Time Life Music

[kaysixteen]

So I just found out something last night that is sortta rocking my world.   I admit it, I am someone who has over the years actually bought several of the Time-Life CD compilations, the ones advertised on late nite infomercials (though usually I buy them from 3d party vendors via Amazon).   Since I work late, I am up til the wee hours and have watched the ubiquitous, and fairly entertaining, infomercials for years.   Then about two months ago, they seemed to go away.   And so I decided to log onto the TL site last night, and it has also gone bye-bye.   I did me a quick internet search that revealed the TL Wikipedia page, which did indeed confirm that the company has eliminated its music CD business, effective in March.   I confess to no longer owning my TL cds, largely because they do not age well, and nowadays I more or less just listen to Music Choice on cable tv, or youtube.   Am I old, or is the world passing out of the cd age?   And is the music that TL favored also increasingly becoming the new Swing?

[Parasaurolophus]

Most laptops no longer come with CD/DVD drives. So yeah, CDs are dying/dead. Unfortunately, streaming services pay artists virtually nothing.

Edit: For example, $0.09 per track purchased on iTunes goes to the artist vs. $0.53 for the label, and $0.00029 per play on Spotify goes to the artist vs. $0.0016 for the label. Streaming is where music is at right now, and it sucks for musicians.

[kaysixteen]

OK, but can't the musicians cut out labels and just produce and stream their stuff themselves?

[sinenomine]

I have hundreds of CDs and resist streaming (which is spotty in my area, anyway). Just did a road trip in my newer car, sans CD player, but I managed to link a wireless player to the car's Bluetooth so it played through the sound system. So I guess I'm a Luddite with some techie skills.

[Parasaurolophus]

OK, but can't the musicians cut out labels and just produce and stream their stuff themselves?

Sure. And the profit margins on that are much better (except, of course, that nobody buys CDs any more). But the problem is exposure and market share; the music market is streaming now, and so you need access to the streaming platforms (also radio, for those genres that get radio exposure). And your record label still controls access to that stuff. If you're a known quantity, you can sell your music directly to fans. A few big bands have done that with some albums. But if you're a nobody that most people haven't heard of, you're not gonna shift many CDs, so you have to cross your fingers and hope that enough people will discover you via streaming. That said, the real money for many (most?) bands comes from live gigs--although again, you do need to be able to draw crowds, which requires exposure.

[apl68]

I have hundreds of CDs and resist streaming (which is spotty in my area, anyway). Just did a road trip in my newer car, sans CD player, but I managed to link a wireless player to the car's Bluetooth so it played through the sound system. So I guess I'm a Luddite with some techie skills.

You can still get CD players, too, though they're not in my experience usually of more than adequate quality and durability (I still listen to CDs some too).  The format isn't dead.  I even saw a recent article that indicated that they'd had a modest uptick in sales recently, for the first time in a long, long while.

[Anselm]

Vinyl album sales surpassed CD sales this past year.  The cool kids collect vinyl.

[dismalist]

Both record players and cd players are made by a certain Japanese company. I have one of each and they are of high quality. I'm sure other companies make these, too, but I never investigated very thoroughly.

We just got too much good, irreplacable music on records and cd's. [Thus, not a sunk-cost fallacy. :-)] I could transfer all this music to hard drive, but there is no pressing need to.

[kaysixteen]

I am now using a cheapo Chinese-made CD player I bought in 2020.   It still works well enough, but is physically falling apart and will probably soon become useless.  One of the things that induced me to buy it then, after the CD player in my car (2007 Chevy) then, crapped out, and I did not want to pay for the mechanic to put in a new one, is that this portable CD player was supposed to have an internal rechargeable battery that would allow use in the car, placing it on the passenger seat.  It takes about an hour to recharge the batt, and it will play a CD for only about two hours before running out of juice, so I gave up tryin'. 

Sinenomine, how do you get those hundreds of CDs you have to play via Bluetooth in your car?

CDs physically do not last very long, esp if taken outside for use in cars.

If Musician X decides to produce and stream his own stuff, can't he sell access to it?  Obviously as stated here he will have to have a fan base willing to buy it, of course.

