Longing for the day ...

CDs as a sales force

Interesting article on Slyck examining the prospects for the CD as a music sales medium. It's pretty thorough and goes over a recent report by NPD (pdf, 1.68MB) pretty well, concluding that, depsite the NPD finding, digital downloads will replace the CD as a sales force, mainly for reasons of convenience.

I'm not convinced by this, though it may be true for a large proportion of the market. I've already posted on the future of the CD as a production device, and I think this will cntinue to be the case, especially for artists whos sales figures will not make iTunes want to invest in single releases. Besides, some people still listen to Vinyl and others still have their old phonographs ... analogue is *such* a better representation.

But I think this examination is closer to realistic than the nonsense I cited earlier. It is at last focussed on the right aspect - sales - and includes some more interesting data.