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Will CD’s Become Obsolete?

CD has been the standard physical way of storing music for many years. To this day, music is being distributed on CD. With that said, a lot has to be addressed seeing as music is mostly being stored digitally nowadays.

Streaming platforms for example have made it easy for the average person to access any music they need at a pretty low cost. This raises many questions with regard to music storage mediums like CDs.

In this post I’m going to discuss one of these questions.

Without further ado… let’s get right into it.

Will CDs become obsolete?

In the future CDs may become completely absolute but it’s not anytime soon. There are many factors that have to come into play for CDs to be completely phased out.

Let’s take a look into some of these factors.

Complete domination of online platforms

Of course we can all agree that streaming services have made quiet the impact, however, it is still a little to early to call CDs obsolete.

Look at it this way, vinyl records were the only storage medium back in the day and at the time they may have been called the latest technology.

As time went by, the CD was introduced as a storage medium at a time when the world needed it the most.

If you look at how much of an impact CDs made in the early 2000’s you can easily conclude without a shadow of a doubt that they completely overshadowed vinyl as the final medium for storage and distribution of music.

But… Vinyl is still around in as much as its not the go to storage medium. It is still in demand and there are a number of collectors out there paying top dollar for vintage vinyl.

With that said, one of the factors that would make CDs completely obsolete is the total and complete domination of streaming services.

This may be something that is likely to happen in the future but we can all agree that CDs still have a couple of good years left.

Near Zero demand for CDs

Another factor that we have to look into when trying to figure out whether CDs are going to be completely phased out of the game is the demand for CDs.

If a time came where the demand for CDs hit an all time low almost to zero.

There’d be no need for musicians to distribute their product in CD format.

In my opinion, one of the reasons why CDs have stood the test of time is because they’re pretty much the best medium of storage that musicians can use to store data and display their cover art.

Embracing other physical storage mediums

Phones and other devices that are able to store data like music have basically become the new thing.

If technology continues on this trajectory and people completely embrace these devices.

CDs will see an ever steeper decline in demand.

The main threats to CDs

Below are the main threats to CDs.

Streaming platforms

Streaming platforms have made accessing music much much easier.

These platforms are perharps the biggest if not the only contribution to the decline in demand for CDs.

Any musical artist out there can easily publish and sell their music online with ease and streaming platforms have made this possible.

Let’s face it, the easy access that comes with streaming music cannot be compared to the hassle of having to find a CD player to play music.

However, CD sales are still something heavily recognised in the music industry in as much as they’ve been overshadowed by streaming platforms.

Other cloud based platforms

Cloud computing is a new technology that has pretty much ensured and enable the storage of files online.

The cloud offers great security for files and the major advantage that comes with it is that you can rely less on your storage devices.

Storage devices like memory cards or hard drives have the disadvantage of eventually running out of space and this means that you cannot store everything you want on them.

This is perharps another reason why streaming platforms are desirable.

You don’t need to necessarily have files on your storage medium to play them. All you need is access to them.

This is one of the threats to physical CDs.

Smart Mobile devices

Smart Mobile devices are everywhere and phones are pretty much a huge part of our lives.

They allows us to have access to the world at our finger tips.

Back in the day, when phones weren’t as advanced, it was difficult to have music or any other media on them.

This made CDs a very important part of our lives. Now that our phones are able to pretty much work like a computer, the demand for CDs is not as it once was.

Less reliance on physical units

Physical units are of course important like I earlier stated. However, as the world evolves, technology has pretty much dominated the world and we are now relying less and less on physical units.

This is a huge threat to the CD industry.

Final Thoughts

CDs will envetually become obsolete as time goes on because people are relying more on streaming services and other online services for the access of anything from music, video, imagery etc.

It’s to early to say that they’re completely obsolete but their demand has been on the decline over the years which says a lot about their future.

Will CD’s Become Obsolete?
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