From the SF Chronicle

Consider the alternatives to compact discs: iPods, satellite radio and hours of free or cheap digital music to download legally. Begone, bright discs and pesky cases! Begone!

Aidin Vaziri, Chronicle Pop Music Critic

Monday, November 28, 2005

They're overpriced, ugly and don't even make good rearview mirror ornaments. Now that we know they are also potentially poisonous to personal computers, thanks to Sony BMG's rogue copy-protection technology, there's really no reason to buy another compact disc ever again.

With sleek iPods rapidly becoming the hi-fi system of choice, satellite radio offering hundreds of specialty stations, and the Internet overflowing with all kinds of free and cheap legal digital music, suddenly the thought of owning an awkward polycarbonate plastic-coated disc that holds only an hour of tunes by just one artist seems positively prehistoric -- even if it comes with a hastily produced "bonus" DVD.

It's clearly time to move on. Think about it: No more nails-on-chalkboard-style skipping. No more secret tracks that scare the stuffing out of you 15 minutes after you think an album has stopped playing. No more fumbling around with those impossible-to-unwrap jewel cases. It was fun while it lasted. The music industry has declared war on its customers. Now it's time to fight back. Below we explain the 10 best ways to get the most out of the next musical revolution.

1. MP3 blogs: The Internet isn't just a great place to find amateur porn and clips of fat kids acting out scenes from "The Phantom Menace." It's actually an incredible resource for discovering new music and the best sites to do that at the moment are MP3 blogs such as The Hype Machine (hype.non-standard.net) and Largehearted Boy (blog.largeheartedboy.com), which offer daily, no-nonsense links to free music available online. Meanwhile, personal blogs such as Stereogum (www.stereogum.com), Sixeyes (sixeyes.blogspot.com) and Said the Gramophone (www.saidthegramophone.com) hand out iPod-friendly tunes along with smartly written previews. For those with a couple of hours, weeks or months to kill, a staggering list of MP3 blogs is available at the Tofu Hut (tofuhut.blogspot.com).

2. Online radio: While terrestrial radio stations choke on corporate policies, automated playlists and buzz-killing commercial breaks, online radio stations are becoming a safe haven for anyone who just wants to hear some good music. One of the best is Los Angeles-based public radio station KCRW (www.kcrw.com). Its daily "Morning Becomes Eclectic" program, hosted by Nic Harcourt, never ceases to amaze, mixing everything from indie rock and world beat to classical and jazz. Where else can you hear the Arctic Monkeys, Johnny Cash and Bebel Gilberto back to back? Another great station, Cincinnati's WOXY FM (www.woxy.com), set up shop on the Internet after it was bumped off the air. Now it reaches a worldwide audience with an adventurous mix of alternative rock. San Francisco's contribution to the online radio market is SOMA FM (www.somafm.com), a listener-supported portal providing eight channels of mostly electronic-based music.

3. Digital music services: Owning music is so last century. With everyone bent on cutting the clutter, it makes sense to sign up with a digital music service that puts a head-spinning, commitment-free music library at your disposal. Rhapsody (www.rhapsody.com) and Napster (www.napster.com) -- formerly an illegal peer-to-peer service -- are the big ones, giving subscribers more than a million songs to choose from and providing interactive radio for those who just can't decide what they want to hear. They both tend to lean heavily toward more mainstream releases, but neither allows much room for the kind of boredom that sets in after listening to your Billy Idol greatest hits CD for the 789th time.

4. MySpace music: MySpace.com (www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music) is an enormous online social networking site that was recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million. It counts more than 37 million members, most of them falling into the coveted teen demographic. So it only makes sense that the place is simply bursting with music. Both upcoming acts and major labels use it as a way to reach new audiences, with artists like Nine Inch Nails, Madonna, Black Eyed Peas, Neil Diamond and R.E.M. even going so far as to put up exclusive previews of their albums before they hit the streets. For the more adventurous, there are more than 55,000 unsigned bands of varying quality, just begging for anyone to listen. You have to figure anything's got to be better than the new Scott Stapp album.

