Ugh... and I thought this conversation was ugly before I went to work today.

Glad to see I'm not the only person turned off by that... sorry Wal Mart, but I want a jewel case. But even as you said most of the stuff in those kinds of cases is greatest hits junk and it's very rare for a compilation to have all the songs I want from a particular band anyway.

You aren't. FYE only makes money off the impatient who refuse to wait for stuff to be shipped to them from another place that could offer them a better deal. I only buy there if there is a special deal or a price is within a decent range elsewhere - give or take a buck or two.

And no, when CD's came out they cost around $20 and it was said by many that the price would come down as the format became the standard. The price has come down, but some chains just perfer to feed off those with more money than brains. Why should I pay $20 for Nirvana's Nevermind when I can get it for $10 elsewhere? I would pay more for something if it was an independant record store but not a chain.

This again. Please explain to me, if data isn't "physical", what is it...?

"As permanent as"? Dictionary.com's definition of permanent is "existing perpetually; everlasting, esp. without significant change". Permanent is not a matter of degree, either something's permanent (everlasting), or its not. And CDs sure as hell are not.

I personally have a fondness for my CD collection. I am a particularly sentimental man so the loss of my favorite media in its physical form would sadden me quite a bit. When someone buys a movie, a music disc, a video game, a program what exactly are they buying. They are buying the right to look at and use someone else's intellectual property. When its all said and done buying a Mp3 album will never hold a candle to me when the physical copy exists. Getting a disc makes me feel like the product is truly mine to mess up, use, abuse, lend, throw away, keep for years. It occurs to me that this is also true of my hard drive but somehow it is not the same. Despite CD's costing more money to make and taking up space in my home, sometimes too much space, they have become a representation of the things that I enjoy and the things that I continue to support. Also it gives a bit of history along with it. This by proxy probably means that I am a sort of material person which I don't disagree with but having the pride of ownership means a lot to a bunch of people instead of actively acknowledging that the only reason that you listen to that album is because the record companies let you listen to them.

In any-case even if the moguls decide to end the CD, the physical form will probably not end. I contend that local bands and people of that nature will continue to distribute their goodness upon the masses at their shows and stuff.

Oh well. Lets see what happens.

Data is a sequence of both positively and negatively charged particles on a magnetic surface.

Data doesn't last as long as on a hard drive as it does a separate, removable, free-standing disc.

As for data on the internet, in "Cyberspace," I couldn't tell you what level of existence data exists on in that instance; particles scattered to the wind, I guess?

It's kind of like, you can download MP3s from the internet, but then, if you have to or want to back them, you have to end up burning them onto a CD-R. Guess what? Then you've defeated the whole "Eco-Friendly" purpose of no CD, data-only policies.

Besides, when the hell are we going to go paperless?! That's something they've been taking about in the corporate world for awhile now, yet have yet to do. Everyone should be carrying documents around as PDFs on tablet PCs, Goddamnit! It's like, we're chopping down all these trees, and we're losing our filters for dangerous greenhouse gases! Goddamnit, I'm gonna sell my car, and get me a horse! You can honk your horn all you want, but I'm going to go 10mph! And if you end up killing me, or trying to kill me, in a fit of road rage because you're so damn impatient, my family and I will SUE! [/self-righteous environmental rant]

Y'mean those "Cases" that're just a mite wider than the disc itself? Yeah, I've seen those: "An Inconvenient Truth" was packaged in one of those things, and they still sold it for $20. It's like, if Al Gore was REALLY environmentally conscious, he would've released his film FOR FREE over the internet, rather than trying to make a quick buck off of those who have already been singing the siren's song of global warming. It's like, was your purpose to make money, or to inform people of impending global disaster? I mean, you're going to CHARGE us to listen to your prophetic speech of doom?

You seem to be getting really hung up on the cost of packaging. You do know you're not just buying packaging, right? Did you have the same problems with CDs being cheaper to manufacture than tapes?