[sinenomine]

Sinenomine, how do you get those hundreds of CDs you have to play via Bluetooth in your car?

I used a portable wireless player (brand name Hott) that runs about ten hours on a charge; it syncs up to the car's Bluetooth to play through the speakers.

[AmLitHist]

K16, your post reminded me of my 5th/6th grade teacher many years ago, who subscribed to the Time-Life or similar series of music.  (It would have been on LPs, I think, or maybe cassettes?  Way before the advent of CDs!) If the class had "been good" that day/week, he'd spend the last hour of the day* letting us do our reading or other homework on Thursday or Friday afternoons listening to some of his music.

* This was WAY back in around 1970 or so, when our little rural school had just one teacher for each grade, who taught all the classes--no changing classrooms or teachers for us, until we went to town to high school! That made the chance to listen to records a special treat to break the monotony for all of us.  Good times (and I wonder how any of us managed to grow up to amount to anything, without all the specialization and enrichment that K-12 provides today?)!

Thanks for reminding me of that nice memory!

[apl68]

K16, your post reminded me of my 5th/6th grade teacher many years ago, who subscribed to the Time-Life or similar series of music.  (It would have been on LPs, I think, or maybe cassettes?  Way before the advent of CDs!) If the class had "been good" that day/week, he'd spend the last hour of the day* letting us do our reading or other homework on Thursday or Friday afternoons listening to some of his music.

* This was WAY back in around 1970 or so, when our little rural school had just one teacher for each grade, who taught all the classes--no changing classrooms or teachers for us, until we went to town to high school! That made the chance to listen to records a special treat to break the monotony for all of us.  Good times (and I wonder how any of us managed to grow up to amount to anything, without all the specialization and enrichment that K-12 provides today?)!

Thanks for reminding me of that nice memory!

You must be old enough to remember educational film strips that were synchronized with records for instruction, in the pre-video days.

I don't recall teachers bringing records of their own to school (Except a time or two around Christmas), but we did have a weekly music class in grade school.  The teacher had to push his grey, institutional-looking record turntable and stack of song books into each classroom on an AV cart.  He also took us to the cafeteria at least once to hear him use the school's upright piano, which was kept in the cafeteria because the grade school had no auditorium.  He was a cousin of my dad's, so I had to learn quickly to address him as "Mr.", instead of the more familiar first-name basis I'd already been taught.

[jimbogumbo]

Sinenomine, how do you get those hundreds of CDs you have to play via Bluetooth in your car?

I used a portable wireless player (brand name Hott) that runs about ten hours on a charge; it syncs up to the car's Bluetooth to play through the speakers.

They are sold at Walmart and Amazon. Here is a review of seven brands/models: https://www.lifewire.com/best-portable-cd-players-4160484

[Wahoo Redux]

And is the music that TL favored also increasingly becoming the new Swing?

It is more complicated than that.

My nephew, who is now 14, is really only interested in "rap" (although what he listens to is actually "hip hop," I believe), but he will grudgingly admit that his friends also listen to Led Zeppelin, Guns'n'Roses, AC/DC, Metallica, and all the loud old bands of yore.  I've force-fed him a bunch of these songs and he always likes them.  I think the easy access of YouTube, Spotify, Pandora and the other streaming services, which has all the stuff new and old (right now I am actually watching a Fleetwood Mac concert from '82 on YouTube that I remember seeing on TV when I was in high school) means that people's tastes are very eclectic these days.  When I taught pop culture, I'd ask students to bring in songs they felt were important, and it was a wide variety, including a great many non-mainstream and underground music as well as the oldies.  Students frequently arrive at school with Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd T-shirts, even the occasional Ramones garment.  Several students have commented on how much they liked the movie "The Dirt" based on the Motley Crue story.

I always took Rock much too seriously, as did my generation as a whole, and I find myself concerned that some of the great old artsy and punk bands----Blondie, Talking Heads, Dead Kennedys, Fleetwood Mac, and the Violent Fems----do not seem to have made the pantheon while sucky Bon Jovi and Drake still pollute the airwaves.