Death Of The CD, Backwards In Time

July 6th, 2007

Ars Technica has a nice update regarding the continuing death of the CD. But in addition to the vanishing of a physical format, it’s possible the whole concept of the “album” — a sequence of songs meant to be considered as a whole — is dying along with it.

Truth be told, it’s an idea that calls for a change in my way of thinking. I’m still a die-hard album fanatic. Even with digital downloads, I find it hard to download just one song from an artist. It feels somehow incomplete and unfair to to only cherry pick an artist’s best songs — like watching only one scene of a movie — so I find myself still buying complete albums, even through downloads.

Doesn’t that sound old fashioned? Well, I’m divulging my age.

I grew up with albums and cassette tapes. CDs became popular when I was in junior high and throughout high school. The shiny-disc format required a mental adjustment. Pre CD, albums had two sides of music (basically two albums), with a strong, single-worth song at the start of side one and side two. The CD forced us to look at albums as one continuous stretch of music.

The CD also killed off large album art and liner notes. Odd as it may seem today, the first few years of CDs were sold in “long boxes” that were the same height as an album LP. Perhaps this was to fit CDs into store shelves designed for LPs, or maybe someone was worried that nobody would be able to locate the relatively small CD jewel boxes.

I also “wasted” quite a bit of money on cassettes. These were the format of choice for portability, as they worked in a car or a Walkman, plus one could make their own “mix tapes.” It seems rather amusing the amount of time wasted fast forwarding, rewinding, and pausing to find the right songs.

Today, the whole “record store” concept seems rather quaint and increasingly outdated — soon CDs will only be sold in a dusty bookstore backwater or big box superstore department — before passing away completely.

But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking the death of the record store and the CD is a move to the future. The current format of choice — single songs, more digestible for digital downloads, is actually a return to the days of the hit single, where all the emphasis was on the lone song. It seems the entire music industry is moving backwards in time. Focus is also returning to the live concert — which is how musicians made their living before the recording industry even existed.

The record industry basically made a consumer product out of music by wielding the power of technology to control recording, mass production, and distribution. Musicians basically had to get involved with the recording industry in order to be heard by a mass audience. I need not say more about how computers and the internet have basically broken down the record industry’s power; the story is familiar to everyone.

Anyhow, back to the album. It’s a statement on the music world of today that there really haven’t been many albums that justify a purchase, especially in comparison to the sixties, when the Beatles made their name as creating albums where nearly every track was worth owning.

Perhaps digital downloads make it easier for people to create their own radio stations which is more appealing than listening to the same artist for a half-hour. Perhaps attention spans are shorter, and changing songs or hitting shuffle on an iPod is just too ready an option. Perhaps people prefer to make their own albums with iTunes and a CD burner, and forego the inferior ones created by the record industry. Perhaps today’s artists aren’t capable of filling an entire album with great songs.

But whatever the reason, the CD format is dead. The sixty year old genre of music called “rock and roll” still struggles to remain relevant. I’m thinking the more things change, the more they stay the same… only with less packaging.