When I was a wee lad, our music was a bit different. You might try to put together your favorite songs on a mixed cassette tape. If you worked an odd job and had a little free cash, you might be able to stitch it together from an album or 45. Otherwise, you had to wait for it to play on the radio (and hope the announcer wasn't one of those talkative types). If you were really cool, you could even carry it around with your Walkman.
Late in high school, the CD was introduced and it revolutionized the industry. I still remember carting around a carefully crafted collection of several hundred jewel cases for my many moves.
Today, CDs are a relic. Sales are slowly dying. It's hard to even find physical CDs in retail establishments. All of the music superstores have gone the way of the dinosaur. I still find myself buying a few. Even though I rip them to .mp3 files, there is still something about having the physical disc that appeals to me. I know that there are a lot of people who have gone completely to streaming services like Pandora or Spotify. While I will listen to them, I guess the failed artist in me still wants to reward the musical creators with some small share of value.
In an advice column from FiveThirtyEight, someone asks if they are normal because (like me) they still buy CDs. It turns out that we are becoming an endangered species:
More from the article:
Nielsen published data showing that 165.4 million CD albums were sold last year (down from 193.4 million in 2012). Once we subtract those CDs, as well as LPs and digital sales, from all albums sold, we’re left with almost nothing: That confirms how obsolete cassettes and minidiscs are. But more importantly, those CD sales confirm there aren’t many Americans like you: Just 0.5 CDs per person were sold in 2013.
Here is the link to the full article: Dear Mona, I Still Buy CDs. Am I Normal? | FiveThirtyEight
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