Arts & Culture
If we are to believe the Wikipedia crowd, the word gimmick has roots that are … somewhat less than noble. “According to the OED,” writes, uh, someone, “the word … first [appeared] in 1926, defined in the Wise-Crack Dictionary by Main and Grant as ‘a device used for making a fair game crooked.’” And if we trust team Wiki, then it seems that the term has made very little progress: “In marketing,” it continues, “product gimmicks are sometimes considered mere novelties, and not really that relevant to the product’s functioning, sometimes even earning negative connotations.”
So, as gimmicks go, the one recently announced by Motormouth Media on behalf of the band HEALTH is relatively harmless. For those not willing to click, it goes something like this: Band makes colored tickets. Band distributes CDs with the colored tickets hidden in a select few jewel cases. Lucky buyers of said CDs get neat-o prizes. It’s all so very wholesome. ‘Course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something sinister lurking behind the giveaway — at least if you’re a band or a label or anyone else in the CD-buying food chain. For these lucky chumps, the HEALTH “CD Sweepstakes” signals a dark turn indeed, one which has been coming in the object of slumping CD sales for quite some time but needed something of an announcement before it got here. And this sort of incentivized buying would be it. This, finally, is the formal end of the age of CDs.
Way back in 2006, blogger Jabari Zakiya had what he calls an “epiphany.” “It became clear,” he writes, while he was contemplating the usefulness of flash drives. “[T]he end of CDs is near … And when I say CD I don’t just mean regular old 700 MB compact disks, I also mean DVDs, and the new Blue-ray and HD DVDs optical disks too. In fact, I see a world in the near future (5 years?) where, like the floppy, optical disks will take their place in the trash bin of yesterdays technology.”
His reasoning is relatively sound: “[F]or all the benefits optical disk storage brought,” he writes “there was an Achilles heel inherent in their use — they require a mechanical optical drive to play them with. And being mechanical beasts, by nature, they are subject to all the inherent negative aspects of such things (size, weight, fragility, etc).” Basically, the things were bound to be made unwieldy by future technologies, and they would, eventually, as he terms it, go the way of the floppy disc.
Zakiya’s post is something of a well-duh — at least in terms of technical advancement; innovation happens, popular modes of … well, everything, are replaced by more effective means. But for the music industry, where CDs represented the major means of product distribution, the technical trump didn’t just signal some kind of evolution. Nope, the end of CDs was, instead, brought on by a total re-wiring of the media acquisition process — an effort which was a giant work around of the exchange of money for music. Not only would the CD become obsolete, but the whole industry that relied on it for delivery of their product was also threatened with extinction.
Thanks to another innovation, the music industry averted crisis and has started to right the ship — without CDs. And that brings us back to the HEALTH gimmick: Faced with the prospect of having to sling a product that no one really wants, someone came up with the brilliant idea of making the things into sweepstakes entry tickets. Whether or not anyone really wants to win an “LP test pressing autographed in [members of the band's own] blood” is something of a crapshoot. But at least it’s not selling CDs.
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While I agree that CDs are now artifacts, that doesn’t make them any less useful. At some point people are going to realize that standard quality mp3s are pretty poor quality on the digital scale. mp3s compress while CDs do not, and for that reason alone they will be in demand as a source of high-quality recordings for future generations. As repeated downloads and uploads take their toll on mp3 files I fully expect to hear from DJs looking for a decent copy of my minimalist techno CDs. Bottom line: I agree the medium is dead, but don’t sell those Autechre CDs just yet.
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