Greetings Readers!

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how CD sales are down and Walmart is reducing the floor space it gives the CD.  Clearly, the fools at Sony don’t agree with my assessment of the CD and its impending death.  Sony has now announced a new CD format, Blu-spec CD.  This format is going to be dead before it even has a chance.

The new format is said to be backwards compatible with current CD players, so you will be able to play the blu-spec CDs in the CD players you already have, but what is the point?  Are people really going to pay the higher cost of a new format when what they have works just fine and can play the same music, often at a better quality than the digital music that many people listen to now?  Sony touts the new Blu-spec CD players will eliminate vibration and therefor make music quality better.  When people are generally satisfied with compressed mp3 quality audio, do we really need something better than existing CD quality?  I don’t think so.

No prices have been announced for the music or the new players, although 60 titles will be available by Christmas.  I certainly don’t expect the prices to be cheap.  Prices for new formats never are.  The new technology will use the same Blue Laser Diode as Blu-ray, so from that alone, you can assume it will be quite expensive, especially when Blu-ray players are still running in the hundreds of dollars.  With consumers moving in mass to digital downloads for their music, spending a large chunk of money on the new format of a dying medium makes no sense.  Somebody needs to relay this message to Sony so that they stop wasting money trying to develop these formats, only to have them die right out of the gate.

While I will always love the CD and listen to it every time I am in my car, with sales down around 23% this quarter, it is not worth investing in a new format when the existing format is quickly dying out to something far more convenient.  Sony would be better off to create their own store to compete with iTunes and others in the digital download space rather than to create a whole new format that is truly unnecessary.

The world is moving to digital downloads Sony, get on board and stop trying to keep the past alive!