What makes it interesting is it's Melbourne focus and interviews with shop owners including Polyester Records (who have just opened a second store in the CDB at 288 Flinders Lane) and Dragonfly Discs (who have recently closed) as well as various consumers who still buy, and prefer, CDs, even though they also own MP3 players and download music.
Polyester has seen no real difference in music sales since starting in 1999. They're more of a speciality shop who sell a lot of indie and left-field music, so I'm not surprised they're still doing OK. Their store is aiming directly at CD lovers. Fanatics.
Dragonfly discs were deep discount, selling discs between $10 and $15. The discs were often cheap imports, or the cheap, mass-market version of a disc that has since been re-released or remastered. When the quality of the physical product is reduced, they were more directly competing against other "deep discount" outlets, like downloading. At least in my head. I always walked in there thinking "why is this so cheap, is there another better version out there?"
I'd love to see some physical CD sales numbers from JB HiFi.
For the record, I still buy a lot of CDs. Probably 80% from JB HiFi (their physical stores and online store), the rest from various other online stores (picked purely because they stock the CD I want). Rarely I'll buy second hand from eBay or Dixon's Recycled. Very rarely from a specialty indie store like Polyester or Missing Link.
I listen to most of my music on an MP3 player on the way to and from work, and in my CD players (non-MP3) in the car and at home. I've been on the look out for an MP3 player capable of playing FLAC files (lossless compression standard). iRiver's latest models appear to do what I want.
I would probably buy a lot more digital singles if you could buy it in lossless format. I have in the past been very tempted to subscribe to eMusic.
I've always thought I was a freak for still buying so much music. You read today that hardly anyone buys CDs anymore. And it's not like I throw my money around... I'm a pretty massive tight-wad.
Do you still buy CDs? Did you?