Mike McGuire

So why does this keep coming up as a news item? This year’s decline in CD sales is the worst. Ever! Reports like this are like watching a footage of a car crash in slow motion and exclaiming every couple of seconds “It’s really going to crash…It’s closer to crashing.” A lot of these stories about the demise of the CD also usually contain a phrase that goes something like, “. . . and while online sales are growing, they have not made up for the revenue loss due to the CD’s decline . . .”

Let me not be the first to say that it’s over. The CD might still dominate the revenue streams for the music industry, but it’s not coming back, folks. The longer people fret over the CD’s demise, and music label  execs who keep blaming the demise of the CD for their less-than-stellar financials should be prohibited from . Statements like this are approaching the banal.  I tried to tease out some of these issues in a document that we just published entitled Christmas 2008: The Last Year of the Retail CD.

For the industry to continue to focus on the CD’s demise – which implies a nostalgia for the old control points of the 20th century record label business – hinders the ability of the labels to move into the 21st century music label business.