BigShinyThing

Speaking at the London Business School last week, EMI Music Chairman and Chief Executive Alain Levy said that as far as EMI is concerned, the music CD is dead — and that from next year, all new EMI CDs will include ‘extra material’ to entice customers to purchase disks rather than download.

CD sales still accounted for more than 70% of total music sales in the first half of 2006, with digital music sales contributing about 11% of the total, according to music industry trade body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. CD sales were worth $6.45 billion and digital sales $945 million, the IFPI said.

We’re not exactly holding our breath to see what that ‘extra content’ might offer — the ‘lost third hour’ or Fleetwood Mac’s double album Tusk, maybe? Alternate takes of famous 70s prog drum solos? Not interested. We’re amongst the claimed 60% of CD buyers who rip our music straight onto hard disk, but we’re still exclusively CD shoppers for one very specific reason — those silly little silver disks in their crappy brittle ‘jewel cases’ are still virtually the only way to purchase un-DRMed, uncompressed digital audio, and until that changes, neither will we.

It’s been a long long time, though, since we darkened the doors of a highstreet music chain — we might still be buying 20th century media, but it’s mostly from online stores, be they Amazon or the lovely (and newly virtual) Smallfish.

[Via Marketwatch]

UPDATE: The NME has announced that ‘CD will be dead in 5 years’. A new survey is predicting that CDs will die within the next five years:

The report, compiled by former NME writer Johnny Davis, found that up to six out of 10 under 24-year-olds believe physical formats will decline as people turn to digital methods. According to the survey, published by mobile phone nextwork 3, 85 per cent of under 24s believe that downloading music can help save the planet by reducing the amount of packaging, waste, and carbon emissions involved in producing and transporting CDs to shops