Analyst: Target should drop CDs

[GA Russell]

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a front page article about Target Stores, which did poorly last year.  

It said that John Zolidis, an analyst at Buckingham Research Group, wrote in a research note this week that Target needs to exit underperforming categories like CDs, DVDs and other media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/target-offers-downbeat-2017-outlook-as-sales-fall-1488284262

[John L]

It makes sense.  The CD age is over.  Maybe there is still a place for certain specialized labels that cater to collectors, i.e. Mosaic, Bear Family.  But this is not the way that pop music gets to a mass audience any more, period.  Young people do not even own CD players for the most part.

[medjuck]

Do new cars come with cd players? 

[Brad]

Yes and I wouldn't buy one that didn't have one.  Truth be told that's where I do most of my listening. 

[JohnS]

I understand that some new cars only have a USB socket.

[David Ayers]

Remember that they continued to fit cassette players alongside CD for many years. The CD player is gone from new designs now. 

[Scott Dolan]

4 hours ago, Brad said:

Yes and I wouldn't buy one that didn't have one.  Truth be told that's where I do most of my listening. 

Actually, many new cars do not come with CD players. You can get them as an option, but they aren't standard issue like they once were. 

[Brad]

I'm in the market for a new car and although i haven't test driven any yet, that is not what I'm seeing.  At any rate, I wouldn't buy a car without one. 

[Brad]

Well, I stand partially corrected. I was looking at the CR V since we want to downsize from what we have (Acura MDX) and the CR V doesn't have a CD player so that's off the list.  Also taking a look at the Outback and it comes with a CD player.  A CD player is one of my must haves. 

Edited March 3, 2017 by Brad

[alankin]

Ford is reportedly doing away with CD players in future models.   Bah.

[Scott Dolan]

3 hours ago, Brad said:

Well, I stand partially corrected. I was looking at the CR V since we want to downsize from what we have (Acura MDX) and the CR V doesn't have a CD player so that's off the list.  Also taking a look at the Outback and it comes with a CD player.  A CD player is one of my must haves. 

You might want to find new avenues in the future, though. Nearly one quarter of all new cars do not come with CD players. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2015-11-06/a-relic-is-disappearing-finally-from-car-dashboards-in-america

Most, including myself, find them inconvenient in the age of Bluetooth. Just put your music on your phone and play it through your car stereo. Why have to fiddle around with CDs? 

[catesta]

Yeah, that sliding a CD in is such a pain in the ass.

I recently purchased a vehicle that does not have a CD player. I had no idea until it was only available as an option until it was too late and it's a big disappointment. I will not make that mistake again. My wife's car on the other hand has 6 disc capacity.

The funny thing about that article is the guy from Scion talking about the future, meanwhile the CD player outlived the Scion brand.

 

[Rooster_Ties]

1 hour ago, Scott Dolan said:

Just put your music on your phone and play it through your car stereo. Why have to fiddle around with CDs? 

When you own 3,000+ CD's, and an iPhone 5 (with only 16GB memory), it's a pain in the ass to have to upload and delete albums in order to listen to them in your car.  With the other apps on my phone, I can only hold about 10 albums (at most), so in order to give up CD's in the car -- I'd have to constantly delete albums from my phone, and re-upload new ones weekly.

Kind of helps that I don't even own a car any more, granted, but when my wife and I rent Zip cars for the weekend -- if they don't have a CD player, I'm pretty much limited to listening to Pandora (as I normally pack about 32 CD's for every trip, in one of those CD flip-binder things).  No way my phone can hold 32 CD's of music, though (or not without deleting a ton of apps and photos).

[Scott Dolan]

If you can only hold 10 albums on an iPhone 5, you are doing it wrong. Really, really wrong. 

16GB is capable of holding around 200 albums at 256K. If all those apps are that vital, you can still delete them and download them over cellular if needed. 

Either way, you should be able to fit a LOT more than 10 albums on your phone. 

catesta, I have about 80 albums on my phone. Do you have 80 CDs in your car? Trying to argue that playing music via Bluetooth isn't far more convenient than CDs is just lunacy. 

