CDs are still the prevalent format, although they are declining, they haven't dropped below the popularity of digital. Yet.
Interestingly, the highest consumers of CDs are middle aged women. This is because supermarkets are the most popular outlets for CDs.
This is because they get sh!t loads of CDs to increase foot traffic in the stores, yet most of the time they rarely make a profit from the sales. If they stopped selling them, they wouldn't even notice until they looked at sales elsewhere in the stores.
(I know this because I'm doing my dissertation on the shift from ownership to access of music and how it affects consumption, I find it all fascinating!)
Good shout! i find anything regarding music fascinating. I think another way you could look at it is that the record companies want you to download as you could argue that its harder to pass an mp3 bought from itunes etc than it is to sell on a cd or lend it. It's all about control of the masses. i'll stick to cd's thanks! Newer stuff is getting harder to find tho, and if HMV goes bust, there could be issuses as supermarkets won't stock anywhere near as much specialist music.
Funnily enough, the MP3 was the first format that wasn't thought up by the record industry.
It was made by computer geeks. When it first came out the industry were furious as they had no control over it (Similar to when tapes came out in the 80s, there was a whole campaign saying home taping is killing the industry. It was far from the truth!)
However, when the industry found out the MP3 was marketable and saw the huge shift from physical (CDs etc) to digital (MP3 and streaming) they had to quickly come up with a way to distribute it.
iTunes came along with the iTunes store, which was nothing more than a sales gimmick used to shift their hardware such as iPods etc.
The industry simply thought "this'll have to do until it all blows over".
What I can't stand about digital sales is that record labels still write a "distribution fee" into the recording contract for bands.
This comes from when records and CDs used to be pressed, then they'd have to be packaged and sent to stores all over the country, or world.
However, with digital, there's no need for this cost (which is usually around 20% of the retail cost) as it's all done electronically.
This means there's even more money the bands are losing out on as the record labels have to recoup all money that they spent on the band to make the album before the band see a penny of the royalties.
Generally, bands only get about 10% (at most!) of the retail price of songs or albums.
So if they sell enough albums to recoup all costs for the record label and start earning royalties, for an album that cost £7, they would get at the most 70p from that.
Their manager would then get 20% of that 70p. Once the manager has his cut, the rest is split amongst the rest of the band.
Imagine splitting 56p between 4 people from the sale of one CD?
It gets even worse with things like spotify or youtube, and the "micro-payments" they offer to bands.
It's alleged that lady gaga had 4 million streams on spotify, and from that she only earned around $1000!
