Why CD players so expensive when the fomat is dead

Robr45 - touche. Maybe sales of music on CD is not dead, just CD playback is. I am still on the fence regarding purchase of a used Rotel RCC 1055 in good condition, vs. spending a little more for the AE/DAC combo. I don't like being tied down to a laptop for playback, so the answer for me is probably to buy both! I still listen to my 15 year old Yami changer 3-4 times a week as I work at home in the evenings. I get nice, long, 1-2 hour listening sessions.

Worse than that, the practice of releasing collections of new songs by artists in album format may be on its deathbed also. Ipods, downloads and music servers seem to killing the album but pumping life into individual compositions.

I think a big part of the reason why CD sales are dwindling and individual track purchases are up is that there's a serious lack of new talent in the mainstream. A lot of people got fed up with buying an entire album for $10-$15 to get one or maybe two good songs at most. The days of mainstream musicians writing entire and complete albums are pretty much long gone.

We also haven't have a new wave of musicians who've changed everything for a long time. The last one IMO was the Seattle grunge movement.

There are still a lot of very good mainstream artists. Very few new ones IMO. And even fewer new ones who are putting together complete albums with very few if any fillers.

To add -

When was the last time MTV played music? "Music Television" used to be a huge driving force for mainstream music sales. It wa argued that MTV made Michael Jackson.

Where are the mojority of people getting their exposure to new music from? Radio stations are being hit pretty hard by the economic times. I live in the Metro NYC area. There's only about 3 radio stations I can tolerate anymore. Just about all of them that are in English play the same dozen songs over and over again, in between what it seems like more commercial time than music playing time.

I think the thing killing albums is simply competition. There are so many things competing for peoples leisure time these days, you have to have a very good album to warrant the time spent getting something out of it. Instant gratification man! I can download most any song on a whim these days, put it on my music server and listen to it as aI please along with everything else there. I listen a lot to my collection with the cuts randomly queued up on music server, 1 by 1, a lot these days. What a great way to discover new gems that might otherwise be overlooked. occasionally, I will still que up a CD in original track order or play a record (not many options there).