[JSngry]

Target should take the counter-intuitive approach and start selling after-market car stereo systems with all kinds of CD players. But not CDs, nobody buys those anymore.

However - playing a CD in the car is a lot easier for me than playing music off the phone. It takes more looking at the phone than is comfortable for me, and the whole voice-command thing is a little too I Dream Of Jeannie-ish for my sexual morals. Then again, I'm one of those old fucks who still doesn't like talking on the phone while driving.

My preferences are no doubt antiquarian and doomed to extinction, but my driving habits will more than make up for that, unless some maniac runs me over in a Target parking lot while trying to get their phone to go into the slot of the CD player they just got installed there because, you know, Target don't sell CDs, just the players, and all the kids are like, hey, this vinyl and turntable shit is soooo 2010-ish, old CDs in cars are the REAL thing.

Past that, I can't recall the last time I bought anything at a Target that didn't involve an OH SHIT WE GOT TO GET A GIFT FOR _____ .... LOOK, THERE'S A TARGET. They lost me when they started selling groceries. I mean, I buy pork chops at one place, a cute little combination alarm clock/tea kettle at another. But not both at the same place, that's just TOO weird.

[Dmitry]

I've never been to a Target store.

 

 

[Scott Dolan]

52 minutes ago, JSngry said:

 

However - playing a CD in the car is a lot easier for me than playing music off the phone. It takes more looking at the phone than is comfortable for me, and the whole voice-command thing is a little too I Dream Of Jeannie-ish for my sexual morals.

 

You can set up as many albums as you want to play before even starting the car. Then you don't have to mess with anything. Next time you have to look at your phone is when you go to grab it before you get out of the car. But hey, I'm not going to stand in the way of your Luddism. I'm just saying...

Now, if you have a 200 disc-changer in your trunk, I suppose you could pull off the same feat that you could with your phone. But guess which one is easier to load/unload? 

48 minutes ago, Dmitry said:

I've never been to a Target store.

 

 

You're not missing anything...

[JSngry]

One man's Luddism is another man's making changes on the fly.

 

[Rooster_Ties]

1 hour ago, Scott Dolan said:

If you can only hold 10 albums on an iPhone 5, you are doing it wrong. Really, really wrong. 

16GB is capable of holding around 200 albums at 256K. If all those apps are that vital, you can still delete them and download them over cellular if needed. 

Either way, you should be able to fit a LOT more than 10 albums on your phone.

The Music on my phone currently is about 903 MB (only 8 albums).  When I first got the phone several years ago, I loaded about 20 albums on it, but over time, I kept getting closer to running out of memory (so I'd just delete a couple albums, and/or a few apps).  Right now, the top 10 apps on my phone (by size), are...

1. Photos/Camera - 2.66 GB
2. Music - 903 MB
3. Weather (Channel app) - 577 MB
4. Mail - 445 MB
5. Google - 362 MB
6. Messages (text messages) - 308 MB
7. NPR App - 164 MB
8. Google Maps - 139 MB
9. Pandora - 132 MB
10. Yelp - 124 MB

And I've got another 20 (or so) other apps on the phone (but only 9 of them are over 50 MB) -- but I do really use most of them a fair bit.

I know too many photos is a big part of the memory issue, and I try and go through and delete stuff I don't need, but I really need to figure out what (if anything) I want to do with them, other than just keep them on my phone.  Maybe I should try and get more iCloud storage, I guess (I've gotten messages forever telling me to upgrade to more iPhone storage, which I presume entails some monthly fee).  But I'm not so thrilled about storing that stuff out in the stratosphere (not that I care if anyone sees any of them, but it's more like out of sight, out of mind, but then if they disappear, it could be months before I even knew they were gone).

When I first started with the phone, I did upload different CD's to the phone, but then I always had to delete them from my phone (to upload others). But then I also had to delete them from iTunes (on my laptop), because I had to limit what I kept in iTunes on my laptop (or else it would all get bigger than what I could upload to my phone).  Frickin' pain in the ass, all of it, if you ask me -- which is probably why I haven't bothered trying to reinstall iTunes on the new laptop we got a couple years ago (when our harddrive and motherboard died/got fried).

