cd demise?

Yup.... CDPs might start going to the wayside, but there are few, if any, better storage methods than the CD/DVD that are ubiquitous now.

Generally any "player" that accepts a thumb drive cannot play lossless. Not even close to everyone who enjoys music has a computer.

Many things will need to change before CDs and DVD/Bluray go away. It is kind of like why Americans dont just start using the metric system. It would require the entire tooling, manufacturing, and basic infrastructure of anything manufactured to be completely overhauled.

We will start downloading music and movies but generally these of of very poor quality. Who wants to download movies that or over 4GBs? Until then the silver discs are cheap, reliable and come with some very, very nice packaging at times (John Zorn and his Tzadik label).

Used cds used to be $7 to $10. Now $5-$7 and dropping, with ever more falling into the bargain bin ($4 and under) category.

When a download is $10 and a cd is $4, many will choose cd.

But overall, the cd is on a long downswing.

Of interest ... I was reading of Nimbus Recxords (a medium sized UK former producer of CDs) has restarted following management buy-back / restructuring / sell off from big multi-national (not sure of the details) and is producing high quality CD-R with well produced booklets. Each is produced on demand so that they don't need to keep massive stores. However each is High Quality rather than the cheep tat that some other companies have done with trying to sell one-off produced CDs.

Eloise

P.S. sorry thats really badly written but I can't remember the details but I hope you get the jist of what I was trying to describe. For more info - search Nimbus Disc on Demand

As with others, I buy CDs and rip.