lwhy?

I have been car shopping recently and discovered that Chevrolet no longer installs CD players in their new vehicles. I bought a 2017 Nissan Altima that still has a CD player installed, but the 2017 Chevrolet Equinox that my sister bought didn't have one. She still listens to a lot of CDs and she almost didn't buy it when she found out it didn't come with a CD player installed. My old car was a 2008 Chevy Malibu and I burned podcasts to CDs to listen to them while I drive. It was frustrating though since I was limited to 79 minutes and 55 seconds of content. My new car has a CD player, Bluetooth, a USB port, and an Auxiliary cable to use to play music with. I have now started downloading podcasts on a Flash Drive and playing them via the USB port.

Obi-Wanma

My car is a 2015 and it doesn't have a CD player either. I ripped all my CD's and put them on a thumb drive and I have my entire collection at my fingertips. Yeah, it was kind of a pain to do that all at once, but I would never go back to CD's in my car.

fumanstan

My 2017 Mazda CX-5 doesn't have a CD player (although apparently the Japanese version still has it). I thought I would miss it, but I either listen to XM radio, stream from my phone via Bluetooth, or use a USB thumb drive.

zyzzle

Hey, I'm complaining more about the lowering of the bar that streaming involves rather than the intentional blaming of the technology. Streaming would be really quite viable *if all the companies offered either uncompressed-16 bit, DRM-free .WAV audio or lossless .FLACs. But they do not. That a hard fact. 99% of music streaming is compressed mp3 or aac at garbage bitrates. This is "intentional" by the RIAA and streaming services, in order that they might save those extra pennies in bandwidth costs, all while charging the same or MORE for each song downloaded, as the equivalent CD cost per track.

Streaming has the potential to be *much better* than CDs, since 10000s of songs could be at our fingertips. But, fideltity has been made to artificially suffer in that construct because of corporate greed and niggardliness.

The argument that 16-bit .FLACS are bandwidth heavy no longer holds water when 50-100mbps internet connections are common, and a full CD uncompressed can be downloaded in only a minute or two at those speeds. It's infuriating, but an intentional conditioning of the masses to lower the bar in audio fidelity.

PhantomStranger

Yes, supposedly they will still offer online sales.

PhantomStranger

It's actually worse than simply missing a CD player on some of the newest cars. Many manufacturers now have consoles and dashes that make it very difficult to install an aftermarket CD player at all. In some new makes you literally have to install the CD player in the glove compartment to fit it.

New Hondas are fairly hostile to installing CD players in them.

rwsharpjr

The article I read said it was due to their CD sales dipping to $40 million last year.

I wonder how they plan to use the same space to generate OVER 40 million dollars in a year?

Michael Corvin

More toys to life figures? But great point. $40m is $40m.

Joking aside, CDs are clearly dying and if Best Buy doesn't adapt they become Circuit City or Sears.

big e

My car doesn't have a CD player and I still buy CDs; I just rip them to my computer, then sync the albums to my iPhone. IMO, it's way more convenient having fifteen digital albums sitting on my phone, than having to deal with swapping discs in and out of a player. When I rip the album, I do a one-to-one copy, so what's sitting on my phone is an exact copy of what was on the CD.

Obi-Wanma

I got a free copy of Metallica's newest CD nearly a year ago, and I still can't be bothered to rip it. I put all my music on a 32 GB thumb drive that pretty much stays in my car all the time unless I'm adding new music to it.

rwsharpjr

If I'm not mistaken, they do minimal maintenance, and vendor partners do the heavy lifting when it comes to organizing/stocking/merchandising the CDs, but my point was made. To me, $40 million is $40 million in today's retail landscape.

Mikael79

I think it's part cost-savings, but also due to the fact that a good amount of customers don't know any better or care. If you sample 10 people, you may likely get a full 10 who wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and that's just a sad fact. People care so much about 4K UHD TVs, but then they use the built-in speakers instead of investing in the audio experience.

Adam Tyner

I bought Partner's "In Search of Lost Time" from the website a few months back, but that's the only CD I've bought from Best Buy in years and years.

I guess the last album I bought for myself at a B&M would be Chvrches' "Every Open Eye" since Target had a couple exclusive bonus tracks. No idea what it would've been before that.

My CDs nowadays are probably a mix of amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com (when there's a coupon), eBay, or directly from a label/artist.

Obi-Wanma

The last CD I bought from Best Buy was probably Chinese Democracy, because that was the only place to buy it. And I bought it for like 5 bucks when they were clearancing them out.

davidh777

After the CD player died in the wife's car, I got her an ipod nano (yes, they still exist!)--easy navigation for albums, playlists, etc.

BobO'Link

Same here - I complained to both the dealership and manufacturer about that! It took 6 months for me to rip most of my collection to flac files. I must admit, it's far more convenient for the car, and that CD stays home, but it was a royal pain getting everything ripped properly. And the car player still won't play them seamless when tracks crossfade, etc. in spite of them being flac files! That meant additional special measures to keep such tracks properly intact for the car.
All? Wow... mine currently require over 300GB of space and I still purchase one or two CDs per month (I have a dozen or so waiting to be ripped right now). I don't even know if my car will handle a drive that large.

