What Really Killed the CD?
CD sales have been in free fall since the beginning of the century and for years, we were told that piracy was responsible. Or was it?
Remember that CD technology hasn’t really changed all that much since it was created in the 1970s. There were attempts to update it (Super Audio CD, DVD-Audio and DataPlay among them), but these new ideas were simply variation on a century-old theme: selling the public pieces of plastic.
The true reason the CD is dying is convenience. Downloading a digital file–legal or otherwise–or streaming a digital track is far, far, far more convenient that dealing with pieces of plastic that you have to physically acquire. If you make something easy, the world will beat a path to your door.
Digital Music News posted this chart to illustrate the situation.
