Dear all,
Rolling Stone published an article that I felt might resonate with our community, "The End of Owning Music". (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-end-of-owning-music-how-cds-and-downloads-died-628660/) Of course it is not focused on "classical" music, but I saw quite a few things we have discussed over the years.
It is an interesting article and the subject, I think has been raised here somewhere before. The Classical Music market is only a small percentage of the CD market as a whole and it is surprising that CDs of classical music continue to come out, and not just with the works of the famous of which there already so many in existence. In White's article, he ponders who is buying CDs and comes up with Walmart customers. Of course, he is talking about the pop market, which for all intents and purposes is the market. But, very few classical music fans are buying their CDs from Walmart.
One has to wonder though how companies like Hyperion, Chandos and even Naxos, not to mention the smaller companies can make a profit. Will CDs disappear in the next decade as White suggests. Perhaps. Owning CDs may be a generational thing. People under 30 are probably used to getting their music or listening to it on Spotify etc. And CDs require a dedicated player, even in a car or computer...streaming services do not.
But owning, will that disappear. Maybe not. While there were many reasons why Communism as it existed has often failed, certainly one was the desire of humans to own property for themselves and not communally. It may be that CDs as a delivery format die. But one can buy mp3s. Not of every work, of course, but as CDs start to die out, perhaps the delivery system for those wishing to own will be to buy the MP3s and the player will be the computer, the tablet and the smartphone.
There is a certain convenience to owning. A certain comfort to knowing you can hear the music whenever you want and not just hope you can get it on a streaming service. Communal bicycles have existed in some cities with a fair degree of success but they have not killed off the desire of most bicyclists to own their own...
Interesting, Ilja.
As noted many times on UC, we are enjoying a 'golden era' for the Unsung Composers, Unsung Music and the odd and off-beat, principally through CDs and/or downloads, and I would guess that few of us on UC use streaming services for this type of music, if at all.
I hate being forced to use services that I don't want! I never use streaming services, and any new car I buy must have a radio and CD player, even if it's an added extra, rescued from the "obsolete" bin!
Long live the CD, I say! ;)
I'm very happy with abandoning the CD, and have digitised getting on for 2/3 of my collection now. The prospect of regaining a whole room previously dedicated to CD storage and replacing it with a server not much bigger than a large, fat paperback is very attractive, not to mention that I can stream the music it contains to any room in the house or even, potentially, anywhere in the world I happen to be. I rather resent having to buy a CD nowadays - it gets digitised immediately. Loss of sound quality (I've settled on 320kbps mp3s as standard)? Well, my old ears can't really hear any difference now between a good CD and a good mp3 I'm afraid. That said, I'm not ready to abandon ownership, and I do think that is something which separates my generation from my son's. I still want the security and, I suppose, pride of ownership and I wouldn't be happy relying solely on streaming services, although I have been exploring Spotify recently and have been impressed with the diversity and depth of unsung composers' works on offer there - but the coverage is very patchy and comes nowhere near matching the collection I've built up over the years.
I agree with Mark - there are 2 distinct threads here but intermingled (i) the future of the CD format 'per se' and (ii) the trade-offs between owning music in your own domain and owning or streaming it on demand.
For many people, I suspect it is access to the music that is the priority on an 'as, when and where you want it' basis. For me, good accompanying notes (which I believe you don't get with streaming) are also v. desirable, though just short of a 'must'. I have little attachment to the CD format as such - I'm quite happy with mp3 downloads, but I do find the CD album much more convenient to grab and play, rather than select some tracks from a large library and then arrange to play them in a particular sequence.
There is also the added consideration (risk?) that by relying on streaming services, you no longer have assured listening. If you 'own' the music but leave it 'on the cloud', the firm delivering the service could go bust and take all your music with them. Even if you only stream, not own, you might still have the inconvenience that if you have found a particular service that, say specialises in providing 'unsungs' or whatever and they go bust, that source of pleasure has potentially gone unless you can hunt it down elsewhere. Imagine the world's grief if YOUTUBE ceased operations!
The world IS going inevitably, I suspect , down the 'download or stream' route and, of those two, I'd choose download every day for the above reasons. What value do other UC members place on booklet notes, ownership issues etc?
Just a thought or two!
Richard
QuoteWhat value do other UC members place on booklet notes?
I've written the odd booklet note in my time, but I am surprised at how little I refer again to CD booklet notes once having read them. Libretti are a different matter, there's no doubt that sitting down to an opera with the libretto in hand is a real immersive pleasure, and so I do generally retain them, but otherwise the notes go the way of the CDs themselves.
I love having the notes 'on hand' if I need them for some reason. The big issue is the lack of notes in the first place for a lot of digital DLs which often have things including 'official' track times which I like to add to my database and stuff like arrangers, and other stuff such as occasionally noting the instrumentation for thinly scored orchestral stuff.
