Linn sounds death knell of CDs

Linn in a shocking announcement on Friday said it would stop making players and concentrate on digital products from 2010.

Linn said in 2009 it saw sale of digital products sweep past that of CD players and felt CD sales will fall further as digital streaming music service gains ground.

According to Gilad Tiefenbrun, managing director, Linn Products, the company's DS "streaming players," a hard-disc-based device that can that can encode, store and play CD tracks at will are registering strong sales despite being slow in taking off. "But sales of CD players have declined 40 percent year-on-year, while streaming players now make up 30 percent of our total business. It's unprecedented growth," Tiefenbrun said.

According to Tiefenbrun, CD players as well as CDs may have well reached the end of their purposeful existence and their death are being hastened by streaming players and digital streaming music service. "You can get more by ripping a CD to a hard drive and then streaming it from a Linn DS. And the streaming player doesn't have the moving parts, the lasers and gubbins that a CD player does," he said.

Besides, a CD recorded onto a hard disk can achieve a higher playback quality than one played on a CD player.

Moreover, streaming players have longer life-span as "the hard drive isn't in the 'listening chain' and you can get a stand-alone backup hard drive that can store all your tracks uncompressed for a couple of hundred quid which can hold 10 to 20,000 tracks," Tiefenbrun added.

Agrees Ivor Tiefenbrun, founder, Linn Products. "People are not buying new CD players. The success of the iPod means people are used to downloading music," he said.

The British Phonographic Industry trade body also claims that 2009 is set to be a record year for single and individual track sales.

Of the more than 117 million tracks had been bought by the end of October, before the holiday season has even begun, 99 percent were legal digital downloads.

However, album sales tell a different story.

In 2008, there were 137 million album sales, comprising of 123 million CDs, 10.3 million digital downloads, while vinyl records, cassettes and other formats accounted for around 300,000.

In 2007, out of 138 million sales, 131 million were CDs and 6.2 million were digital.

And, just two years ago, CD sales dominated album sales, accounting for 151 million sales out of 154 million while digital downloads accounted for 2.7 million sales.

In other words, though for albums, CD sales are still the preferred option, yet, their market share is clearly slumping.

Ironically, however, vinyl records, which were replaced by cassette tapes and ultimately by CDs, might actually outlive its upstart successors even in the era of digital downloads as many top DJs prefer records, because of the flexibility of the format for mixing, while audiophiles enjoy its 'warm' higher quality of sound compression.

No wonder, Linn Products, whose top systems cost more than £100,000, is continuing to make turntables.