though - for obvious reasons - that's just legit legal paid for downloads

I still like my CDs and vinyl and even use audio tapes on my stereo. I use Spotify, but feel slightly uncomfortable with having so much access to free streamimg music. It's just too easy, like walking into a library full of books you will never own.

But what interests me is the media hammering nails into the CDs coffin. If you were to ask the Man on the Clapham omnibus what he thought, I suspect he would say that no one buys CDs and that downloads are all the rage! The stats, if correct, would seem to contradict this.

much to the chagrin of my wife. Have rarely downloaded. I have recently become a Spotty and if anything it has increased the number of cd's I have bought and will be buying because I am hearing stuff that I hadn't thought about listening to. Just off to Spotify now to check out a couple of things - will be another few quid lighter by the end of the night!!

other than mail order, but in the same way you still can get vinyl, albeit with some difficulty, I think they will be about for a while yet. And as long as people download, they will still want something to play in the car, necessitating, at the very least, blank discs. (I conveniently ignore i-pod radio transmitters and special docks, as these are still less than standard, whereas CD players still are.)
Mind you, not seen a cassette for some time, they being ubiquitous to cars not that long ago......

I have always been a reluctant convert to technological advancements and it was a long time before I got an IPOD but now wouldnt be without it. Also the same with Spotify - it was weeks after everyone else was raving about it before I decided to put my big toe in the water now I have immersed my whole body.
The problem with much of this is knowing what is a five minute fad and what is here to stay but guess it was always this way witness 8 track and betamax.
What is amazing is the sheer volume of new stuff - Retro you mentioned Camera Obscura - I knew nothing about them and checked out their new cd on Spotify and it is bloody stunning. How much more stuff is there iout there like that which we may or may not stumble upon by accident?

between the move from vinyl to CDs and the move from CDs to downloads is that the former was a huge jump in sound quality (despite what people like Neil Young might say), while the latter is a decline from CD quality sound to a compressed file, which only sounds any good on an ipod.

For that reason (and also because lots of people still like to have something tangible to hold in their hand for their tenner) I don't think CDs will go the way of vinyl.

I like buying the shiny disc, for two reasons:

a) I like having the lovely, shiny, shiny thing in the box. Even though the sleeve art is nowhere near as good as with vinyl, it's still better than what you get with a download.

b) I can choose what quality to burn my iPod contents at. I tend to like higher quality because I use decent headphones and hear the audio artifacts and lack of top-end in lower quality bitrates.

Sorry, I'm a geek about such things.

I work in the business, for what it's worth, for one of the remaining players. The company I work for is down 10% year on year (in cash terms) despite increasing its market share - this as Woolies and Virgin have left the building.

Physical sales are, as time goes on, transferring across to Amazon and Play and I can fully understand why that is. I think that the CD market has at least ten years left in it as long as online distributors offer free postage.

Supermarkets will exit the arena within five years.

HMV and Fopp (owned by HMV of course) are now virtually the only bricks & mortar outlets handling any kind of back catalogue CD sales, beyond the oft-discussed & ever-shrinking indie network. As Auntie Beryl sagely notes, the supermarkets (including WH Smith) will be out of the market before long, and even HMV itself is in the process of reducing its overall music in-store "footprint" by 40% this year, so mail order might be the only option sooner than we think...

And yet, as Masked Tortilla says, (legal) downloads are still only a small fraction of overall album sales, though singles sales are now dominated by downloads... the "Now" compilation released last summer (can't remember the number) was the the fastest selling CD of the series ever, so clearly the market is still there, but if no-one wants to sell CDs, what can we do?

...having downloads does not constitute having a collection like a wall of albums does. The move towards download ends the "record collection", but I think there are enough people who want one or the other that both will carry on for a long while.

With TV, we're forever being pushed down the route of bigger screens, HD, Blu-ray, always being given the idea that it's much better quality and that quality is king.

With music, we're encouraged to buy compressed to buggery downloads becase it doesn't really matter if some of the music is missing, mp3 gives you the gist of it.

Personally, I'm much more interested in sound quality than the visual, I find musical nuance much more rewarding than going from a 18 inch to a 42 inch version of Jeremy Clarkson.

