Ask a music scene micro celebrity

[ICallHimGamblor]

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Cds have a per-unit lifespan of 20 years or so, if you're lucky. Many fail in as little as 5 years. Other than physically breaking or gouging it, there's no reason a vinyl record won't last several hundred years. Purely-digital data (downloads and other sound files) are infinitely more fragile, since they exist only resident on a drive (which is itself vulnerable to failure) and dependent on soft aware to make any sound at all, and that software is beholden to the software maker for all its functionality, and that software is beholden to the computer industry as a whole. This is more of a problem with proprietary file formats for professional use, but it is true nonetheless.

I have been through this particular debate almost as often as the major label vs independent label debate, and I don't have the energy to recite all the point-by-point discussions, but if you do archive searches at prosoundweb and rec.audio.pro and the Ampexlist at recordist.com you'll find several thousand words from me on the topic.

Once you're up at the front of the boat, we can discuss what's ahead.

Regarding sales, CD's only real advantage (not perceived, but real) over vinyl is convenience, and that is how they won their market share. Ipods et al trump that step in convenience by a mile, and so I expect that CDs will lose the convenience-first battle to downloads. That will be the end of them.

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You are right... I know you have had this argument a zillion times before, and will go through prosoundweb and recordist sites to see what you have written before. I just wondered if there was any new perspective from what I have seen you write in the past few years.

I refuse to tread in rec.audio.pro anymore because of the jawdropping arrogance (gawddamn, I hate fletcher), or the electrical forums (because of the nine million irrelevant posts by TooManyHelicopters and his ilk or the bizarre tangents about Karl Rove).

Have a nice evening, and thanks for humoring me. Baseball is still boring.