Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the end of the CD business.
Steve Jobs just delivered his latest keynote, and perhaps the final nail in the coffin for the CD business. The Mac Book Air has no CD drive. When the original iMac lost the disc drive, the floppy quickly went the way of the Dodo. Now Apple have done the same thing to the CD, and quite possibly hastened the demise of the DVD too.
And why not? We live in a world where it’s perfectly feasible to distribute most types of media without the need for little plastic discs of any kind. Yet EMI, who are laying off one third of their entire workforce, still find it economically viable to ignore ubiquitous digital distribution with zero marginal cost, and instead spend $50m a year scrapping unsold CDs.
Moving to all-digital media formats isn’t just the most efficient thing to do economically, it’s the right thing to do environmentally, and it wouldn’t be happening as quickly without companies like Apple accepting the reality of the situation when most media and technology companies won’t.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Hey, you gotta give EMI a little slack. They are the most progressive of the big 4:
-The first to offer DRM-free songs on iTunes
-The first to suggest dropping support of the RIAA
But if they are the only label that had released thees numbers (and since they are the most progressive, that may be the case), that is understandable.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Hey Nick –
You’re right, EMI are doing some progressive things, and they’re not the only ones spending millions destroying large piles of unsold CDs. There is a reason it has to be done from a royalties point of view which makes sense economically for record labels, if you totally ignore the fact that music doesn’t have to be distributed this way, which all of them, EMI included, are still doing.
Nice blog by the way!
Matt
January 16th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Hi Matt,
I see your point now (I had not read the ft link when I replied). Thanks for the props on my blog. You blog is pretty good, too. I see you are a daily poster, so I’ll be stopping here daily, thanks to Mike mentioning you on Techdirt. I am totally going to get your book. I am just finishing up The Medici Effect. I had seen it mentioned somewhere else but when I saw you mention it I just had to check it out. I also finished Free Culture a couple months ago, which it appears your book builds upon further.
~Nick
January 17th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
That’s pretty much the same thing my brother told me last night. I watched the clips of MacWorld presentation on G4TV but he explained to me the machines full capabilities and I was dumbfounded.
One.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
[...] but that might be a sign of my age. So, back to the trendier stuff: it’s also a blog that identities the Mac Book Air as the end of the CD business. Posted by Andrew Filed in Business Tags: book, [...]
January 20th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
you’rr right, right, right!
good point with the carbon footprint and congrats for the wording (the way of the Dodo)!
January 20th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
[...] Now he is sooo right! I can’t wait until people defocus from the small silver plastic discs! Good point! « Kelly & Ping New York Sorry, keine Kommentare bislang. [...]
January 21st, 2008 at 2:44 am
[...] sales are in freefall, (the arrival of the Mac Book Air this week was perhaps the final death knell for the format) and the legal department is clearly not a viable long-term revenue stream. A more [...]
January 25th, 2008 at 12:23 am
MACBOOK AIR, DISC-KILLER…
While the tech world was all agog by last week’s unveiling of the silly-thin MacBook Air, Matt Mason noticed a key missing component from Apple’s new portable, with potentially paradigm-shifting consequences:
The MacBook Air has no CD drive…
May 21st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
[...] delivered the Mac Book Air in January, with no optical media (CD/DVD) drive. Many are singing their praises, many are cursing them. I [...]
February 21st, 2009 at 7:52 pm
This is ridiculous. The compact disc format and it’s extensions (DVD, BD, etc) will not die off because Mac decided not to use it anymore. It is still a standard used in millions and millions of devices still in heavy use, and millions of new devices everyday. It was an incredibly stupid move for Mac to exclude it. There are no popular media “holders” that are as large capacity and as cheap as the optical disc format. It will die eventually, that is for sure, and it mght be relatively soon (less than 10 years) but Mac jumped the gun on this one big time. Thinking that Macs having no optical drive will destroy the optical disc industry is like thinking that Macs soldering their video cards to motherboards will destroy the standalone videocard industry. This is just another stupid thing that Mac has decided to do to be different than PC. Sorry, but I like being able to switch out hardware on my computer, I like having 2 mouse buttons, and I like to be able to use all the media available to me, like various flash cards and optical discs. Most people still have extensive music and video collections on optical discs. Like I am going to rely on storing my entire music collection on a hard drive, nevermind some cheap piece of crap ipod that will error and leave me with no music or video. No optical drive??? This is a freakin joke. Hey, maybe we can do away with the cpu too. Let’s just remove everything useful from computers!
April 16th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
thank god for EMI at least i wont be carrying CD rack anymore, Apple you are the bom. i wish mac book is mine. that will be outrageous so to say.
April 21st, 2009 at 5:31 pm
ПомнитÑÑ, кто-то выкладывал фотки…