Music's Move From CDs to Digital Forms

An ever changing industry

The music industry is one that changes constantly. A band can be tearing up the charts one week and then drop off the face of the Earth the next week. The same goes for the mediums used to listen to or play music. These days, if you buy any iPod or MP3 player, it’s out of date in as little as one year, maybe even months. The iPod and all of Apple’s products are perfect examples of how quickly today’s music business moves.

The digital age embraced

According to second quarter numbers for the iPhone and iPod, people are welcoming the digital age with open arms. Alexandra Osorio’s article “Apple Earnings Go Kaboom…90 percent Quarterly Gains” for digitalmusicnews.com says that the iPhone sold 8.75 million units (double last year) and the iPod sold 9.75 million units. The number of iPods sold is slowly decreasing, but that is because the popular iTouch and iPhone are slowly taking the iPod’s place.

Further proof that the digital movement is being embraced comes from two Point Park University students who say they prefer the switch. Tamara Rivera says, “it’s a good thing because it saves a lot of space than it would to have CDs laying around. You can have 300 songs without having to carry 50 CDs around all the time.” Cory Bosket adds saying, “you can pick any song you want, any time you want and it’s a lot easier to find the ones you want to listen to.” Other things the students like about the digital age are: the cost is cheaper, it’s easy to share or transfer files to different devices, and it’s easier to use digital versions for projects.

When will CDs become obsolete?

In 2006, Judas Priest front man Rob Halford said, “it’s inevitable that CDs will become obsolete; you have to face the fact.” Later on in his interview with MetalTemple.com writers, Halford said, “I think there’ll always be a market for some kind of physical collection. It’s just moving south fast.”

It is only a matter of time before CDs become obsolete, but it will take a while. In the past; it has happened to 8-tracks, vinyl records, and cassettes, so it is bound to happen to CDs with digital downloads on the rise. People can only guess at when the full transition will take place because even those in the industry are unsure of the progress. It might be in five, ten, or twenty years, but a music world without CDs is definitely on the horizon.