Posted by Jeremy Scott in Uncategorized | 15 Comments
Teenagers Don’t Buy CDs Anymore
These darn kids today & their newfangled music formats!
It seems that teenagers don’t buy CDs anymore. They have moved beyond the compact disc in a big way.
I know this because I just read this article in the LA Times, which says that in 2007, half of all U.S. teenagers bought zero CDs. Well, almost half… it’s 48%.
That’s sort of astounding. I remember being a teenager–barely–and I bought a lot of tapes and CDs. Hey, back off…I’m just old enough that my youth spanned the gap between cassette tapes and CDs.
But regardless….I bought a lot of music.
And I don’t think music is any less important to teenagers today than it was to kids in my day. It’s pretty clear what’s going on: iTunes and illegal song-swapping have killed the compact disc… or at least maimed it.
The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam. In the last year, Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, which sells only digital downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Please note that Wal-Mart is the number one music retailer in the U.S. Also note that Tower Records went out of business in 2006. Also note how sad these two facts make me. And the article says that computers are to blame. Here’s a snippet:
Rachel Rottman, 14, says she hasn’t bought a CD in a year. The Santa Monica High School freshman says she downloads five or six songs a day, using paid services such as iTunes and social networking site MySpace, where bands post songs for free download. Rachel said she had about 2,600 songs stored on her computer.
Before getting a computer in the seventh grade, she always bought CDs. But now it’s too much trouble, she said.
“You have to go to the store and then you have to pay — I don’t know how much, $12, I’m guessing? — then you have to put it on your computer,” Rachel said. “When you download it, it’s right there.”
Man, this girl is out of touch if she thinks CDs are only $12.
But seriously, she’s right. Buying a CD is, to this generation, just an unnecessary step in the process of getting your favorite songs on your iPod or uploaded to your MySpace page. By the time people my age start becoming grandparents, the age of the physical medium for entertainment will have come to a close. Movies, TV shows, music and more will be all digital. These crazy teenagers today just don’t care about holding something tangible in their hands. They care only for the music.
In a decade or so you’ll find quaint little throwback boutiques opening up in trendy places like Nashville and Austin and they’ll sell things like CDs, DVDs, BluRay Discs, and other physical media like magazines and books. And hippie people will shop there and remember the days when your entertainment dollars actually brought you something you could hold in your hand and touch. And those things will cost $100 a piece, because they’ll be nostalgic items now… antiques.
But the trend has too much momentum to be stopped now. Digital media is the wave of the future. You can either ride the wave, or let it overtake you… but there’s no stopping it, that’s for sure. I can just hear the Scooby-Doo CD manufacturers howling about how they “would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”
Hey, at least music itself isn’t dead… yet.
While I agree with the trend, I wonder what we are missing by this. Music isn’t a commodity to me, but something to be absorbed. There are full cd’s / albums before that, that helped define a time in my life…I remember ripping open the jewel case on a cd, and looking through every page of the artwork with lyrics, musicians, comments by the artists. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the new cd. Maybe MySpace or Websites are taking place of that…It may take me lots of time to get used to that whole idea.
Great article.
Jason
Well, I agree with you. There was an experience there that we will miss. But there is a new experience today for the teenagers. Instead of flipping through album art and reading the liner notes…they read the band’s MySpace blog. It’s not that having an “album experience” is dead…it’s that the definition of that experience has changed.
Also, you and I are both showing our age here. We’re old.
Hey man i still buy CD’s its just that when i want ALOT of music such as lets say the discography of a band..im not going to go and spend 200 bucks buying cds, however if a band comes out with a new cd i will go out and buy it. and how the bloody hell is WALMART!!!!! the number one music retailer in the US wtf..
I can’t really speak for other teenagers, but I love CDs.
The only music I get that isn’t on a burned CD is from CDs I get off Amazon.
I love having concrete copies of my music – it’s proved useful in ripping my collection to higher quality files.
Plus, I absolutely despise most online music stores, with a few exceptions. Most of the popular ones sell lower quality, DRM-loaded files, which I want no part in.
There aren’t any half-decent local music stores near me, and I doubt they’d have the selection anyway.
Vinyl’s pretty sweet too – nothing like putting a new LP on the turntable.
Unfortunately, I doubt most other teenagers share my views. Run-of-the-mill manufactured chart-topping bands are not my fancy. If I want something from an artist that’s already making millions, I’ll just go ahead and pirate it. If I bought one of their CDs, the money would barely trickle through to the artist anyway, with as much as the record label takes out.
I don’t really like the fact that you’re generalizing teenagers in that they don’t buy CD’s anymore. Yeah, CD sales are down, but you can’t just blame teenagers. Adults don’t seem to be buying as much CDs either. Instead, “teenagers” (how exactly are you labeling teenagers? College students included?) are going onto myspace, purevolume, garageband, etc. to find new music, which I think is pretty cool.