It's just a storage method. You're paying for the music. The shiny disks are just a storage method. The actual music is no more permanent. In fact, with the ease of back-up, from someone who had a load of CDs stolen a few years back, having them as mp3s can well be more permanent.

Music is what you're paying for. The cost of packaging is not dramatically going to affect pricing, if at all.

It's just that things are changing, as they always do. That it bothers you is probably a sign that you're getting old. And you could be dead soon, so why not just enjoy the music?

Mp3s -- even 320kps ones -- though, are certainly not the same quality as a CD. There's info missing so you ARE paying for less. Regardless of the fact that a lot of people don't hear the difference on the forefront (because of their crappy setup) is completely irrelevant.
I have no problem paying 30 cents for one (I pay 24 cents per track at eMusic), but $1 per track, and the way they force you to buy more when they don't haver to theoretically IS annoying, and I will pay $15 to get a disc over $10 for fifteen tracks over 75 minutes. Normally what I buy at  eMusic is either unavailable at English online stores (be it OOP or Eurostuff,  or the occasional digital release), or I only want part of the disc. It's also a lot less risky to only spend 96 cents on four tracks if I'm not sure about em.

What's really crazy, though, is with the online prices as they are, there's now plenty of legal options to listen to music for basically free. Between streaming sites (like Pandora, Lala, Jango, and a whole bunch of others I've never tried), to SpiralFrog - a HUGE amount of stuff, even major label stuff, one can DL for free. It has DRM, but it's not even that bad of DRM (Winamp works with plugins). Though for sanity's sake I mainly use it to decide what to buy DRM-free (either DL or CD), one could if one wanted to DL a ton of stuff and just listen from there.

Lert's try this again. While it's true that they can set their CD price, the actual prices they are charging are the MSRPs. That means the amount anyone selling the CD is "suggested" to charge. Do you complain about a paperback when they charge $12.95, and this price is clearly written on the book itself? Yeah maybe Walmart has it for $9.95, but Walmart doesn't have that graphic novel you might want too (just an example). Paying the extra in a bookstore is in part paying for the convenience of them having a better choice. And on the flip side, you may be able to get the same, used less than the bunch of people reading it in store, for $4.
So no, they aren't charging extra, it's the other stores that are charging less.

I personally have never, and will never buy mp3s over the internet. I like to own an original CD or a "physical" item. I myself haven't seen any decline in CD stores and stocked items, Amazon for example has hundreds of thousands of CDs to buy. CD's go out of print for a reason, each has it's own time limit of sale at retail and that's that. If the CD dissappears and they move onto something else, then that's something we'll have to deal with in our own way. The same as VCR to DVD to BlueRay. My apologies for not structuring my post with neatly written paragraphs and attempts to make other people feel small, I'd also like to  apologize for not going off on anal tangents such as the environment.
Cheers.

Booya!

Both of these statements are patently false nonsense. I understand that you were on a roll with your rant, but that shouldn't give you license to stretch facts. The opinions you offer on "2D vs 3D" gameplay and "chiptune vs streaming" audio are just that: opinions, which you've presented here as facts.

Permanence is a human illusion created by the scale of our common perceptions. Nothing is permanent.

It's somewhat easy to teach oldies, atleast my mom nowadays easily rips the CDs she owns / loans from libary, downloads movies she like to watch, and even gets subtitles from them. Heck she probably even retimes those subs if they're bit off. It's just matter of teaching them properly.

And why we are talking about death of the CD when vinyls are still been made and used. And those are like, ancient history.

Actually, burn some shit on shitty CD-R and let's see how long that will stand against time. Or sunlight or other things that tend to destroy CDs. And are you talking regular old spinning HDDs or the new fancy HDDs with flash-memory? Seems that flash mem has the living age of 10 years, which is pretty much same as regular CD-R, right? But then, I don't have any idea how much more or less flash-memory nature destroying it is compared to CDs

And I want Babylon 5's data crystals to be invented, asap. Or some other fancy nancy meaning of data storage, instead of CDs and HDDs.

