death of the cd

Ian Landsman • April 8, 2005

"
Then it occured to me, that I haven't used my CD Player, portable or at home, in a long, long time. That I rarely, if ever see anyone walking around with a portable CD player anymore. They have all been replaced by MP3 players. If everyone is switching to MP3 players, whether they are Ipods, in phones, in PDAs, in cars, whatever, then that means that everyone is going to have to go through a multistep process in order to get the music from where or how they buy it, to the place they want it.

That's not good for the people selling music. Particularly retail stores. Think about it. Apple has done such a great job of selling us on why we should store our musically digitally, that every one is either doing it, or on their way to doing it. Which means that 90 pct or more of music being sold is currently being sold on a physical format that the segment of the music buying public that spends the most amount of money on music doesn't want. They are being sold CDs. They want to listen to their music from hard drives or flash drives. That's a problem." (Marc Cuban)

Note: If you're not reading Mark Cuban's blog you're really missing out. He's really really good. For those who don't know he's the guy who sold Broadcast.com at the height of the bubble to Yahoo for 5 BILLION dollars and now owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball franchise.