Everyone knows CDs suck. They're lame, outmoded, plastic replicas with all the soullessness of digital and none of the warmth of vinyl or analog tape. And even if you did want to listen to those godless bits and bytes, once you insert the disc into your computer and rip all the tracks, that CD is reduced to a superfluous hard copy. CDs are relics of the past, destined for the landfill, soon to be forgotten as we upload all music onto our hard drives and into the cloud. Right?
Not so fast. There are still good reasons to buy CDs. In fact, I will argue that it still makes more sense to buy them instead of mp3s (assuming you care about what happens to the music you purchase/acquire over the long term).
The kind of data compression used to encode audio in mp3 format is "lossy." This means that some of the original information that was there when the music was recorded is gone forever from that mp3. According to the creators of the compression algorithm that encodes mp3 files, the missing information would've been inaudible anyway, but many people can in fact hear the difference between an uncompressed audio file and an mp3. In any case, to me it seems absurd to pay for what is, essentially, a deliberately damaged file.
The thing is, CDs are still the only means by which to acquire uncompressed digital reproductions of most music. I would settle for purchasing music in a "lossless" compression format such as FLAC or Apple Lossless; the data compression tricks used in such formats allows for full recovery of all the information in the original, uncompressed file. However, the iTunes store doesn't even give you the option of purchasing in such formats. Neither does Amazon, nor most other vendors, large or small. Occasionally I'll come across smart, savvy, independent musicians or labels that sell their music in FLAC (or even uncompressed WAV), but these are still very much the exception. So until most music vendors start selling FLAC (or Apple Lossless), I will be buying CDs.
But let's say you're perfectly happy with mp3s and the way they sound. What do you care if some harmonic overtones in a part of the spectrum you can't hear anyway are missing? Well, consider the possibility that in the near future, someone may develop a more efficient compression algorithm than mp3. Actually, this has already happened - in fact, software engineers are constantly coming up with newer and better ways of compressing both audio and video. With some of these newer lossy formats, you can get sound quality as good as or better than the mp3s you now own but that take up less disk space. Sounds great, right? If you bought mp3s, though, you're going to have to repurchase all of your music in the new format. If you'd gotten CDs (or lossless-compressed digital files), this would never be a problem, because you'd always be starting with the original audio file(s).
[Note: You might be wondering why you can't simply convert mp3s into one of these newer formats directly. This is called "transcoding" and it always leads to degradation of audio quality. It might not be obvious at first, but after you've converted from mp3 to Ogg Vorbis and then AAC, you probably won't like the results.]
What about vinyl? Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely format. Putting a record on can be a kind of ritual and can make a listening experience seem special. However, this doesn't make analog discs in any way superior to digital ones. All the disadvantages of vinyl that most people were happy to rid themselves of with the advent of the CD are still there. Polyvinyl chloride discs are still big, bulky, heavy, slow, inconvenient, prone to wear and tear, and sound inferior on all but the most expensive audiophile equipment. I know many people will swear that there is some magical "warmth" imparted by the vinyl format that makes it superior, but I believe this is a kind of delusion. If that's how you prefer to listen, be my guest. But let's please have no illusions about superiority of sound quality.
So until I see a big move toward lossless or uncompressed audio becoming much more widely available for download online, I am going to stick with the only format currently available that allows me to get as close as possible to the music as it was recorded. I am not alone in feeling this way; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if CDs get a slight boost in sales over the next few years. It won't be a mainstream phenomenon, so the bump may be very slight indeed. I'm not saying I expect to still be buying them ten years from now (although it's not impossible), but for those of us who passionately collect music that is relatively outside the mainstream, I think CDs will stay relatively popular for the short-term future.
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