saving ink

Why is this a surprise? This is exactly what I predicted last year, and will predict again - CDs are on their way out, and digital or digital + vinyl will become the new standard.

Why do people even buy CDs anymore?

With services such as Bandcamp or iTunes allowing you to download lossless .wav or .aiff files, there goes the argument of buying CDs for sound quality.

What’s that, you say - you like the pretty artwork? Well, take a look at a full-size booklet, or perhaps a poster, or a beautiful, frameable front cover which is a part of vinyl packaging, any of which will put that tiny CD booklet to shame.

Granted, not all releases are available on vinyl today. But hopefully artists will be the ones to push the market in that direction by being the first to abandon the CD format.

Personally, I’m someone who cannot afford to be a collector, partially for financial reasons, but mostly for spacial ones: I simply have no room for excess stuff. When you pack up all of your belongings into two suitcases and move across the globe, suddenly carting all of your music on hundreds of plastic discs in plastic containers makes no sense at all, especially when 2.5” hard drives exist. So I now opt for digital only, being content with iTunes viewer versions of artwork. Am I losing some of the aesthetic value of the album as a product? Yes. But am I still getting the most important part, the music, at a high quality? Absolutely.

And I make it up by telling myself that one day, when I’m done shuffling from continent to continent, I’ll get that vinyl player and start a proper collection once again.

But no CD will ever grace my shelves.