IS THE CD DYING?

John Nova Lomax writes an interesting article in the Houston Press about the future of CDs and music. It's not time for a funeral yet. There are too many discs in circulation, but no doubt, the way we use and acquire music is changing.

Last month, EMI Music Chairman and Chief Executive Alain Levy walked up to a podium at the London Business School and told an assemblage of bright-eyed
young titans of tomorrow something that, in all likelihood, they already knew full well.
"The CD as it is right now is dead," he said. As usual, the big brass at the very pinnacle of the industry seemed the last to know. Levy's remark came towards
the end of a year in which the 89-store national retail chain Tower Records went bankrupt and announced that all of its stores will soon shutter. Online
giant iTunes cracked the top ten music retail outlets for the first time ever, and the only places CDs actually sold well were stores like Target, Best
Buy and Wal-Mart.
And yet it remains too early to say that the CD is dead, as in buried in a casket underground. It's certainly terminally ill, condemned, a dead medium walking.
Indeed, sales of CDs still dwarf digital sales, to the tune of $6.45 billion to $945 million worldwide. But CD sales are sliding, a little faster and steeper
every year. People tend to buy less music as they grow older, and the CD audience is pretty much exclusively aged 30 and up. Very few teenagers buy CDs,
and what's more, just about every music retailer will tell you that those who do will end up burning that CD for a few friends.


Read the full article at

http://www.houstonpress.com/Issues/2007-01-04/news/feature_full.html