It all depends on the consumers. If a majority (or a sizable portion) of consumers switched to or started getting interested in flac or other lossless formats, you'd pretty quickly see a new iPod supporting those. The issue here, as with the issue of the continued existence of the CD-format, is primary one of laziness and conformity: people are so used to one thing that they're uninterested in or even hostile to trying out something else.

The consumers have the power to change things, however the vast majority of them are dumb and lazy, unwilling to get off their obese asses, mentally as well as bodily.

How does this factor into this discussion? If those artists weren't able to sell CDs, how does that speak against the digital format? If anything, yes, it'd be marginally easier for them to sell their music digitally, because its much easier for anyone anywhere in the world to buy digital files than it is to buy "physical CDs". And it is much, much easier for someone to independently advertise their music on the internet than anywhere else, getting the word out to people in many different places that might otherwise not have heard of them. If someone can't get their music sold online, I fail to see how it would be easier for them to sell it offline.

We've been through this in another thread already, don't you remember? The CD isn't going to disappear overnight, it will be a phasing-out period that will probably be very long (since people in general are dense and slow). The "old people" will learn eventually, and if not, they'll go away sooner or later, won't they? And hopefully, the young people who are already "old" in this respect will learn as well.

Agreed, we can definitely shake hands on that. $5 is a very reasonable price for an entire album in digital format provided that most of the money goes to the artist (although hopefully in the future this will be lossless, not mp3s), if albums cost that much and all albums were widely available, I'd probably pirate a lot less than I do, and I'd most certainly buy all the stuff I enjoyed. This shows that what's wrong isn't really the digital format: its the crappyness of the industry that's unwilling to improve their product as well as of the consumers who are daft enough to not demand a better product. Some artists get it right, though, which is a positive sign that things are slowly improving. I bought the latest Saul Williams album for exactly $5 from his website, it was in FLAC (you could also choose 320 kbps mp3s if you wanted) and came with .pdf-files of the artwork. Isolated example, I know, but hopefully getting more common.

"a sequence of both positively and negatively charged particles on a magnetic surface"? Doesn't that have something to do with something called "physics", a science examining the physical world...?

I'm so tired of hearing this bullshit argument. Data is as physical as anything else, because everything is physical. Just because you can't "touch" data doesn't mean it isn't physical. People use the word as though it only applies to what they can palm in their hands, its so small-minded. Data is as physical as air or atoms or molecules, none of which you can "touch". What lies behind the concept of "physical" as used by many people is pure convention, what they've decided themselves (or rather, gotten decided for them by others) is possible to "own". But if you think about it, we do buy a lot of things that aren't tangible, like insurance for example. Why not music?

Not really. There are many different ways to back-up data. You can store them on online servers, for example. If nothing else, you can burn the files to DVD-Rs, which admittedly defeats the purpose of "eco-friendliness", but less so than CDs, since you can store many CDs on a single DVD, reducing the oil/plastic being used up in the process.

Personally, I find this to be a moot point, since I'm looking forward to the time when all music will be available on the internet for easy acquisition, and people look back on this conversation and these times with a sense of bafflement and wonder what the controversy was all about. 

Agreed, nothing is permanent. I was only taking apart his use of the word.

Also, to Bernhardt, GoldfishX, Boyblunder: you guys are totally missing my point and doing me (as well as this debate) a great disfavour by twisting my argument and trying to paint me out as some "environmental nut" or something. I didn't raise that point to sound smart or push some environmental agenda or anything, I raised it (as I said) to point out the redundancy and waste of the CD-format, which is a strain on both the collective natural resources and our own financial resources. A strain that can easily be avoided, unlike many other strains.

