Need an example? A new Blu-ray copy of Aliens is just $11, while a digital license (which might disappear one day) costs $15. There are still a few outlets where you can purchase and download movies, but it’s often cheaper to buy the discs. If you want to own movies and TV shows, you’re going to need a DVD or Blu-ray player. And, as we’ve seen from Ultraviolet’s failure, access to digital content can disappear at a moment’s notice.
You either pay $12 a month to watch a select library of content that changes every month, or you shell out $15 for access to a specific movie on a particular website (to be fair, Movies Anywhere helps solve this issue). A Novel Concept: Owning What You Pay forĪs physical media slips into the abyss, we’re starting to run into an interesting problem. Lucky for you, there are still plenty of good reasons to buy a disc player. But if you’re undecided, you might need some reasons why a disc player is worth your hard-earned cash. Well, if you want a DVD or Blu-Ray player, you might as well buy one. While we don’t think DVD and Blu-rays are outdated just yet, their future is inevitable.
Spotify’s HiFi tier was MIA in 2021.It’s a fact of life that media formats become obsolete. You served us well.Īmazon Music is now available on Vizio TVs Instead, we can only bid adieu to the once-mighty CD. Unfortunately, we can’t answer those questions. Will streaming ever become a profitable vessel for the industry at large, or is the Napster wound simply too deep to heal? And just what happens if streaming services never make money? And while Apple’s catch-up service, Apple Music, continues to gain ground, it too appears to be a loss leader for the mighty company. Spotify, the biggest on-demand streamer by leaps and bounds, has yet to turn a profit 10 years on. Yet, as the physical CD readies to slide into its saddle and ride into the sunset, the music industry is still in relative disarray. Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek (Toru Yamanaka/Getty Images) Follow us below as we chronicle the rise (and demise) of the late, great, Compact Disc.
Many of us have rich memories of our time with the Compact Disc, from the first cartridge we cracked open outside a Sam Goody, to the overstuffed wallets and CD towers in our living rooms that stored hours upon hours of digital music bliss.Īs such, we decided to see the CD off in style with this trip down memory lane. While CDs have been on their way out for some time now, this week’s news may as well be a eulogy for the once-mighty disc, signaling a last step in its passing from a dominant medium to a forgotten relic in the ever-changing pantheon of recorded music. Target is expected to make a similar move, selling CDs only on consignment, which will essentially leave the aging digital disc to be relegated to a few last bastions, including Walmart, a motley collection of record shops with a CD section at the back, and of course, online distributors like the all-powerful Amazon.
Best Buy, one of the last big-box electronics chain stores still in business, will be phasing out all CD sales by July 1, 2018. This week brought news that all but marks the end of an era in the world of recorded music.
With the CD all but dead, see it off in style with this trip down memory lane.