What would you do if?

[JAYJO]

from the first time you ever heard music it was through your phone, ipod, internet etc.
This all came first. Then one day someone came along and said. Ive just invented this, its a disc with music on it. You can put it in this thing here and it will play your music when you want to. Its not cheap but it works really well. You also get a little booklet with lyrics and piccys. I predict in a few years it will be made even bigger. Then someone comes along and says look what ive just invented . Its vinyl and bigger, you get a bigger booklet and piccys and you can play it on this thing here.These are called things!.
Just think, we could give a gold one to any band who sells 1 million of them or platinum etc. What do they have on their walls now?
If you could afford to, do you think you would buy any of these. ?

[GAZTOPIA]

I much prefer the good ole cassette tape...

[JAYJO]

I much prefer the good ole cassette tape...

forgot about them and i still have them!

[guitarfishbay]

As soon as hard drives are big enough and internet speeds are fast enough it is game over. Once both of those things are cheap and are the norm, physical media is dead.

I say this as a massive CD fan... I've got hundreds, I only stopped buying due to lack of space. I now buy my downloads as high bitrate mp3s. CDs still sound better, but as soon as huge hard drives are the norm there is no reason as far as I can see that you couldn't just have all your albums as full quality non compressed files. I'd still like the booklet/physical thing, but there are so many physical things you can have in the space you have.

And there are already huge numbers of people who already feel mp3s are good enough, those people are a lost cause to any possible revival in physical media.

I think physical media is on the way out as a norm, it will still exist but the demand is only going to go down IMO. I never liked tapes FWIW! I rebought my favourite tapes as CDs, but being in my mid 20s now I didn't have many tapes to rebuy back then, just a few Queen albums.

[amberlamps]

physical media has been dead for me for a fair few years now, I will still buy the odd CD but its gets ripped and then put in the cupboard, still have loads of vinyl too, would I like to have time to sit down and put a record on? yes but the days are gone where I have time and focus to sit down with a drink and the Melody Maker/NME and listen to a record..

I play music all the time but its whilst out walking or working out or in bed with headphones, very rarely sitting down relaxing.

[digitalscream]

As soon as hard drives are big enough and internet speeds are fast enough it is game over. Once both of those things are cheap and are the norm, physical media is dead.

That will only last until people suddenly realise that stuff on the Internet is only there for as long as the company providing the service a) continues to see a profit in the service, and b) manages to stay solvent. Of course, I'm counting hard drives as "physical media", but there's a profusion of streaming services where people are relying on cloud storage. That's inherently unreliable as far as I'm concerned.

The same goes for anything with DRM on it - the files you "own" will only work as long as the servers providing the authorisation exist, and/or devices are still manufactured/software still maintained which can process the DRM encryption. In 20 years' time, all your tapes/CDs/vinyl/MP3s will still work, but those files won't. Sure, you'll need devices to play those physical objects, but the fact is that DRM-based technology is moving on faster than those are being decommissioned.

[dafuzz]

I used to be dead against the sort of thing I'm about to say but it's kinda snuck up on me so here we go...

Amazon's Cloud player thing is pretty shit hot. You don't even have to download the tunes anymore, you can stream them to your device (Android, iPhone, whatever) or your browser (although there's a limit to the number of machines you can register at one time iirc) so there's a couple of freebie samplers I've 'bought' and listened to at work, on my phone and at home and I think it works brilliantly. You might argue that spotify etc have been doing this for yonks but there's no ads or subs or anything like that, just your bought music available wherever you are. They got me by giving me some vouchers for free mp3s and that's how I got started with it.

I'm convinced this is the model for the future: cloud based music collections (inc. film and games eventually) that you just log in and play.

I feel quite dirty for saying all that actually

[PhantomRouge]

I really don't like buying mp3 files. I want a hard copy. But what good is that when the local record shop doesn't even have the records on the day of their release?

[ICBM]

I still buy the vast majority of my music on CD, and I do immediately rip them to the computer and then store the CDs. I have a really nice CD player and a good hi-fi, although I use it so rarely that I sometimes wonder why I bother... 99% of the time I use mp3 for background listening.

I do still like having the physical object though. This might sound old-fashioned but not only is the quality still higher on the very rare occasions I really want it (although that may have more to do with the playback equipment than the actual file format), I *own* the CDs. I will never lose access to them or have to pay a fee to use them, and I can re-rip them into whatever new format comes along. I even buy CDs of albums I've already downloaded.

It is true that I buy almost all of them secondhand, but as a result they're also *cheaper* than legal downloads too. Even new ones are better value for money, I think.

[JAYJO]

I still buy the vast majority of my music on CD, and I do immediately rip them to the computer and then store the CDs. I have a really nice CD player and a good hi-fi, although I use it so rarely that I sometimes wonder why I bother... 99% of the time I use mp3 for background listening.

I do still like having the physical object though. This might sound old-fashioned but not only is the quality still higher on the very rare occasions I really want it (although that may have more to do with the playback equipment than the actual file format), I *own* the CDs. I will never lose access to them or have to pay a fee to use them, and I can re-rip them into whatever new format comes along. I even buy CDs of albums I've already downloaded.

It is true that I buy almost all of them secondhand, but as a result they're also *cheaper* than legal downloads too. Even new ones are better value for money, I think.

Im not 100% sure but i think if you sell the cds you own then your ripped copies are illegal.