And if you don't give a shit about that, let me ask you this. Do you drive a car? If so, are you irritated about high gas prices? If you are, and if you like complaining about it, you can stop right now, since you're unwilling to take even the smallest personal steps to ease it. Oil prices are going up because it seems to be a dwindling resource, at the same time as everyone has an insatiable desire for "more and more", no one's willing to cut back on even the slightest everyday "need". No wonder we're heading for a crash and catastrophe when people are so short-sighted and small-minded as to not even want to consider the possibility of changing their habits in even the smallest way to meet the future. As I've underlined, switching from CDs to digital formats is a mere drop in the ocean and not much likely to change anything at all, but its one of the small ways in which we actually can make a difference and reduce oil dependency, and hopefully, as science and technology progresses, there will be more and more areas/products that can be "saved" this way.

But it really fills one with a sense of dread and hopelessness when you see that most people are unable to even take this smallest of steps, doesn't it? Just raising the problem or starting a discussion about it is enough to make half the people on this forum (and people here are comparatively smarter than the average Joe) feel threatened and start jabbering crap about intellectual property rights, the "physicality" of the CD, how nice liner notes look, the importance of paying the artist (the most bogus bullshit argument ever, since practically all the money goes to the big corporations that are impeding the development of widespread lossless formats), etc. It just completely boggles my mind that there's this option that eliminates the negative environmental and economic effects AND is cheaper and handier than the CD, yet people are so lazy and indoctrinated in CD-use that most of them cannot even conceive listening to music in any other way. Maybe I should just stop discussing this altogether, people like to shoot the messenger and ignore the message.

But who cares about all that shit, LOOK WHAT I'VE GOT!!!! *waves colourful and shiny booklet with Japanese text and anime characters*

Sure, man. Go and play with your toys.

What happened to STC? I remember back in the early 2000s, we used to discuss all sort of controversial things. Sure, the flames burned high and people weren't as backscratching-diplomatic as now, but at least we could talk about stuff more openly. Now its like, if you raise an uncomfortable point, people threaten to leave the forum or accuse you of going off on "anal tangents", like you're a traitor or terrorist or something. A lot of talk around these parts, but real substantial discussion is dead (even on most soundtracks, it seems). A few more years in this direction, and the best VGM-forum on the 'net will be nothing more than a billboard for upcoming releases, and we already have VGMDB to take care of that.

With ease. (if you one of these: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano) Thought, no idea how handy rockbox is actually, but still, if I would have iPod, I would be very tempted to try it.

Also Daniel, I won't start speaking behalf of others, but I myself like to collect CDs with their liners and sometimes bit special cases. Thought, I wouldn't mind paying few dollars more for enviromental friendly CDs and stuff.

Also, I hope that more artists would follow Radiohead/Saul Williams/NIN-way and release their albums digitally with a nice price. Thought, me being such a Ferrari-stealing pirate, me paying for digital releases would take some time, maybe it's just the collector inside me.

Third also, what the f--- are people buying videogame music saying that they support the composers they like. I'm pretty sure that the composer (unless he owns the rights to the music, looking at Koshiro and Mitsuda) doesn't get anything, thought, there might be some contracts where they get some share of the sales. Thought, someone with more knowledge about this should chime in.

And I'm off from rambling, back to watching Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I know you're in Sweden, but here in the US, the price of gas has gone down nearly $3 over the past year (to around the $1.50-$1.80 range) because the demand for gasoline completely dropped off, enough that OPEC wants to cut supply and drive the prices back up. Many people I talk to say that fuel efficiency is a top priority when buying a new/used car. So...yeah.

I believe in stuff like digital documents (my coworkers waste SOO much paper at work, an environmentalist would have a heart attack and then probably start chasing people with an ax) and biodegradable food containers. The thing about CD's is that they're a luxury item (like videogames and DVD's) and I want them to look good as well as be functional (as a hard copy of the music) and I don't believe enough of them are created to have enough of an effect on the environment to make a difference, especially if their sales continue to decline. If I buy an Iron Maiden CD, I get more value having a hard copy of the music, plus the artwork with Eddie and the liner notes. I think it adds to the overall package, however I do think it is becoming replaced and if companies wanted to keep CD's in the public eye, they would lower the price (they tend to sit in the store otherwise) and/or offer more of a value (GH notecharts, like I said). As a consumer, they offer more for the price than a digital download does.