I'm not against downloads - though I hardly ever download - but I do want my music in the best quality I can get it. As download speeds increase, maybe this won't be an issue and they won't need to compress stuff, but at the minute, I want lossless music and not all downloads offer you that.

I was a long-time CD refusenik, and didn't even own a CD player until well into the mid-90s. This wasn't borne of any Luddite tendencies, either; during the 80s, I worked as a quality control supervisor for an electrical goods retailer, and even then was struck by how the supposed improvement in sound quality that the CD represented was invariably cancelled out by the slapdash construction of those hideous fibreboard-and-plastic 'integrated music systems' most people bought to play them on, making the audiophile appeal of the new format seem a bit 'Emperor's new clothes'. That's without mentioning how, despite all those demonstrations of last-a-lifetime superiority on Tomorrow's World, where a dollop of jam or peanut butter could not diminish the majesty of the Brandenburg Concerto, scores of early discs were prone to oxidisation, thus rendering them unplayable fairly quickly. And is there a more maddening sound in all existence than the stutter of a 'stuck' CD?

The irony is, in its eagerness to impose the CD upon the music-buying public, the industry has sowed the seeds of its own destruction. As if conniving to make the public buy their entire collections a second time wasn't enough, The Man also exploited a loophole whereby royalties were only payable contractually on the sale of "gramophone records and compact cassettes". Out of all that extra revenue generated through successfully marketing the CD as "a premium product", sold at the kind of price that labels always wanted to charge for albums but couldn't get away with, none of it was going to the artists. Not until Ed Bicknell, manager of Dire Straits (in sales terms, the first real beneficiaries of the CD age), led the charge for widespread renegotiation of recording contracts to make sure that his charges (and, by extension, everyone else) didn't get juked out of their dues. I also once heard a story that, by the turn of the 90s, one record company - you won't get mE to MentIon them by name, sorry - had purposely begun to press copies of albums by their flagship acts on the poorest quality vinyl available, so's to drive consumers away from the format.

B-b-but wait, it gets worse. Several years later, when the possibilities of the CD as recordable media were beginning to emerge, I was working for a leading music industry body. One afternoon in the late 90s, I was present at a frankly chilling demonstration by the head of the organisation's New Technology department, during which I learned just how easy it would soon become to download a copy of Radiohead's OK Computer from the internet and, using a recordable CD and a burner, create what was to all intents and purposes a perfect copy of the shop-bought variety. This was when P2P file-sharing was still the exclusive preserve of geeks and l33t haxx0rz, and long before there was a broadband connection in every home and a CD burner in every PC. Twelve months later, that New Technology department was closed down, and the music industry continued to lobby for a blank tape levy whilst hooting with laughter at the ludicrous notion that, one day, people might use computer technology as their principal means of listening to music, and even - oh, my sides! - buying the stuff. Remember, these are the same people who told Brian Epstein that 'beat groups are on the way out'.

I buy CDs now, of course - after all, in most cases, what choice do I have? And isn't it a further irony that old-fashioned vinyl is now the 'premium product' (£25 for a 180g virgin-vinyl pressing of 'Master Of Puppets' in HMV)? The real kicker is that, in the time it would take me to record a casette copy of a vinyl album, I could have ripped 50 CDs, and uploaded them to a filehosting site or an mp3 blog, where, in theory, millions of people could download them as quickly as their internet connection would allow, for the princely sum of 0 pounds and 0 pence. What was that? 'Home Taping Is Killing Music', y'say..?

CDs - a scam for the ages. And much like Bernie Madoff's lavish Ponzi scam, it's ended in tears. Whether they're tears of laughter or sadness rather depends on your point of view.

I popped into the Christian Aid booksale on George Street in Edinburgh this week - this event usually has boxes and boxes of CDs for sale, but this year, only a handful (which looked like one person's collection judging by the number of Daniel O'Donnell discs in there). I've found the same at the last few jumble sales I've wandered round, usually a good way of picking up a few bargains but not recently. I can't think of an explanation for this - I'd have thought that there would be more people getting shot of their CDs as they go digital....