Looking for a CD Player

As of 2022, CDs accounted for less than 3% of music sales.

As of 2023, in England, CDs and vinyl accounted for 9.4% of music sales and year to year growth for CDs is at 5.4% ($127 million). 

In the EU, CDs account for over 10% of all sales with growth at 7.3% year over year. 

In the US, CD are a bit less than 3% with sales (but account for over 10% of revenues) and hover around 37 million per year since 2023 and 25% of consumers say they use CDs for listening. There's as many ways to skew stats as there are to skin cats.

The tremendous number of streaming sales is mostly from youngsters and Gen Zers downloading pop music and are not audiophiles. People have to stop using that red herring to validate their position. They listen on cheap, branded IEMs and headphones that no self respecting audiophile would use, or just blast it out of their smart phones (as anyone who spends even a few moments in public can attest to).

And yes, there are millions of pieces of music out there with streaming that no one is listening to. Availability does not equate to acceptability (clumsy, but I was going for something catchy). It's like saying one library is bigger than another to someone who could care less what's in the cooking and home improvement section.

All the best,
Nonoise

@jayctoy Great!!

Two other things I'll mention about streaming:

1) I've discovered artists on Qobuz who I would never have heard of otherwise, and who would not have a gotten a cent from me in CD sales;

2) Streaming is vastly less wasteful than CDs, which use fossil fuels and cannot be recycled.

@nonoise 

Honestly, nothing you have said there undermines my point: CDs account for a fraction of music sales these days.  They are environmentally harmful to manufacture and cannot be recycled.  And what difference does it make WHO buys streaming music, or how they listen to it?  Talk about a red herring! ;-)  Let the "kids" buy whatever they want.  My daughter loves Spotify.  So what?  In a single week I can access more high-quality, hi-resolution music suited to my tastes than I could afford to purchase on CD in an entire year.  Plus I can share new discoveries with friends with a simple text message.  This month alone a fellow jazz lover who lives 3,000 miles away introduced me to six artists I was unfamiliar with.  I can check them out and enjoy them (or reject them) at no extra cost.  I'm currently reading a biography of Charles Ives.  I can listen to almost every piece referenced in the book in excellent sound quality without spending a cent on CDs.  And if I find something I want to be sure I can preserve in my collection, I can BUY it and store it on a hard drive.

@dogearedaudio 

That's an interesting twist!

Surely once the music has been recorded, silver disks just have a one time manufacturing and distribution cost.  They are an excellent way of sequestering some carbon as polycarbonate, which is expected to last a hundred years or more.

Streaming costs resources every time it is deployed.  Cloud storage, routers, repeaters, cache storage, transmission lines, cables, wireless, satellites ... and that's before it even gets to you.

It is a quirk of the Internet today that these things appear free to the end-user, apart from fixed access fees.  At the birth of the internet, it was not clear how anybody would be able to make any money from it.  Now less than a handful of US tech giants are hoovering colossal advertising revenues, which we all pay for.

The internet uses a staggering amount of electricity, and it is growing exponentially.  40% is just for cooling data centers!  Estimates of around 10 to 20% of global electricity demand next year will be for the internet.

One of the most demanding internet loads is streaming.  A CD contains 0.6 Gbytes of data, as much as tens of thousands of text messages.  DVDs and SACDs are around 5-Gbytes.  4K Blu-ray is normally 50-Gbytes, about 100 times as much as a CD.  That is why 4K video streams are dramatically compressed, and the best you can expect from most audio streaming services is CD quality.

Streaming performs an unnatural act with the internet, because the internet chunks your data into packets and sends the individual packets over switched networks. There is no guarantee of arrival time.  The internet can only reliably transmit data if data errors are detected and the offending packets re-transmitted.  Streaming gives away error correction in the interest of timeliness, and drops entire packets if need be.

We have recently seen that a routine security update knocked out much of the internet for days.  In a war, the internet will be destroyed very quickly - no more streaming.

@richardbrand

Well, you can certainly make the choices you want to make. I consult for a company that produces digital media, both hard and soft, and over the past 15 years I’ve witnessed hundreds of palletes of returned CDs headed for the landfill, because nobody wants them. And that's just one very small company.  Fortunately that practice is on the decline. And I could be wrong, but I don’t believe CDs count as "sequestered carbon," at least not at the moment. There are efforts to turn sequestered CO2 into plastics, but as far as I know no currently manufactured CDs are made that way.

As for the internet, there’s another horse out of the barn. Might as well object to radio or TV.