5. Satellite radio: Howard Stern is moving to Sirius (www.sirius.com). Mercedes-Benz plans to make the satellite radio service a standard feature in its luxury sedans. Snoop Dogg appears in TV spots for XM (www.xmradio.com), while the company has wired JetBlue planes with more than 100 channels of its programming. We don't know much about the stock market, but it seems like a good idea to invest both money and time in what has to be one of the fastest growing entertainment services in the world. Offering more variety than even a 60-gig iPod and more unpredictability than the wildest shuffle imaginable, these subscription-based services are simply a must-have for anyone with a daily commute of more than five minutes.

6. iTunes Music Store: This is the obvious one. Despite restrictive file formats that allow only a limited number of transfers for purchased MP3s, there's a good reason why it is the most popular download service by a mile. With simple across-the-board pricing and lots of exclusive content, the Apple Music Store is the example nearly every new music service will follow from here on out.

7. Hit the clubs: The best way to experience music, of course, is to ditch the fancy gadgets and go straight to the source. In the Bay Area, we're fortunate to have an abundance of excellent live music venues that cater to nearly every whim. Whether it's the Lovemakers at the Fillmore, Armand Van Helden at 1015 Folsom or Zion I at the Independent, there's enough going on on any given night to prevent anyone from missing those old CDs.

8. BitTorrent: People used to exchange live Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan bootlegs on crummy tapes by seeking out fellow traders through cheaply produced fanzines that came out once every four years. Now they just point-and-click toward the legally nebulous BitTorrent (www.bittorrent.com), a computer program that allows users to share huge files over the Internet. The exchange of torrents, which can contain anything from music and software to the latest "Star Wars" movie six hours before its official release, is said to be responsible for one-third of the Web's traffic. The entire recording of Dave Matthews Band "Live at Golden Gate Park" on crystal-clear digital audio? No problem. The latest Coldplay concert video that Chris Martin hasn't even seen yet? There it is. The Strokes' latest album four months before it hits stores? Better call your attorney.

9. Amazon.com free music downloads: To entice people to buy new music, Amazon (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/468646/) has an incredible free music downloads page loaded with MP3s from new and old releases spanning practically every genre imaginable. There is so much good stuff available from the likes of the Arcade Fire, Alison Krauss and Beck, you might be forgiven for never getting around to actually purchasing anything.

10. Rock it old school: Let's be honest, somehow R.E.M. never sounded better than when it was blaring out of the college dorm room boom box with all that tape hiss in the background. Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" doesn't make nearly as much sense as digital ones-and-zeros as it does on a slab of dusty, crackling vinyl. And the 7-inch single of Blondie's "Dreaming" still sends shivers down the spine.

All the classic albums made before the CD revolution hit in 1982 -- some might argue the only albums anyone really needs -- are abundantly available in vinyl form, most for less than the price of one lousy Black Eyed Peas song on iTunes. Try garage sales, street corners, the bottom shelves at Amoeba, or, better yet, buy up entire lots of records and tapes on eBay. Fortunately, there's a booming market for retro-themed record players in stores like Restoration Hardware and Target, while once sleek Walkman cassette players are practically spilling off the electronics shelves and into the bric-a-brac aisles at Goodwill stores everywhere. Going back to basics has never made more sense.

E-mail Aidin Vaziri at avaziri@sfchronicle.com.

Is this really a big problem with CDs? I have never had one of my CDs skip - NEVER.

I sincerely hope that there will still be physical copies of albums available.
And, I think that there will be.

Most people, methinks, like to have that tangible artifact to hold in their hands. To fondle and manipulate.

It provides a more real connection with the music and with the artists.

If that disappears... it will be a sad day, indeed.
But I do not think that will ever happen.

i don't think that it's "most people", i think that it's a passionate minority.

purists will never let vinyl and cd's die. i have a feeling these 2 formats will exist for quite sometime. thankfully.

You don't think it will ever happen? I see it happening in the next 10 years. I think there will still be a group of hardcore music fans who collect more than just the music when they buy an album but I think most of the music buying public will go almost exclusively to MP3s or something similar.