Even though I've not purchased a CD from BB in a very long time, this doesn't bode well for local distribution. WM has been a joke for a very long time, partly due to censorship but also selection, so this'll leave Target as the only viable local option (we have a Barns and Noble but the selection isn't that good). All the mom & pop "record" shops here closed years ago and Hasting shuttering last year was a major hit.

randian

Sad really. Loudness war, what's that?

randian

16/44? The last couple of years I've been buying almost all of my music in 24/96 or better.

Obi-Wanma

It's fine for me. I have a few hundred CD's, most of that was ripped and stored on the thumb drive. The vast majority of my collection was acquired in my teens and twenties. Now I probably buy less than 5 albums a year.

There's 3 thousand or so some odd songs on my thumb drive. My best friend thinks that's crazy. He has probably less than 300 songs on his.

rjh_54

I have a 2016 car and surprisingly it has a CD player. It also has a hard drive which allows me to rip CDs onto it if I want to, but I'm also able to connect my phone via Bluetooth so I rarely use that feature, save for when I rip Target exclusive CDs for bonus tracks that aren't on Spotify and things of that nature.

As far as my local options, I'm afraid I really won't have many once BB and Target stop selling CDs. Of course, there's a Walmart near me, but they rarely ever have anything on sale so I'd be better off ordering from Amazon if Walmart is too expensive. It's funny, today I was thinking about going to pick up a certain CD and thought about Best Buy. The only reason I'm going there is because I have a Reward Zone certificate, but once that is used I am done giving them my business. Same goes for Target - so it looks like it'll be all Walmart from now on if I really want to buy locally. The two Barnes & Noble near me have no CD or DVD/Blu section, so that's not an option, which is fine since they're a bit pricey anyway.

For older albums we have two local record shops but their CD selections remain limited and sometimes overpriced, but I don't mind paying a little more if it's from a small business. Other than that I have some thrift stores near me, but you can never go into one of those stores looking for anything specific.

clckworang

I still listen to CDs in my car on occasion, but I can't remember the last one I purchased. I used to be very active in the live show trading community, all shows legally traded and not official releases. I've amassed a great number of shows, but the problem with dealing with those tracks is that they are all given very generic track names, often not including any info like song name or artist, just a track number and maybe a date. Burned onto a CD, that doesn't matter, but trying to add them to a mp3 player would be an organizational nightmare. I know I will likely be looking for a new car in the next couple of years, and I fear not having that CD option.

As much as a movie collector as I am now, I was once a CD collector. I live in a small town that's geographically isolated. Locally, I only had Camelot Music and Musicland at the mall from which to choose, aside from places like Wal-Mart that typically didn't have the type of music I was looking for. Best Buy was about an hour drive from where I lived, but it was like an oasis. They always had a good selection and good prices. I loved going through the rows of CDs to see all they had, coming across unexpected treasures. My nearest Best Buy has already been reduced to one small row of music. It's a shame to see all that ending, sort of an end of an era, but I suppose it was inevitable.

rjh_54

The problem with my car is the interface is a little bit older, so although I can stream from my phone, it doesn't display the library up on the screen in my car, so if I want to select a different album or playlist I have to do it from my phone. Because of this I have to queue songs if I know what I want to listen to, otherwise I just use CDs - I find it much easier to just swap out a disc as opposed to having to pick up the phone, unlock it and scroll to where I want to get to - which I obviously couldn't even do if I was driving.

I also miss Best Buy's heyday when they had tons of rows of CDs. I always found so many good titles and even a few imports that were otherwise hard to find for a reasonable price.

clckworang

All I have in my car is an auxiliary input, which actually doesn't work anymore. I don't even keep music on my phone much less have anywhere near my catalog. If I could just use a thumb drive to scroll through bunches of folders in my car, I'd probably listen to more music. As it is, I mainly listen to NPR now. I think that's a sure sign I'm getting old.

rjh_54

That's my other issue too, I have hundreds upon hundreds of CDs, but I don't have the time to sit there and search Spotify for everything I have on disc. Back before I had the car with the Bluetooth or aux, I would just grab whatever CD I was in the mood to listen to and I'd be good to go. On top of that, Spotify has a limit on how many songs you can save to your library - even for Premium users - so even if I had the time to search for and save everything I own, I wouldn't be able to.

Randy Miller III

I still buy CDs somewhat regularly, but rarely listen to them anywhere but in the car. It's still nice to have a relatively high quality copy -- they've always seemed like a comfortable middle ground between quality (vinyl) and convenience (mp3s). I think what killed the market for them was a stauch refusal to drop prices on new and catalog releases: new releases were $15 or so 20 years ago, and they're still nearly that expensive in stores now. Absolutely NO single-disc new release should be more than $10 ever, and catalog stuff should be $5 at the most.