And if people are so resistant to change, explain how CD's have all but replaced cassettes and vinyl.

Haha, you're the one who walked away from the 128-bit thread. ;-p I have to deal with the diplomatic nonsense at work everyday, so it's nice to be open on the internet without getting into politics.

And this is exactly the observation I made in the monster thread before, as to why the current VGM scene is lacking and people seem to care less and less about what comes out, compared to about 8-10 years ago (although I feel that is more on the shoulder of the artists and gamemakers and people/vgm fans are reacting naturally). Most of the good ones are still based around the same things (Rockman, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Silent Hill to an extent).

^
Come on Cedille, read the text and get mad again. You know you want to.

As do I, to a certain degree. But its a vain luxury that's losing it's hold on me.

VGM in particular is expensive as it is, I don't think starting with environmentally friendly packaging would  especially help sales. The most eco-friendly (and economic) thing would probably be to cut out packaging altogether and go digital.

Prices might fluctuate up and down, but the thing is that the resource we're talking about (petroleum) is finite, meaning that it will eventually run out. Prices might still go down now and then, but there will come a time when they start rising sharply and don't stop.

As for the paper-thing you mentioned (and Bernhardt mentioned it earlier too), its true that we waste a lot of paper, but I don't think that's as big a hazard. Paper isn't as damaging to the environment as plastic, it can very easily be recycled, and - maybe the most important thing in this context - it can be replaced by carefully executed forest planning. If we're skillful in going about it, we should always have paper, since we can always plant new forests. Not so with fossil fuels, though - once they're gone, they're gone.

Not really comparable, I'd say. CDs, cassettes, and vinyls all resemble each other very much, and are handled/bought/sold in much the same way. People could thus adapt to them with relative ease. With digitally distributed music, we're talking about a whole new way to sell, distribute and listen to music, and therein lies its revolutionary nature. As we've seen in this thread and many others, a lot of people still can't or won't acknowledge digital formats as being "physical" music, which should basically tell you everything about the difference between it and the earlier formats you mentioned. I talked to a friend of mine about this, a very smart guy by the way, and he's like "mp3s don't feel like real music because it feels like I just have some dust lying around on my computer that isn't mine". Its an unfortunate opinion, IMO, because it shows that rather than focus on the music itself, people are hung up on the ownership aspect of the music, the notion that music can only be "owned" and "enjoyed" in a few specifically determined formats, like CD, cassette, LP, etc., and this hinders them from recognizing other ways of hearing it. But as we've seen, both "physical" and "non-physical" formats can be lost/stolen/broken/scratched/damaged/whatever, the line isn't as clearcut. After all, when all's said and done, the important thing is the music itself (as I said above, I hope everyone can agree on that point), and as fans and consumers we can (and should) ask ourselves what formats are most beneficial to ourselves, the artists, the environment, and whatever else we may care about, and make informed choices from that. What we shouldn't do is close our minds to other possibilities, because things aren't as easy as that.

To the people who think digital music can't be "owned": do you own your money? Most of your money is probably stored away as abstract figures in some bank. If you have money stored in the bank and can take it out to use it, why couldn't you store music digitally and take that out and "use it" (meaning listen to it)? What's the difference? Different and mutually incompatible notions of ownership, is my theory.

Well, I walked away from that thread because I felt I had nothing more to say about the subject, really.

Well consider that a CD often comes with nice art, a nice booklet, etc. Only in the past year-year and a half has there been a push to even include cover art, much less notes. This is especially problematic in cases where sometimes they simply offer the music and DON'T include info on who wrote it and/or who's performing it.
The irony is that it's quite often easier to get such info from a torrent/other DL source than from a legal DLed version.