For the CD space issue I found a solution eight years back to use the plastic sleeves from Bags Unlimited combined with protective CD holders from Sleevetown for all 'standard' 1 and 2 CD jewel cases. It decreases the space a CD takes up by probably 65%.
I still like something in my hand and reading the booklet. I still have a CD player in the car and enjoy that on the way to work.
I appreicate Mark's pooint bu t because I don't have Mark's in-depth knowledge of composers, their works or music, I like the notes to tell me about the lives of the composers and the background as to how a work came to be written. Sometimes (e.g. CPO) they go into too much detail, sometimes (e.g. ZYX) cheap labels from yesteryear say virtually nothing. l also like the notes where they cover the structure of the music, as I am not an 'educated' listener.
Whilst much of this info for many works is available by trawling the web, it becomes a lot of effort for little reward. Oh for a central database on composers and their works (but then every notes writer seems to take a different tack, so who would have the courage to edit that lot anyway!) And also, much of the interest of UC members is NOT documented out there on the web -I've tried all too often to find details on unsungs without success and have to rely on whatever UC members themselves have been able to post.
Keep up that good work, folks - it is really appreciated by us 'incognescenti'
Best wishes
Richard
I'm not evangelical in any way, I'm only reporting what 's important or unimportant to me and the way I enjoy music. It happens that the digital download model suits me very well, but it won't do for everyone I know.
I am most strongly of the opinion that having the printed notes available and to hand immediately when listening is desirable at the very least, but of paramount importance when applied to the neglected and forgotten repertoire as frequently dicussed on this forum. IMHO, having the booklet is surely a valuable marketing tool in the endless battle in promoting such music and encouraging a much wider dissemination to an otherwise unsuspecting, but music-loving audience! I can certainly echo the above sentiment from my own relatively limited experience as a writer of booklet notes etc., and would like to think that providing this extra dimension enhances the listening experience and encourages further exploration away from the all-to-well-trodden paths of the so-called "established classics"!
Since CDs can be ripped onto a computer, if one plans to listen on a CD player, in addition to a portable device, then it is still the best value.
I only ever listen to digital files which I purchase, unless the classical piece is on a decent sounding vinyl (analog quality has its advantages). Having all of one's music on a publicly shared server kind of devalues the meaning of a "collection," in my opinion. Yes, you can categorize what you like, but I think there's a difference between adding a song to a cart and adding a song to a playlist.
With thousands of CDs, how on earth would I find the time to rip them? I'll continue to buy them until they aren't made any more and then switch to downloads. Simples...
Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 21 January 2020, 19:11
With thousands of CDs, how on earth would I find the time to rip them? I'll continue to buy them until they aren't made any more and then switch to downloads. Simples...
Well if you do some for a few hours every weekend Alan, you may be done in as little as 50 years. ;D
As Mark said, if the booklet has useful info that can be continually referenced, such as a libretto, it is a nice item. But many downloads offer digital files of the liner notes anyway.
Quoteyou may be done in as little as 50 years
I'm looking forward to being 115! Not!
Seriously, though, I've got far more important things to do than worry about this. I just don't care enough...
Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 21 January 2020, 19:11
With thousands of CDs, how on earth would I find the time to rip them? I'll continue to buy them until they aren't made any more and then switch to downloads. Simples...
Took me three, but I'm far more meticulous than others about the way I named and tagged my files. Just /ripping/ them is actually quite an easy task since it's passive -- just shove the CD in and go, the majority of time you can do whatever else.
Quote from: Zusac on Tuesday 21 January 2020, 20:16
But many downloads offer digital files of the liner notes anyway.
True, but many don't. And often times you have to but the full album to get the book...which beings up a very silly point about digital DLs -- especially with classical where 'albums' can often be not originally made of recordings meant to be together, one might often not want everything on them. Yet (outside of eClassical.com) they are priced to aggressively sell you the whole thing anyway (that is being very expensive ala carte), and often can't even buy certain tracks separately. This is something that's bothered me since diigi-DLs started.
Although I love CDs, have a room full (plus tapes and LPs!), and are distraught if I mislay one, I mostly get downloads these days.
Liner notes are important to me, but more for other genres of music, for which I want recording dates, personnel and so forth. I'll leave streaming to the younger generation... a time will come when they'll know no better. ::)
It strikes me that in an increasingly authoritarian world, people might end up being streamed only the music that those in power (politically, economically or culturally) want them to hear, and that's quite frightening. I wonder what streaming services are like in Russia, Hungary and China.
