120 replies to this topic

[jameshunt]

ampersand, on 05 January 2011 - 03:43 PM, said:

this worries me. i've got a 300gb (i think) hard drive and that's plenty for me. should really buy another one for cheap cos as you say, it'll happen and i'll be gutted!

There's every chance you'll lose your whole collection at some point.  Buying a backup disk after that happens won't help you.

[ampersand]

jameshunt, on 05 January 2011 - 03:50 PM, said:

There's every chance you'll lose your whole collection at some point.  Buying a backup disk after that happens won't help you.

aye course. that's why i'm saying to get one now. or really soon. had this one for at least a year now.

[Steve P]

fatyeti24, on 05 January 2011 - 11:06 AM, said:

nobody will buy CDs in a few years though, they won't hang around like vinyl.

while i agree that online is even more dominated by large retailers, i find far, far more choice on say Amazon than i ever did in HMV.

of course if, like Pinhead says, binary just doesn't do it far you then fair enough.  your call.  i never got excited by artwork on albums, that wasn't my thing.

and you could argue that since all mp3 sales started to be counted towards the charts, the top 40 has been more varied in recent years than it has for a long time.

I think it'll be very sad if/when HMV shuts its high street stores. I don't have a ipod or mp3 players as I actually like owning my records. A massive part of getting a new album is reading the lyrics in the first couple of listens. I like displays of cd's, books, films etc. in peoples houses and love looking through them. It'll be a sad day indeed when people have all of those things stored in a humming box in the corner of the room.

[jump]

I think physical music will stick around, I've got the bulk of my cds seeing small bands in a shit clubs and I can't see them not carrying music to sell as they'll miss out on the opportunity to sell drunken people their music before they loose interest when sober.

Edited by jump, 05 January 2011 - 04:10 PM.

[Pinhead]

Yes, lyrics are important - I'd miss the song sheets in an all digital world. Mind you though, in perspective, the metadata for some of these digital formats is now becoming quite sophisticated. As well as essentially including the video now for MP4's (could lead to innovation in the music video arena in the long run?), the ID tags can contain image art, song lyrics and in future probably whole interviews and the like, much like DVD's today.

[Kowalski]

Steve P, on 05 January 2011 - 04:04 PM, said:

I think it'll be very sad if/when HMV shuts its high street stores. I don't have a ipod or mp3 players as I actually like owning my records. A massive part of getting a new album is reading the lyrics in the first couple of listens. I like displays of cd's, books, films etc. in peoples houses and love looking through them. It'll be a sad day indeed when people have all of those things stored in a humming box in the corner of the room.

Good post.
I own an iphone but also buy CDs a lot, I like owning CDs.  I have put some older stuff on ebay so I don't have an ever growing collection, but its certainly very sad if/when HMV shuts its high street stores.  They've done okay online to compete with the likes of Play and Amazon, but I can't remember the last time I bought anything in an HMV store (I get almost all my CDs from Play).  But their stores are losing out to illegal downloads / supermarket under cutting them.

[jameshunt]

Kowalski, on 05 January 2011 - 04:14 PM, said:

...But their stores are losing out to illegal downloads / supermarket under cutting them.

Their stores are losing out to legal downloads and their own online store under-cutting them as well.

£16 for a particular CD in their highstreet shop.
£10.99 with free postage on their online store.
£7.93 from Amazon.

[ampersand]

jameshunt, on 05 January 2011 - 04:22 PM, said:

Their stores are losing out to legal downloads and their own online store under-cutting them as well.

£16 for a particular CD in their highstreet shop.
£10.99 with free postage on their online store.
£7.93 from Amazon.

yeah that did my nut in.

karate kid bluray from some random online store - £6
karate kid bluray from hmv online - £10
karate kid blurat from hmv store - £16

had a £10 store voucher and didn't want to use my own money so couldn't get it. ended up just getting the £8 trilogy on dvd. and there was another copy in the store which had a price tag of £28. some poor f**ker who didn't know any better will have paid that in the past!

[LondonTom]

I think this from NME kind of makes a good point about HMV and how it can also help the indie labels and people who wouldn't normally go for less mainstream artists find something else and get interested in it.

[MilkyJoe]

ampersand, on 05 January 2011 - 03:49 PM, said:

1tb is too much, i can do it cheaper. all i back up is my music. i can start from scratch easily if i need to reboot. it's just internet and music i use pretty much. and any programmes are easy installed again like bitlord, itunes etc.

though i only store my music on my external hard drive. that's the folder where it all gets listened to from.

1tb really isn't too much though. It doesn't matter how much you have now, you will inevitably fill it in the probably not too distant future. A few HD movies and it's gone. Also with a 1tb drive you will lose almost 100gb out of the box.