Alright, the example wasn't completely analogous then. But it does show that we have a concept of "ownership" that doesn't exclude things that aren't "physically tangible".

It often boils down to how much of your enjoyment from a CD comes from the music itself and how much comes from the packaging. The more you derive enjoyment from packaging/artwork, the more likely you are to think the CD superior, and I guess this varies between all of us. Personally, I do enjoy artwork/photos/liner notes, but the music is always the main event for me, and I can often take or leave the package the music is contained in.

One advantage of listening to game music is that one can make their own CDs. If you have the game, and if it is cooperative, you can make the soundtrack yourself, thus negating the need for purchasing a CD. It is merely a convenience that game companies sell soundtracks. If one likes popular music, then it is still possible to make a CD, although it would be more time consuming than making a game soundtrack. I would argue that the challenge presented by collecting popular music is more difficult than collecting video game music, assuming the CD does not exist.

  As an example, to collect the music from a video game that does not have a separate soundtrack release, one merely needs to buy the game. However, to collect the music from a popular artist that did not release a CD would require spending much time by the radio, whether digital or analog. One would also need to attend many concerts. As you can see, the CD format is merely a convenience.

  The medium for video game music is still the video game, while the CD offers a convenient way to listen to it. The medium for popular music is radio, internet, and live productions (concerts). Some popular music has begun to encroach a new medium - the video game. Again, the CD offers convenience for popular music. It is strange to consider the past, before portable media existed. All music was live production only. The option to buy the music you liked did not exist and this makes me wonder what the effect on the evolution of the human brain will be, since we have more access to music. My primary guess is that most people simply played back their favorite music in their heads, effectively memorizing every piece of music. We don't have to remember the music we hear, since we can listen to it without having to go to a live production.

I still consider it a bitch to make game RIPs, but that's just me.

...

You know, when there already exists lossless formats like WAV, you'd think there'd be portable, digital music players that would be able to accommodate WAV.

Especially when you can actually get players that are 60, or even 120GB.

When you have that much memory, all of a sudden, a 400MB album (hour of music) sounds more feasible.

...

I know that digital music is probably the way of the future, and a number of factors are in its favor, but there will still probably be some artists who don't get their music released digitally, only to never be heard of again.

...

For what it's worth, I just purchased Russian Circles ~ Enter (2006) from Amazon MP3; it was $6 for the full album, the album's out-of-print, and I could still customize the ID3 tags (because it's DRM free!)

When I purchase a hard copy of the album, it's because I like the hard copy to back it up, and I like to scan the album graphic as 1400 x 1400 pixel resolution jpg, and then print out an 8.5 x 11" that I can then frame and put up on my wall. Granted, I can d-load album graphics off the internet, but those're never anywhere near 1400 x 1400. Maybe 500 x 500, if you're lucky; I'd like it if more album cover graphics were provided (especially for free!) and with better resolution; some artists have EXCELLENT taste in art, evidenced by their cover graphics, but in some cases, couldn't care less about their music.

Definitely need better bitrates, and I'd like digital versions of the album graphics and liner notes available, AND in high-resolution.

I'm sure there are people out there who are upset about the death of the cassette tape, the death of the 8-Track, etc.  I can understand why you would want to preserve an item in its natural state, but in the end, we all die, so it's best to just enjoy your items while you have them, make good use of them, and when you feel that it's time to move on, then pass them on to the collectors. 

Yeah, nothing lasts forever, and if digital media replaces physical then so be it.  There will always be a market somewhere, for ancient relics and items that once were a part of history, somewhere. 

There are some things that have affected me in this lifetime,that I wish to be buried with.  Just as a sort of tribute to their majesty as a part of my life. 

Who knows, maybe one day we will have digital funerals.  Where we can add items to our coffins and inscriptions as to say "This is what this man loved"

What, you mean the Goth version of those...avatar systems that they have for those "Personalize your own profile" type shticks?