Whenever the digital revolution gets mentioned in the press, or indeed in conversation, it tends to be closely accompanied by murmurings about declining CD sales and questions about whether or not the rise in digital sales makes up for that shortfall and whether or not anyone will actually need to own music in five years and so on and so forth.
The answers to the above questions are both simply ‘no’. There is no need to own music anymore and digital sales will probably not make up for the revenue generated by the somewhat false heights of the CD industry. So what.
What doesn’t get mentioned too often, though, is what an incredible benefit the mp3 has been to the CD in another sense: it has liberated it from the constraints of being a commodity product. The mp3 is now the commodity, needing to be as cheap and readily available as possible, with price and availability considerably trumping any questions of quality. High bitrate mp3s and lossless file formats don’t seem to have made any impression on the digital market when they have been provided at a premium price, and I don’t really think people care that much. An mp3 is merely a commodity, shunted about in large quantities, and exists simply to reach as many people as possible and to generate revenue. It is important, but very unglamorous work.
That used to be the job of the vinyl record, of course. Then for a while it was the job of the cassette tape, although to a lesser extent, and by the nineties it was pretty much entirely the job of the CD. What did that mean for the little shiny silver disc? Well as with any commodity product, it put pressure on price. It was all about how cheaply you could make them, and in what volumes. At those numbers any kind of increase in the manufacturing price has a massive knock-on effect on revenue generation, which is by its very nature what the ‘industry’ part of the industry cared about, no criticism implied.
Now, of course, no-one ever needs to buy a CD; it is as obsolete as vinyl and tapes. There are still plenty of CD players around of course, and it will take a while to fully die out, but basically the CD has had its day as a delivery medium for music, as has any and every physical medium. And for these various media that is a liberation, not a condemnation.
As we’ve seen recently, there has been a significant rise in vinyl releases and vinyl sales. In the last year or so we’ve seen all sorts of things released on tape as well. I wouldn’t be wholly surprised to see something released on DAT tape or something stupid like that in the near future, provided it still comes with a digital download. I seem to recall someone from Domino boasting recently at a Born to Be Wide seminar that they had recently released something on a tin of beans.
Basically, it is no longer enough for a CD to be a mere delivery mechanism for the songs, because the mp3 does it cheaper, faster, and with more flexibility – better, in other words.  A physical product nowadays has to justify its existence in its own right, because the music contained thereon is not enough anymore, and this challenge has been risen to with some alacrity by the more forward-thinking record labels and self-releasing bands. No-one needs to buy a CD these days, so if you are going to bother going to the trouble of making them then you have to make them worth owning. The packaging has to be beautiful. There has to be something extra. It must, in itself, be something which is a pleasure to own and to use.
It reminds me a little of the argument about wine bottle sealing technology. Screw-tops are, I seem to recall, actually better at preserving the wine properly, but they haven’t really made as much headway as they might. Simply, they cannot compete with the satisfaction of cutting and removing the foil, and then uncorking a bottle of wine. It’s a tactile pleasure, and I feel the same about music.
Vinyl may not reproduce music as faithfully as a CD or a high quality digital file, but there is a ritual to putting a record on the record player which mp3s and playlists can never match. When it comes to opening a CD package to play an album the same has to be true. Click on the picture above and have a look at the gorgeous packaging of the Now Owl album. Apart from being an excellent piece of music (buy it here), that album is a pleasure to own, and a pleasure simply to open up and play.
Now, I think the CD has a few years left where people will buy it simply as a commodity – because that’s what they can play in their cars or their living rooms, perhaps. In general the technology isn’t quite obsolete just yet. But we are getting ever closer to the point where a physical medium for music is more of a hindrance than a help, and soon it will not be enough to simply put together some graphics and duplicate the music.
And in a way that will be a blessing, because freed from the rather brutal economics of the commodity product, where all is dependent on keeping costs down, you are now selling a luxury item, and the economics of that are rather different. All of a sudden it makes sense to spend a little more on paper; to think of new ways to package your music; to release on tape, on CD on vinyl, on wax cylinder, on whatever you want; to sit there and hand-fold a few hundred copies and sell them for a little more; to hand-stitch your vinyl sleeves; to superglue actual sequins to your album cover…
When no-one has to buy your product anymore, the people who do buy are the ones who really want to, and they are great people to be working with as they will spend a little more money, and they will appreciate and reward that extra effort. The whole transaction becomes a little bit more rewarding for everyone, which in my eyes is a very good thing indeed.
