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Disappearing Act: Is Demise of CDs, DVDs a Good Thing?

And what about the extras that come with CDs and DVDs?

Marcia Etzwiler, a 58-year-old Fremont resident, is a music fanatic who is always on the hunt for an undiscovered artist. She doesn’t own a computer or iPod, nor does she intend to.

And she misses the days of spending hours in a record store browsing through the selections to find a colorful album cover that caught her eye. Most of the time her purchases proved wise.

Then she moved on to CDs. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, she said.

“What I didn’t like about CDs when they first came out was the liner notes. They didn’t have any of them,” she said.

As record labels beefed up the bare-bones CD packaging by including song lyrics, artist photos, and liner notes, Etzwiler embraced the li’l discs. Now she owns close to 2,000 of them.

And while her beloved format is far from extinct, she’s already lamenting its demise.

Most of the local music stores are long gone. Borders, she said, eliminated much of its CD collection, including the store’s classical and blues section. Even Wal-Mart doesn’t stock nearly as many CDs as it used to, as the retail giant moves further into the mp3 era with its own music download store.

Within a decade, Etzwiler said, “there will be no more CDs.”

Perhaps. But dwindling sales figures be damned, there’s a lot to love about owning a “real” copy of an album or movie, one that you can hold in your hands, including, as Etzwiler said, the packaging that comes along with a CD or DVD – especially the box sets typically bought by fans and collectors.

Plus, depending on your Internet connection speed, a trip to a store to buy a DVD will probably be faster than downloading it, especially for a 20-gig Blu-ray.

Owning the physical media of an album or movie, as opposed to an electronic file, is also a better long-term investment.

If a disc is treated with reasonable care, you can expect it to last quite a while, anywhere from 25 to 100 years, barring an act of God such as the usual flood, fire, or earthquake – in which case, the loss of a music collection doesn’t seem quite so important compared to the loss of a home.

But if a hard drive crashes with 3,000 songs and 20 movies on it? Unless you made a back-up (and seriously, how many of you have done that?), the files are gone for good. Vanished because of an unknown error or mechanical mishap. Not to mention there’s always the chance of an accidental deletion of a folder containing the files. (Guilty as charged.)

Yes, CDs and DVDs can be ruined by the elements – have you ever seen a CD that’s baked in the sun? Not pretty – but so can an mp3 player or laptop. And those are a lot more expensive to replace than a CD or DVD.

Still, technology marches relentlessly forward – it never slows down or looks back. And already, a generation has grown up with little knowledge of record albums and even cassette tapes.

And already a generation has no idea about what they’re missing.

Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.

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