I guess I'm a bit of a technophobe, but really, the amount of energy and time it takes to mess with this stuff just isn't worth it to me.  Which is why I'd much rather have 3,000+ CD's, than have to worry about trying to store stuff on a hard drive, and somehow keep it all backed up (and not ever lose any data), over multiple technology changes over the next 30-40 years (or whenever I shuffle off this mortal coil).

Edited March 3, 2017 by Rooster_Ties

[Scott Dolan]

Have you ever restored your phone? Based on your top ten apps, you should have a shitload of room left! You're only showing less than 6GB being used. Which tells me you've got a TON of garbage built up. 

[rostasi]

Used to look forward to buying ice cream at Target - their own special brand,
but soon Kroger took the same design and flavors and even expanded on it
so I hardly go there anymore. Never bought any discs there.

As I mentioned in another thread, I was surprised the last time I rented a car
and there was no CD player (and the young girl who checked the car back in
with the puzzled look after I mentioned my surprise), but now I'm expecting this
to be the case when I rent for the Big Ears Fest. Still, I'll take along 10 discs just
in case. No phone, so I'm hoping an iPod filled with over 12,000 tunes will be just fine.

[Dmitry]

4 hours ago, catesta said:

Yeah, that sliding a CD in is such a pain in the ass.

I recently purchased a vehicle that does not have a CD player. I had no idea until it was only available as an option until it was too late and it's a big disappointment. I will not make that mistake again. My wife's car on the other hand has 6 disc capacity.

The funny thing about that article is the guy from Scion talking about the future, meanwhile the CD player outlived the Scion brand.

 

Chris, I got to agree with Dolan 100% here. BT is so much easier to use in the car than cds, it's not even funny. I've resisted for a while, like some of you, but I'm a 100% BT convert now. Nothing like it for listening to whatever your mind feels like, on the fly. I've got Amazon Prime membership, which includes Amazon Music with streaming of pretty much anything your heart desires.

Amos Milburn - no problem. Andrew Hill - there you go. Trane - complete Atlantic Heavyweight Champion set at tour fingertips. It's amazing. No way I'm bringing cds in the car any more. My discs always get scratched, cases get cracked, beverages spill on them. I don't need the aggravation. 

[Scott Dolan]

I'm going to invest in Bluetooth earbuds soon, as well. And here I was not so long ago raising hell because the iPhone 7 didn't come with a headphone jack...

So I can understand the technophobe angle. But these advances don't grow in popularity because they're an inconvenience. 

[Rooster_Ties]

2 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

Have you ever restored your phone? Based on your top ten apps, you should have a shitload of room left! You're only showing less than 6GB being used. Which tells me you've got a TON of garbage built up. 

Can't say I have (ever restored my phone).  I presume means going back to the original 'fresh from the factory' state.  I'm assuming I'd have to re-download all my apps (write them all down, and search and reinstall all 30 of them).  I assume(?) that would also mean wiping all the photos I have on it (which I really hadn't wanted to do), unless I paid more for iCloud storage.

I kind of figured I'd upgrade to a new phone in a couple more years (when they hopefully brought back the earphone jack, knock on wood), and I'd be sure to get more memory this time (like 32 or 64 GB).

My experience with this iPhone hasn't been bad, but it's getting more sluggish and/or locking up more and more (so my opinion on it is starting to shift).  And the top 'reset' button stopped working a couple weeks ago (just completely stopped), which has kind of been a pain - but I have to just let it timeout to let the screen go dim again.

[sidewinder]

16 hours ago, John L said:

It makes sense.  The CD age is over.  Maybe there is still a place for certain specialized labels that cater to collectors, i.e. Mosaic, Bear Family.  But this is not the way that pop music gets to a mass audience any more, period.  Young people do not even own CD players for the most part.

Ironically, I find myself playing more CDs than LPs these days ! Having upgraded the CD source, the playback is sometimes comparable to or better than vinyl, something I wouldn't have anticipated 5 years ago. For Mosaics, I'm a pretty happy camper with the CD sets these days.

CDs - the new vinyl !