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Are CDs Better Than Streaming?

There are so many streaming services that have hit the market over the last couple of years. Competition has pretty much evened out but it’s easy to see that some of the most used platforms are easily Spotify, Tidal and Apple music.

But what about CD’s, you may wonder?

 CD’s have stood the test of time and are still widely used by many musicians globally to deliver their music.

In this post I’m therefore going to discuss which is better between streaming and CDs.

With that said, let’s get right into it.

Are CDs better than streaming?

Streaming offers more and better benefits as compared to CDs. This is one of the reasons why physical distribution via CDs is slowly being phased out. Therefore, on multiple fronts, Streaming is better than CDs.

With that said, let’s get into some of the advantages that come with streaming as compared to the use of physical CDs.

Library in hand

The one thing that makes streaming services the preffered way of accessing media be it music or video; is that it downright gives you access to a lot of content.

You can literally think of it as a library in your hands.

People don’t need to have access to “dedicated players” (as is the case of CDs) to be able to play media on streaming services.

You can access anything at any time with a phone that has Internet access.

This is one of the many reasons why record labels have switched their focus to promotion on streaming services.

No deterioration

With streaming all media is stored online.

This means any media can be easily accessed and won’t suffer any ruin from physical deterioration.

Granted, data may be lost, networks may be corrupted but many streaming services employ strict measures on both security and data integrity.

The safety of data is actually one of the selling points for many streaming services. This is one of the reasons why they invest heavily into securing data in order to preserve confidence and trust.

So while it may be possible that data could be lost or corrupted, it is pretty much highly unlikely.

Physical CDs on the other hand are susceptible to physical damage when not stored or handled well.

Anti-Piracy

Piracy is something that the media industry has suffered for many years.

The rise of the “blank CD” made it easy for people to illegally burn music onto them as well as well as rip music from CDs with music.

Musicians have pretty much lost millions in revenue because of Piracy.

But here comes the streaming services to the rescue!

While it is possible to rip music or any other media off a CD, it is impossible to rip music off streaming services.

Streaming service apps may be manipulated to enable people to access music illegally, however, they can only play it and not rip It on to their hard drives or other storage media.

Cheaper

Streaming services compared to CDs are a lot cheaper.

For a monthly fee, you as the consumer are able to the reap the benefits of having all music at your finger tips to play whenever you feel like.

Content variety

I earlier talked about the advantage of streaming services with regard to content.

I said, streaming services offer a full library of music and other media which can be accessed anytime.

Another advantage that comes with this is that the user is also privy to a variety of content. They can pretty much access anything they want whenever they want.

Provides better analytics

With CDs, music distribution only goes as far as the physical stores to which the CDs are delivered.

Information about the people that purchase it is not really something that the record label or musician can easily get ahold of from the physical store.

Streaming services on the other hand offer hard data analytics to musicians and record labels or anybody that uploads their music on the service.

This is highly beneficial for purposes of future projects for the musician.

They literally have the power to tailor make their content to satisfy the needs of the end user.

Downsides with CDs

There are many Downsides to CDs nowadays and I’m going to talk about a few of these.

People are less focused on physical distribution

These days, streaming services have become the holy grail of music distribution. Its less work for the musician or label because they can pretty much have everything done on the Internet.

There’s no need to involve a bunch of third parties in order to move the product to the desired location.

With streaming technologies, the desired location is the Internet and all that needs to be done is use an online distributor such as TuneCore, Soundrop, DistroKid or any other distributor.

The world is online

CDs have pretty much become the second or last option for distribution in this day and age because the entire world is pretty much online.

All your fans and followers are all online and therefore the focus for all musicians has switched in order to take full advantage of the Internet.

This has made the demand for streaming services on the rise over the past few years.

Harder to promote physical CDs

Physical CD promotion is a lot difficult and more complicated as compared to online hosted music.

In this day and age, advertising on streaming platforms digitally has become the easiest way to get traffic even outside of one’s fanbase.

Therefore, people pretty much prefer streaming services because they can easily use ads or strike a deal with services like Tidal or Spotify .etc to promote their work.

And most people are online these days which means that promotional efforts done online are guaranteed to work better as compared to physical promotion.

Granted, physical promotion is also necessary but online promotion is a better way to reach a wider audience with much ease.

CDs can easily get damaged

Physical CDs are susceptible to physical damage and this is one of the reasons why it’s very difficult to compare them to streaming.

Streaming services not only offer great audio quality but they also eliminate the chances of your music or data being damaged, altered or lost significantly.

Are CDs Better Than Streaming?
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