Look at all the former unsigned bands and how they’re doing. Panic at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, etc. have all become huge because of downloading and the “myspace generation”. Not to forget the now disbanded Dispatch, who became incredibly huge in the indy circuit because of Napster. So much so, in fact, that people all over the world came to their last two (free) shows at The Hatch Shell in Boston, which ended up stopping traffic for the entire day. And then in the summer, they became the only unsigned band in history to ever sell out Madison Square Garden. Not just for one night, but for three consecutive nights.
And then we have the genious that is Radiohead and Trent Reznor. Putting their music up for free (or in Radiohead’s case with “In Rainbows”, for “name your own price”) became the best thing to do with publicity and money.
Fact is, a lot of bands love the digital era because the Music Industry is so effed because of the main record labels that screw over every band. CD sales are dropping, but concert attendance rates and merchandise rates (you know, the money that actually goes to the band/artist) are soaring.
Not to mention that Wal-Mart puts HUGE HUGE HUGE restrictions on what they sell. So much, in fact, that in most stores, they’re pulling their CDs. The only reason why they were up at the highest was because of the latest album by The Eagles (which sucked, by the way) was only sold there. There aren’t that many record stores that sell every kind of music anymore. Thankfully, if you live in the New England region, you’ll be semi-close to a Newbury Comics, which sells almost anything you can think of.
What I find sad about the current movement in music is that the idea of an album has vanished. I think that predated, and may have even helped cause, the decline in interest in CD’s though. Everyone talks about only wanting one or two songs on a CD, and not wanting to pay for the entire CD to get them. Top 40 radio/Clear Channel/MTV/culture seems to have killed the album, let alone something as difficult as a “concept album”…
For me there may be one song, possibly even two, on an album I don’t like, if I’m willing to support the band. Sure, there are some one-hit wonders, but they are certainly a tiny percentage of what I want to hear.
Now, what I do like about this movement, is that it seems to be starting to crack the RIAA strangehold on bands. A couple of big bands have used digital means quite well (everyone knows about Radiohead and NIN). But Wilco, which is now plastered everywhere, probably owes their entire success to the internet. They were told Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was unmarketable, and were dropped by the label. They put it up on their site to download until they could get a new deal, and it sold like crazy…and now they’re quite successful.
If bands can get back to making money from performing, and stop being forced into contracts where they make virtually nothing per sale (all while being forced to pay “promotion” and all the other crap) it can only help the actual performers, rather than music labels.
Yeah, I can’t say that I down just pirate some music, but, like some other people said, it’s because those bands are already making plenty of money or that I may only listen to that CD once or twice. But if I’m going to actually listen to a CD, especially a new one, I’ll buy it, jewel case and all. I’m not much of a fan of iTunes because you can’t really do too much with the music since they’re all DRMs…
And, CDs do cost about 12 bucks on average.
Best Buy’s website lists:
<$6.99: 21180 CDs
$7.00-$9.99: 26851 CDs
$10.00-$14.99: 146480 CDs
$15.00-$24.99: 67222 CDs
$25.00-$49.99: 33897 CDs
So..um…yeeeahhhh…
something to think about… Most places the only place to buy cd’s is wal-mart and at wal-mart all you can get is edited music… most songs sound like crap when edited and some albums actually lose tracks to it…. so you can download the music for free or pay $20-25 for watered down music… I choose download…
..also not so much of the money goes to the artist… they get pennies per album… cd’s make money for the record label… so don’t think your so much supporting the artists by buying their albums… if you really want to support the artist go to their concert or buy their merchandise….
just an after-thought
Great comment ‘someone’. Seriously, the last major label cd I bought was Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, (Best Buy with the DVD, paid $20 I think) and before that I think it was a Jack Johnson cd (Target). I listen to Indie’s and have a ton of them as friends. These folks make their living off of cd/merch sales and there’s no better compliment then buying a few discs at a show. The money goes right to them. Indieheaven.com is my favorite site for new music (spiritual slant no doubt…great stuff though.)
Jason
The new digital age (mostly iTunes) has revolutionized music buying patterns. Bands and consumers are all digital now. CD won’t even have a pulse in a few years.
I also bought many tapes and cds in high school, but I rarely buy cds myself anymore. Before college I got into tape-trading to get concerts of my favorite bands, and these days I have thousands of concerts on cd and on my computer. I rarely use mp3s, 90% of my music is lossless (shn or FLAC). When I get a new cd (usually for christmas) the first thing I do is put it on my computer in FLAC format so that I have a backup in case my cd gets lost or scratched. The only cds I do buy myself are officially released live concerts and most of the time these are offered as a FLAC download as well.
I’d roughly 50% of my current music purchases are digital. It would probably be more but I can’t stand Itunes’ DRM protection so I only purchase online from places that do not use any form of DRM, most of whom have a vastly inferior selection to Itunes’ music store.
“These crazy teenagers today just don’t care about holding something tangible in their hands. They care only for the music. ”
That is because adults are show-off’s. Teens don’t care that much about collections.
I buy music for my personal use, not to show off.