I'm sure I'm not alone in having accumulated more LPs and CDs than I could realistically expect to find the time or inclination to play in my remaining years! That, at least, was the situation about 3 years ago, before I decided I could bear to lose my last 1500 or so LPs (having had limited culls on several previous occasions). With LPs of course, the prospect of converting them all to digital format in real time was inconceivable.
Then last year I decided it was time for the 2500 CDs to go the same way, but this time I did rip them all to mp3 first at a rate of more than 20 per day (at one point I had two computers on the job simultaneously) and the job took just 3 months. I'm not concerned about liner notes but I do like to browse, and now the works are all far better catalogued than they were in their CD incarnation. I wouldn't want to sacrifice "ownership" entirely, but I don't miss their concrete physical presence one little bit.
The disadvantage of streaming, I find, is that you need to decide in advance exactly what you want to hear and I seldom listen that way. However, if you yearn to hear a particular piece (at least, one that's old enough to be out of copyright), a subscription to IMSLP fulfills the need perfectly. The only difficulty is choosing which to listen to amongst exactly 100 recordings of the Pathetique symphony!
It's taken me a couple of years of very intermittent activity to digitise around 2250 CDs - only another 1250 or so to go. You can do this job whilst doing other things, just stopping every few minutes to slot another CD into the drive. Of course, the job doesn't stop there, the resulting tracks need to be organised into albums and properly tagged to get the cataloguing benefits Matesic mentions and to maximise instant accessibility. I should add, rather tongue in cheek, that therein I found a great and unlooked-for benefit. Tagging tracks is a highly therapeutic activity for anyone with even a touch of OCD (I have more than a touch). There's reams and reams of advice online about standardising your tag formats, cover art size and so on - it clearly floats a lot of nerdy boats. :)
I guess I'm sailing in a similarly OCD "nerdy boat" like Mark - organizing & tagging music is a task just routine enough to do largely by rote, but simultaneously requiring just enough attention to accuracy to exercise the brain a little. (as to nerdiness factor, my own personal boat may have aircraft carrier overtones :o ) Like others, I found that digitizing wasn't quite the impossible job it seemed to be up front - I ripped my (I'm guessing) 2,500 or so cd's about 5 years ago, and have continued to do so with new stuff since then, of course. One of the great benefits is the option to use playlists and/or "smart playlists" - wherein with a few mouse-clicks, one can assemble however many criteria one chooses - "19th century" & "German" & "string trios" or whatever choices, into an instantly-generated playlist, to be perused and played as one wishes. Also, for me, one of the great benefits of digitizing is that we travel a lot, and the fact that on a whim I can play absolutely any piece of music I've ever collected, of (now) well-organized 84,000+ tracks, while being absolutely anywhere in the world (assuming wifi, of course), seems magical. A smallish-but-surprisingly-good Bose portable speaker and my phone are all I need. We'll be in Antarctica next month and I can play whatever piece of music happens to float my nerd boat.....yes, RVW's 7th symphony is a no-brainer, of course!
I spend so much time trying to peruse the scores so that I can add at least some descriptive info not on the often miserly CD /etc jackets that it slows me down -some-...
I have no intentions whatsoever of disposing of my CDs!
I've got about 1500, some are transferred to hard drive but I intend to do the rest slowly. I've been keeping up with recent acquisitions by ripping them when I get them but my buying rate has dropped off substantially in the last few years. There are several series that are continuing and I shall continue to "collect" but aside from that, the amount I buy is not likely to go up. As a reviewer, I get discs to review so I will still acquire them by that route.
I do use a streaming service as well, mostly for hearing things I've not got the finances to buy - however, if a disc is released I really want, I'll still buy it (even if it's streamable (if that's a word)) :)
I thought people were silly for getting rid of their albums, much less cds. I suppose I'm an obsessive collector. Yes, my shelves creak - but they're happy creaks.
And I haven't read Rolling Stone since Blondie were on the cover (1979, or thereabouts...)
I'm thinking of the unfortunates who'll have to dispose of their unwanted inheritance. After overcoming my initial reluctance I find decluttering strangely liberating.
... and I'm afraid the libraries and other institutions don't seem to want the gift of one's treasured collection.
Well, I won't be here to care...
Ditto ;D
A few more boxes to be carried out after you, then. :'(
Might get a few of my favourites put in with me...
You'll need some beefy pall-bearers (not a sentence I ever imagined typing).
Nothing heavy, mind. No Mahler...
Any of the pieces I -want- played at my funeral would be too long (and even though one of them written around the year my father was born and in a definite enough B minor, too "modern" for some who might possibly come...)
Thank you for all your reactions. For me, the problem is that the CD is just a very attractive object. Quite apart from the fact that a couple of them died on me, a CD booklet is simply a horrible way to present information: the letters are far too small generally, the awful glossy paper isn't very inviting, and if the booklet is even slightly thicker it won't go in the case properly. Say what you will about LPs, but that aspect was handled a lot better.
