the espousels of "opinion formers" paid for by each ad-laden sentence,  I can see why the zombie genre is resurging 

My apologies to those of you whom might not live in the same world I do, perhap I have been run over by 1 buggy pushing "drone" too many