Best Buy not best place for CDs anymore

Move makes sense amid changing landscape of music consumption

Best Buy announced this week that it will stop selling CDs this summer effective July 1, yet another sign of the shift in how people consume music.

It wasn’t that long ago compact discs were the wave of the future.

CNN reports that on Oct. 1, 1982, the first commercial compact disc — Billy Joel’s “52nd Street” — was released in Japan. The CD didn’t overtake cassette tapes until the late 1980s, CNN reports, noting that the first album to sell 1 million copies in CD format — outselling its vinyl version — was Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms,” which was released in 1985.

Now, here were are in 2018, and the way we consume music has completely changed. People can buy digital albums or songs individually through services such as iTunes or Google Play.

Or people can subscribe to digital streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, and tailor their music according to their tastes. Services such as Amazon Prime offer subscribers a wide selection of music as part of their subscription. People can also go to YouTube and listen to a variety of tunes, simply by entering an artist’s name.

That in turn has sparked other changes. In March, Forbes reported that major car manufacturers have been dropping CD players — Honda and Toyota, for example, in 2016, while Ford followed suit with similar plans this year. HIS Automotive predicts that 46 percent of cars sold in the U.S. won’t have CD players by 2021.

However, despite those changes, physical sales of albums still make up more than 53 percent of all album sales, according to Digital Music News.

So is this the end of music as we know it? Of course not — but it is a marked shift in how we consume music.

There is an allure to having music stored on one’s cell phone, available at any moment. There’s no need to go home and dig out a CD any longer — instead, smartphones have become portable jukeboxes.

And one no longer needs to purchase an entire album. Digital downloading has made it possible to purchase just a song or two by an individual artist.

Music will never disappear, but the delivery system will be ever-changing.

What do you think, readers? Are you sad by Best Buy’s decision, glad, or indifferent? Let us know — share your thoughts online at www.YumaSun.com, or send us a Letter to the Editor at letters@yumasun.com.