These days, I prefer a download and read the notes on my e-reader (if they're in epub) or screen (PDF). I'm still not entirely convinced by streaming, but I'm very aware that the "it might stop working tomorrow" argument is not entirely realistic and not unlike that used by people preferring to travel by tugboat because "those train things might be gone tomorrow".
Contrary to the tendency for listeners to eschew CD ownership in favour of streaming we have the retro fad for vinyl - not just old discs but new pressings of 21st century music. However, there seems to be no appetite for this in the classical world. Why should this be so? Surely not just because nobody wants to play classical music backwards-forwards-backwards..?
:) Mind you, that would improve many 20th century works. ;D
There seem to be, for those who do not wish to keep the physical CD, two solutions. In my opinion, those who think streaming is the answer need to realize that not everything that appeared on CD is going to be streamed by the various services, not to mention the other concerns other posters have raised. It is worth remembering that not every work (forget about the question of who the performers were), to be clear, not ever piece of music recorded on LP has appeared on CD.
The other solution being to transfer contents of the CD onto a hard drive, the downside to which can be, depending on how many one has, extremely time consuming and tedious.
I started collecting LPs in the late early 1960s spending my hard earned allowance money on them. They are probably worth a fair amount now to some collector. I stopped buying LPs around 1985 and have stayed with CDs since only occasionally plumping for an MP3.
From my perspective, I can't see why one would bother getting rid of either LPs or CDs. The main argument here has been space considerations...really??? Okay, if you are living in a one room studio apartment, perhaps, just perhaps, it makes sense...but even then. I give you the example of one of my Oxford tutors, long dead now, The Rev. Dr. Thomas Parker who crammed over 30,000 books into the two rooms in which the college allowed him to live. When I became one of his students, it was toward the end of his life and he was getting on in age. To say that books were everywhere does not do justice to it. Beside all of the walls which were lined with book shelves and filled, books were piled three feet high on the floor with no place to walk, and with only a pathway to an armchair where one read one's tutorial essay and further on to his desk and then to the back room, similarly filled except where his bed was. He seemed to have no problem with it. Never heard him complain...So, unless your wife, husband etc is threatening divorce, and even then, or your landlord is threatening eviction, why get rid of them. As a final word on Dr. Parker, he used some of his salary to have the College reinforce the floors underneath his rooms.
Santo - with respect we seem to live in quite different circumstances as regards space - really!!! Mine consists of two large rooms and one small which over the years have become cluttered to a remarkable degree with discs, books, instruments, "art" works and the general paraphernalia of 21st century living, like beds. Amongst all this we need to be able to create space for at least a string quintet to play. I really don't want to end life like Dr Thomas Parker, and over the last few years we've cheerfully sacrificed a lot of stuff. In the case of books this was sometimes a bit of a wrench, particularly for my partner - after all, when they're gone, they're gone - but the CDs and LPs were no great loss when they're available to stream or backed up on hard drive. Even when they aren't, do we really need to have access to every work ever recorded?
A welcome side-effect of the decluttering process is that I've started to value items in terms of what they contribute to my life now and are likely to contribute in the future, rather than what they originally cost or might presently be "worth" in monetary terms. Rather than wait an indeterminate time for "some collector" to come along (he's currently in great demand, or maybe like an anti-Santa Claus he doesn't actually exist at all), my LPs all went for peanuts to a strong man with a van who was only interested in the rock albums. Like yours, they went back to my early collecting days in the 1960's. Now my only vinyl keepsake from those times is a set of Bruckner symphonies, and I recently downloaded the same set from youtube.
I hear you Matesic. Far be it from me to suggest that we should live like Dr Parker. Truth be told, I always wondered what the point was with the floor entirely covered with books, in order for him to get to a book some distance from the little pathway he cleared, he would have had to have taken his substantial girth and walked over a bunch of other books precariously stacked on the floor, and most likely would have wound up under some...
Certainly, life in its autumnal phase, is about letting go. Just last month I donated my ski instructor sweaters along with some other items to a clothing charity. Parting with the past is a poignant thing if the past was pleasant. But CDs and LPs as you so correctly note can often be downloaded and streamed so parting is not sweet sorrow since it is the music in which we are interested and not the physical object which contains it.
So, by all means, go for it and keep those string quintet sessions going....I do have more room than you. I am fortunate to live in a house which is probably too large for two people, although there are also three German Shepherd Dogs as well. I am lucky to have a dedicated music room in which to play quartets and quintets, though not anything larger. CDs and LPs are in other rooms.
As a parting thought, it occurs to me how lucky we are with regard to being able to listen to works pretty much whenever we want. Think about composers and performing musicians, living before the phonograph. How often could they get to hear a Mozart quartet for example...