It Isn’t Just the Music
Physical media market shares, from 1973–2024. From riaa.com/u-s-sales-database.
When the CD is gone, and it will be soon, we’ll miss it. New CD releases are winding down (footnote 1). In the classical world, the era of big, bargain-priced boxes of CDs—a somewhat recent development—is ending because, after a long, slow descent, retail sales have fallen off a cliff in the past year or so. In pop and rock, if you discover a new band you like, you may or may not be able to buy a CD. Perhaps they’ll self-publish a few to sell at concerts; there’s a better chance they’ll have LPs, assuming they can get time at a vinyl-mastering studio and a pressing plant, both of which are booked to the max. CDs, though, are an afterthought if they’re even that.
Vinyl records will likely stay around indefinitely as a collector’s artifact, but new CDs are fading fast. This is momentous. CD will be remembered as the last mainstream physical music format. Its passing marks the death of physical music media.
Don’t misunderstand us. We love streaming. We use Qobuz every day. (One of us also uses Tidal, the other lossy Spotify.) Hi-rez streaming is revolutionary, the most important advance for lovers of recorded music at least since the CD’s introduction. But we’re losing something, too.
In the near future, the most common silver music discs may be not CD but Blu-ray. Every 5 to 10 years, the same classic albums get the deluxe anniversary-reissue treatment. A recent hook is a new Atmos mix on a Blu-ray disc, alongside a discrete 5.1 surround mix, etc. For the 50th anniversary of Deep Purple’s Machine Head (celebrated a year late), which Robert Baird wrote about in the June issue, Rhino put together a lavish package with new stereo and Atmos remixes by Dweezil Zappa and new remasters of the original album mix, plus live recordings, outtakes, and the 1974 four-channel Quad mix (which turned out to be the best multichannel of the bunch). There’s also an LP of Dweezil’s new stereo mix, an illustrated booklet, and a poster.
There are plenty of reasons to worry about this, even beyond the purely sentimental. Mostly it comes down to a loss of control. You control what you own—what’s on your shelf—but a favorite (or even acceptable) streaming service could end at any time, for any number of reasons. The biggest streamer, Spotify, has so far been profitable intermittently and has yet to offer lossless streaming. The financial health of other streaming services, including audiophile favorites Qobuz and Tidal, is largely unknown.
Think about that Machine Head reissue: Now that Dweezil’s stereo mix exists, will you still be able to access the original mix, by Martin Birch, years into the future? If you own the LP or CD, the answer is yes—but what if you’re dependent on streaming?
If you own a CD or LP, you know exactly what you’ve got—or at least you can know, with research. When your music is streamed, you can never be sure what you’re listening to and it can change at any time without your knowledge. Did the streaming service choose the ’95 remaster? Is it the version that originally appeared on LP? Is it a special version created for the streaming service (à la “Made for iTunes”)? Why are the drums in the left channel instead of the right, as they are on the LP?
Until each track and album is tagged with reliable metadata—and your streaming appliance or app displays it—it’s impossible to know exactly what you’re hearing. Some listeners may not care, but we do, and we think others do.
Another form of control over music, and an important one, is search. Searching physical media may be laborious, but if your organization scheme is sound and you stick to it, you will find what you’re looking for, and you know when you’ve found it, since you’re holding it in your hands. Generally, streaming search engines are reliable and useful only for common, simple music. Search the same terms on Spotify and Qobuz, and you’ll likely get different results—maybe not for “Taylor Swift Red,” but try “Dorati Stravinsky” or “Copland Bernstein.” Many audiophiles have chosen Roon for this reason—because of its superior, cross-platform search capabilities. But from a search perspective, Roon is hardly ideal—and it doesn’t incorporate the two most popular streamers, Spotify and Apple Music. What’s more, though Roon adds data on many recordings versus what the streaming apps provide, that data is tied to titles and not to specific releases. For instance, multiple versions of Kind of Blue list all the engineers who ever remastered it instead of the correct person for that version.
Not many music-management services and apps display complete metadata for classical works, even when it’s offered. Can your favorite program list a composer, an orchestra, a soloist, a conductor, and the name of the work and its movements? Probably not, because the user interface was designed for pop music. (Idagio and Apple Music Classical are exceptions.) We have streamed classical tracks and not been able to find out from the app which orchestra is playing.
Losing physical media also means losing a rich multimedia experience. At their best, LP covers and liner notes, and CD booklets, are visually compelling, informative, thought provoking, and part of the artist-intended experience. In a streaming-only world, we get the music but not the visual/informational statement—though kudos to Qobuz for delivering some booklets as PDFs.
This matters less for albums born into this streaming world—artists adjust and find creative new ways to make their statements with new technology—than it does for the 40+ years’ worth of CDs sold with booklets produced with thought and care, intended as part of the album experience (footnote 2).
The upshot: We strongly advise you think hard and think twice before selling off your collection, even if you’ve ripped them to a hard drive and relegated the jewel boxes to your attic. Consider what you’ll be losing—the booklets, the data, the visual art, the guaranteed access—and whether it’s worth freeing up a few cubic feet of storage space.
Footnote 1: See riaa.com/u-s-sales-database. Note the second chart, shown at the top of this article, which tracks physical media market shares; streaming is now the mainstream medium and physical media accounts for just a tiny portion of all music revenues; see the first chart at the RIAA website.
Footnote 2: For a variety of reasons, classical and jazz fans have the most to lose from the passing of physical media; those liner notes and booklets were educational and added oft-needed context to the listening experience, especially the first time.