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Kim Bayley breaks down UK spending statistics to show that superfans buying old school physical media are providing for 15% of the UK's total retail music market, even when streaming is counted. She asserts that curtailing the availability of these physical storage media will damage not just retailers, but the overall health of the music industry itself. In doing so, she presents a strong economic case for why the music industry should treasure its vinyl and CD superfans.
Naturally it would have a clear financial cost: according to ERA's research those 157,000 vinyl Superfans spent between them £63m on vinyl in 2017, equivalent to more than half a million – 525,000 – premium music subscriptions.
In other words, lose a town's worth of vinyl buyers the size of Chelmsford and you need a city's worth of premium music subscribers the size of Manchester to make up the loss.
When it comes to CD, the impact is even greater. ERA's researches show that in 2017 an incredible 292,000 Britons spent £400 or more on the format. That's equivalent to buying a CD virtually every week.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:21AM (7 children)
Many laptops don't even come with a disc drive anymore. It's more convenient to load up a USB stick or hard drive with music, and arguably more convenient than that to use a music streaming service or YouTube.
Paying Spotify members get 320 kbps. Free users are limited to 160 kbps or something. Let me guess, the kids don't pay for streaming and have to listen to ads too.
Anybody who is interested in audio quality can without much effort pirate an album in 320 kbps MP3 or FLAC.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday June 16 2018, @08:02AM (5 children)
Let me guess, the kids don't pay for streaming and have to listen to ads too.
Anybody who is interested in audio quality can without much effort pirate an album in 320 kbps MP3 or FLAC.
The key part being anyone who is actually interested. I'll have to track down some musicians and ask. Maybe they are different. Ages ago it used to be a status contest to see who had the highest fidelity sound system. Strange that something so measurable would fall by the wayside.
So yeah they listen only to the subset of sounds presented as music under the free-of-charge options. That makes their experience just what is profitable for Spotify and Youtube. Pretty much zero interest in actively discovering new or old bands too. I would guess then that, again, its about profits. Profits might not be the highest but the investment for those profits are by far the smallest possible.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:45AM (2 children)
CDs are an investment.
"Young people" want the latest, newest, next..
Which will be different next week, or even tomorrow.
They will support these performers *by* watching and subscribing to youtube channels, and by listening on Spotify.
CDs are irrelevant.
Quality is completely irrelevant.
*relevancy* is everything. To be relevant to is to be the one being watched on youtube and listened to on spotify.. It self-defines.
Belong to the group, listen to the "in" performer.
Listen again in a month? Never! (Except, maybe, in an ironic way, at a party)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:57AM (1 child)
Sorry to interrupt your stream of consciousness but unless you are planning on selling some rare disc + packaging to collectors, they are not an investment. CDs hold digital information that can be copied endlessly.
An M-Disc or some other future archival storage medium may be "an investment" if it can store a large amount of data without degradation for a long time. Because you can be assured that obscure data contained on it will probably not be lost. But CDs will degrade and lose their data within decades.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday June 16 2018, @10:24AM
Quality music at (reasonably) affordable price
Not shares, property, or investment for the furture, but still, an investment in the music and the performer.
Way beyond the "investment" (time, money, or interest) a "young person" is going to give any performer.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday June 16 2018, @10:44AM
Now, its the most expensive phone.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @08:03PM
A lot of the measuring made it obvious there was too much bullshit in the hifi stuff.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:18PM
> Anybody who is interested in audio quality can without much effort pirate an album in 320 kbps MP3 or FLAC.
Almost all of which is sourced by ripping from a (SA)CD of some sort. The CD is the only mass available high quality format left. If they went away and all that was available is a mono, crappily compressed streamrip, where exactly do you think the high quality source will come from for you to be able to pirate it in FLAC or 320kbs?