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Despite the many predictions that CDs will soon disappear and be replaced by fully digital distribution, I’ve always thought that they would rather be displaced toward a “high-end product” niche. That is, mp3 is for the music you just like and listen to casually, but for bands and artists you really care about, you’ll gladly purchase a CD.

Back when the CDs first appeared, I was still mostly using audio tapes for stuff I didn’t really value but was interested in nonetheless. Then CDs became much more common, all stores started to have bargain bins, and lending CDs from friends or a library replaced the tape. Then came CD burners. And finally mp3s. Nowadays if someone tells me about this band he’s just discovered, the band’s name is usually enough for me to find out what he’s talking about.

So, it seems a study has somewhat confirmed my intuition. It’s surprising that a study commissioned by the British recording industry (British Music Rights) would reach conclusions which are (apparently) not totally biased.

Among other findings, 80% of the youngsters they polled claimed they would pay for “a legal subscription-based music service that would allow them to discover, swap and recommend music”. May be there’s room for this kind of service after all. While I still believe Jobs got it right when he said that people don’t want to rent their music, there could be a “don’t care so much about it” space where renting would be good enough. Time will tell…

With the flurry of ground-shaking news rocking that darn old music industry which we all love to hate, predictions of impending doom abound.

I beg to differ.

Not that I think that Radiohead’s last stunt won’t have lasting consequences, no doubt it will, even more now as it seems they won their bet. But two things come to mind :

First, where have I already heard this story about an age-old Big Bad Industry being destroyed by the Good Guys ? Mmmh, lemme’ think… Proprietary Software vs. Free/Open Source software ? Or was it Big Media vs. bloggers ? In both previous cases, initial enthusiasm (bordering zealotery) eventually settled into a less glamourous but more realistic outcome : a mix of the old establishment and the new stuff.

In both cases too, a few high-profile successes (Linux, Apache, the Rathergate) were seen as the general case while they were in fact the exception. The vast majority of free software projects are redundant or useless or both, and the vast majority of news-oriented blogs are, well, embarassments. Let’s hope the signal/noise ratio in the Musicians vs. Music Industry battle rates higher.

Second, as it’s currently turning out, the situation of each band having its own online music outlet isn’t at all appealing. As Michael Parekh notes, the last thing you want is having to go to a different site for every band which album you want to get (said site will of course be hammered down at each new release, if the band is successful enough). I believe that’s the reason why Radiohead’s last album was still “illegally” downloaded so much. Parekh’s other comments on the hassle of managing mp3 (raise your hands those who regularly do backups of their music library, and who know exactly what to do to keep it when they’ll upgrade their machine) and legal music downloads in general echo my doubts on whether the CD will actually ever disappear. Files are volatile, and music fans need to have a tangible object to link them to their favorite stars, something with a logo on, basically :-).

In any case, it sure will be interesting to follow, hard to predict which new business model will make a big enough dent in the current one (or may be displace it as the main one). A little surprise there, as it’s been reported that Universal Music is examining the possibility of an ISP file sharing tax. That would more or less be akin to the “licence globale” which unfortunately failed here in France, mainly thanks to the lobbying of… Universal.