• DOI:10.2752/175470709787375751
• Corpus ID: 191574354

The Music CD and Its Ends

@article{Straw2009TheMC,
  title={The Music CD and Its Ends},
  author={Will Straw},
  journal={Design and Culture},
  year={2009},
  volume={1},
  pages={79 - 91}
}

• W. Straw
• Published 1 March 2009
• Art
• Design and Culture

ABSTRACT Claims about the imminent death of the compact disc (CD) are discussed in terms of the format's slow loss of materiality over the past decade or more. Conceived as a precious form combining music, imagery and textual annotation, the CD's integrity has been pulled apart over several years which have seen it become a portable, mobile cultural form. As the limits of the album-length CD have lost their cultural resonance, the CD has become little more than an intermediate technology through which the transfer of music from older formats (like the vinyl album) to new storage devices (like the computer hard disc) has occurred.