Natural Mike, I take really good care of my CDs but I still get the occasional skip. Sometimes it's the CD player (my car stereo is about to go) and other times it's a CD I bought used but I think annoying skips is a viable argument against CDs.

What the hell is wrong with San Francisco? Besides Morford, you have this douchebag.

For starters, Crack is right. It's not most people. I like to consider myself a fairly early adopter, and I don't even bother with bittorrent.

Secondly, cds are prone to "nails on chalkboard scratching", yet yard sale records are the way to go?

I'd also hesistate to call an iPod "hi-fi".

to clarify, i think that most people don't need any physical artifact with their music and that digital downloads will replace pre-made cds in 5 years. CDs will become analagous to vinyl in that dorks with fetishize it but there's not real justification for most people to keep it around. DVDs a bit longer but same result.

Dammit.

As long as I can still find CDs I like for 3 bucks on Amazon, I'll still buy CDs.

But the technology is antiquated NOW, not just within ten years.

This makes me very sad. Someday all this bloody technology will ruin us all...Live in the past!

Nostagia FOREVER!!! <----------- Not ironic

Andyfest, this could go for you as well, but I'm curious as to why you think that this will happen. Well, not so much the innovation to render cds obsolete, that's bound to happen at some point, but why you think it will happen so quickly.

My feeling is that the options are too splintered to really come together to form one viable alternative just yet. The technology is there, but your regular schmoes on the street aren't really all that open to having several different devices to play the same songs.

Most of the examples in the article require different hardware or formatting to play. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the technology were there for an mp3/Sirius portable player, but you still leave Napster/Rhapsody and WOXY out in the cold.

One big, albeit diminishing, advantage to cds is the portability. It's easier to play a cd in a car, home, office, computer, discman, whatever. Granted, it wasn't like that in 1987, but that's also more or less my point.

that thing is such a piece of shit. it makes me violently angry.

Nonsense. It allows you to hoard/collect and to stock bookshelves to show off to your friends. If I ever caught anyone fondling a cd, I'd rightfully kick their head in. There's no connection at all, other than the artist's label got some of your money.

That's why I say it will be 10 years before CDs are virtually obsolete. I think you're right about portability (at least right now) and it will take time for people to catch up to technology. I don't own an MP3 player or download much music to my computer because I mainly listen to music in the car. I'd buy an iPod if it was more compatible with a car stereo but right now it's way to cumbersome and distracting. Eventually, I'm sure I'll be on board with MP3 players once they become a little more compatible.

In the end, though, CDs will go the way of vinyl records. More and more people will switch to some sort of digital format whether it's a music subscription service or MP3s and the market for CDs will be reduced to the point of virtual obscurity. I think the Internet and MP3s are the new music format and will be to CDs what CDs have been to vinyl and cassettes.

bingo!

I want to strangle people like the author of this article. I plan on writing him an extremely pointed retort

Gotta disagree with Chase. There's a passionate minority that will forever cling to vinyl/cds and another passionate minority that will quickly abandon the format. Most won't consciously embrace or reject any movement towards digital distribution, but rather ignore it buying the 5-20 cds that they buy year in, year out.

Just look at the resurrection of vinyl -- isn't that evidence enough?

I don't have the time or the patience right now to parse through Mr. Vaziri's leaps of logic, so suffice it to say that I think he's as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

CDs won't be obsolete until I stop losing all of my goddamn music every 6 months when ipod shits the bed. And fuck you people with your 62 external harddrives. I don't back shit up, cos I'm cheap, lazy and stupid.

Exactly. That's why I am really slow to go out and start converting/buying mp3s. Just wait til all these musicphiles start losing their collections of stuff. Of course the people leading the wave of mp3s for the most part are people who listen to a top single for like 3 weeks are sick of it, and move onto the next hot thing so...

Everything I listen to now comes off the iPod. When I buy a disc, I pop it in the computer, rip it and put it on the shelf for good. All my mp3s are backed up on DVD-R as well as an external hard drive. It's really not too difficult to create backups. If my iPod dies, it won't be too much trouble to load the 150 +/- GB of shit back onto my pod.

I've moved my library around enough to know that I won't miss CDs.