Goodbye to CDs

I think I bought the last CD I’ll ever buy on Monday.

Before this I want to say the last CB I bought was Dave Matthews solo album? That was in 2003? Like the rest of the CDs I’ve bought its sitting in a box in my closet collecting dust with several folders of pictures and several computer programs that are compatible with Windows 95.

I was out running some errands and a new song I’d never heard before came on and I really, really liked it. The DJ said that every song on the album was brilliant and since I was out and near a Best Buy I wanted to see if Best Buy actually still sold music.

Most of my CDs were bought in college when trips to Best Buy and Media Play were hours long affairs where we’d pour through the racks of games and music. Now the CD section was this tiny little section that might have been a fifth of what it was a couple of years ago.

To my surprise they had Adel’s second album 21. I figured that was as good as anything to make my final purchase and so I bought my first album in almost ten years and probably the last one of my life. I put it into my car and had to laugh because when I started the engine the CD player stopped and had to restart.

Newspapers are one of the first casualties of the fire that is the internet, music is the second. Eminem’s “Recovery” was the top selling album of 2010 and sold 3.4 million copies. Ten years ago Recovery would have been the 10th selling album, Also Media Play was still in business. Digital downloading is slowly but assuredly destroying the way music is sold, within ten years you won’t be able to buy a CD of a new album because they won’t exist in this country anymore.

Eventually the internet will consume every creative field. Books, movies, gaming, anything that doesn’t have to be physically held in the hands will eventually be dominated by digital downloads on the internet. In the future I see retail being reduced to physical consumer goods. We will never be able to digitize a grocery store, we will always need furniture, but we won’t always need bookstores.

There will come a day in my lifetime where you won’t be able to buy a new hard back release because they won’t exist in a physical form.