[MilkyJoe]

It is also worth noting that it's not just supermarkets that is killing the high street stores now. Sites like spotify which I must admit I thought was a bit gimicky when it first launched are a big part of the music industry now. Pay a small fee per month and you never have to buy another CD again.

[jameshunt]

jump, on 05 January 2011 - 03:50 PM, said:

My computer is already over 1TB and know I should get a back up but I keep putting it off knowing how long it'll take to put all my cds onto it.

Then get a 2TB drive.  Set up your computer to copy overnight.  Worst case it will take longer than that, but better to have a backup than not.

[fowls]

I'm worried more about the HMV box offices inside stores to be honest.  It's a real shame that not many big venues have box offices to sell tickets these days, and so the only way to get tickets is to spend £5 on postage and packing online even if you live within 10 minutes of the venue.  If HMV dies then there's even fewer places to buy gig tickets in person

Edited by fowls, 05 January 2011 - 05:48 PM.

[Steve P]

MilkyJoe, on 05 January 2011 - 05:24 PM, said:

It is also worth noting that it's not just supermarkets that is killing the high street stores now. Sites like spotify which I must admit I thought was a bit gimicky when it first launched are a big part of the music industry now. Pay a small fee per month and you never have to buy another CD again.

You see that's where I just don't like the way the music industry has gone. Why do people no longer want to own things? I do use spotify but mainly as a way of listening to new acts that I otherwise wouldn't have heard and then if I like them, i'll buy the cd. As has been said before, how many albums have you got that on first listen you didn't think were all that good. If you've bought the cd the chances are you'll give it another try and may well discover that the album grows into something amazing. If it's something you download for free or listen to on spotify, what are the chances of you listening to it again?

[alframsey]

I personally will be devastated if the day comes where I can't  browse a record shop such as HMV with. I never buy music online and never download illegally (partly due to me not using an Ipod/mp3 player). I only listen to music on a stereo and I enjoy looking through the booklet that comes with a cd and actually having the cd in my hands. I actually hate the fact the music industry will soon all be based online and in mp3. Makes me sad :'(

[MilkyJoe]

Steve P, on 05 January 2011 - 06:16 PM, said:

You see that's where I just don't like the way the music industry has gone. Why do people no longer want to own things? I do use spotify but mainly as a way of listening to new acts that I otherwise wouldn't have heard and then if I like them, i'll buy the cd. As has been said before, how many albums have you got that on first listen you didn't think were all that good. If you've bought the cd the chances are you'll give it another try and may well discover that the album grows into something amazing. If it's something you download for free or listen to on spotify, what are the chances of you listening to it again?

Exactly and that is what will be a shame about the demise of high street record shops. Spotify is an amazing service and seems to be doing everything right in terms of getting a large slice of the way things are undoubtably moving towards. I think that with people not bothering to physically own music is down to several reasons. A large part of it is down to the fact it is so easy to get it online and also that there isn't as many shops that they can walk into and pick it up. (vicious circle anyone)? Also there is not as much disposable income anymore for stuff like music when the majority of the popular music buying public like to be spending money on expensive stuff like alchohol.

[jris]

LondonTom, on 05 January 2011 - 03:45 PM, said:

You should really have 1TB back up external around, if you can afford it go for it. Maybe even 2.

this is what CD's are for, backing up your music?

[ampersand]

Steve P, on 05 January 2011 - 06:16 PM, said:

If you've bought the cd the chances are you'll give it another try and may well discover that the album grows into something amazing. If it's something you download for free or listen to on spotify, what are the chances of you listening to it again?

yeah, that's something that i've lost on the whole. like coheed and cambrias new one. think i've listened to it twice and not arsed. but i would have been if i'd spent 8 quid on it.

but give me my current situation than spunking 8 quid a pop on a cd.

[ampersand]

MilkyJoe, on 05 January 2011 - 05:19 PM, said:

1tb really isn't too much though. It doesn't matter how much you have now, you will inevitably fill it in the probably not too distant future. A few HD movies and it's gone. Also with a 1tb drive you will lose almost 100gb out of the box.

i've got a 300gb (298gb) harddrive, and i've got 164gb still free. and that's with 37 days worth of music which is a crazy amount for me! my hd movie downloads tend to be between 1.5 and 3gb which then find themselves onto a dvd and deleted as i can only play them that way as my computer is too shit to cope and they skip.

[jameshunt]

jris, on 05 January 2011 - 07:16 PM, said:

this is what CD's are for, backing up your music?

All my music is purchased on CDs (since the ex-wife stole and sold my 600+ vinyl collection many years ago).  Then I upload it to my computer for iTunes.  That disk has two backups as I wouldn't want to spend the 100+ hours re-encoding everything if/when I suffer a disk crash.

The advice about backups was mostly for the people who say they only ever download their music (be it legitimately or not), but is also applicable to people like me who have invested time in their computerised/ipodded copies of their legitimately purchased music collections.  But thanks for your sound advice.