A few years ago, the world was still alright. We had CDs as storage media for our tango music. Now, a worrying development is underway that may revolutionize our music world and potentially even endanger our music infrastructure. Let’s look at the facts first:
When CD-ROMs became commercially available in the early 1980s, it was a significant step towards high-quality recorded music. I remember my first Sony CD player and my first music CDs: Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Ravel’s L’Arlésienne Suites. The sound was fantastic, no crackling like vinyl, no hiss like tape recordings.
The CD technology is based on a spiral track from the inside out, with pits and lands, on a polycarbonate disc, which is scanned by a laser (780 nm). The music is encoded at a data transfer rate of 176.4 kB/s and later read out at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. This places the upper frequency limit at 20 kHz [1]. From around 1983, CD sales increased compared to vinyl records. CD sales peaked around 2003. Sales in the USA stagnated in the following years. The decline to date is shown in Figure 1. In 2023, CD sales fell below vinyl record sales, which are now experiencing a resurgence. Figure 2 shows the situation in South American music, where CD sales account for only 0.5% of the market.
The reasons for this decline lie in the availability of online music for the mobile phone generation and the availability of easily copyable and storable music files (e.g. in MP3 encoded file format).
Availability of CD/DVD media readers
Internal CD/DVD drives are still offered by manufacturers, but no longer exclusively. Currently (March 2024), one of the largest manufacturers offers a ratio of 21 models with a CD/DVD burner to 88 models without an optical drive [2]. Optical drives for upgrading desktop PCs are still readily available. The situation is quite different for notebooks and laptops, which are now generally produced in such a thin form that they no longer come equipped with drives. However, individual devices can still be found [3]. However, for the vast majority of modern laptops, external drives that connect via USB are available and are the models of choice [4].
Conclusion
The discerning reader may recognize a trend in the spirit of the times here. On the one hand, there is less and less music on CD (we won’t even consider DVDs/Blu-rays for this discussion), and on the other hand, playback devices are becoming increasingly scarce. This particularly affects those of us tango DJs who are new to the scene. Roughly speaking, the average DJ has access to at least 2-5 CDs from around 20 orchestras of the EDO (i.e., 40-100 CDs) to have a basic collection of tracks for putting together a milonga. However, most milongas are usually played with digital tracks, so an aspiring tango DJ needs a way to rip tracks from CDs. For this target group, things will become increasingly difficult in the coming years.
A first piece of advice would therefore be to keep an internal or external CD drive on hand as a backup for later use. It won’t hurt, especially since you can buy an external drive for 20-50 euros. Furthermore, you should take advantage of the fact that tango CDs are still readily available and also appear on the used market. This is particularly true because meticulously restored music from small labels is still being offered and will likely continue to be released on CD for the foreseeable future. As a tango DJ, it is one of my priorities to ensure the release of high-quality, digitally restored recordings from shellac records. We can only guarantee this if we support such small labels.
Music streaming services are of no help to us; while they interestingly offer some tango tracks occasionally, they’re unsuitable for the live setting of a milonga. Video streamers like YouTube offer a wide selection, but only in limited quality and only online. Software solutions that can extract the music from these videos are questionable in terms of copyright and don’t solve the quality problem.
Alternatively, it remains to be seen whether distributors of tango music will sell it pre-digitized as compressed files. Specialist retailers in German-speaking countries already working with this model (such as Tangotunes) can easily be found online [5]. These distribution models offer a future-oriented technology that is useful to the tango community and provides a safe and high-quality alternative to hard-to-find or illegal sources.
Nevertheless, I have a brand new CD/DVD drive ready in my cupboard, just in case..
literature
- http://www.elektronikinfo.de/audio/cd.htm
- https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/sr/desktops/cd-dvd-burner?appliedRefinements=38802
- https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/laptops-with-cd-dvd-drives
- https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-external-blu-ray-drive/
- https://tangotunes.com/de/