Classical music- do you think the labels are going all streaming?

[Electrostat]

I have been thinking about this for the last couple of years, the major labels have been making a huge dump of their back catalogs in these cheap box sets ranging from a few CDs to 100 plus. To me this seems like one last ditch effort to make some money off their back catalog before going entirely streaming and leaving this music out of print on CD. I am particularly noticing this with Sony's box sets, they stay in print for 2 or 3 years and then they're out of print, once the distributors/retailers run out they do not repress them.

I personally prefer having the CD as I can make my own rip and in case of data loss I can redo it. Perhaps this is less pertinent with classical but the reason I'm not ready to switch to streaming entirely is music can get taken down. And the second more important reason is I can hear the Universal watermark in Tidal Hifi's lossless, linked here if you've never heard about it before.

 

[Barrymagrec]

It seems to me that there are less big cheap box sets about and that new issues seem to be more expensive than a year or two ago.

It`s just business - if insufficient people buy CDs they will cease to be made, of course there will still be a lot of secondhand discs available.

 

[Todd A]

It seems likely that streaming, with residual downloads, is the future. That written, there will always be a niche market for physical media. At the very least, people will be willing to pay premiums for "enhanced" Redbook discs (eg, SHMCD) and high res, especially in some national markets, like Japan.