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Sony to Shut CD Plant in U.S.

tcdriver

tcdriver

Addicted Member
From the Associated Press:

"Sony Corp. says it will shut down a CD manufacturing plant in the United States by the end of March and its 310 workers will be laid off.
Sony spokeswoman Mami Imada said Tuesday the plant closure in New Jersey was due to declining CD sales as more people opt to buy music digitally.
...The Indiana plant will become Sony's only CD manufacturing plant in the United States."

I wonder what this will mean for music lovers that prefer to own a disc? Are we approaching the day when the only way to obtain new music will be through downloads? :scratch2:
 
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tcdriver said:
I wonder what this will mean for music lovers that prefer to own a disc? Are we approaching the day when the only way to obtain new music will be through downloads? :scratch2:
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I don't know. I hope not. The general decline in music sales may have something to do with it as well.

Being more of the 'I wanna hold what I bought' type I'd like to think we'll still be able to get a physical copy of our tunes well into the future. The last two albums I bought were vinyl records with codes for digital copies. Brilliant. I love it. If more music were released that way I may never buy another CD again (and I'm not a vinyl snob either).
 
End of an era. I have all my digital music ripped onto a hard drive and networked through the house via other computers and Squeezebox's. Much more conveniant to access, and the sound is very good to excellent. I organized my 2200 or so CD's in alphabetical order and don't plan to use them much any more.


I also collect vinyl, but never spend more than a dollar or two on records.

I still listen to the local NPR and classical station, and also to internet streaming sites.

Despite the demise of the CD, there are still an abundance of quality music sources.

The only thing I worry about is how to support creative artists in this era of low profit.

Quality recording systems have gone way down in price as well however.
 
It's the end of an era as far as the mainstream is concerned, but CDs will be available online for a long, long time (and cheap!), and those of us who prefer the physical medium approach to a hi-fi system will continue to do so.

As the CD "dies," in the past two years I've spent a large percentage of my hi-fi budget on three new CD players. It's here to stay in my house.
 
The plant, in Pitman, NJ, (may actually be in Mantua Township) was built in my lifetime, though I can't remember a time when it wasn't there. It was built as a record pressing plant by CBS. At one time it was claimed to be the largest record pressing plant in the world. When I was in college a couple of students worked there and would sell rejects. CBS was able to clamp down on that practice!

The view from the street, Woodbury - Glassboro Road, was of a sprawling, tan or greyish colored brick building in a deep, well maintained lawn.

My first, and lasting memory comes from riding past it at night. The big CBS Eye logo illuminated, looking futuristic and spooky at the same time.

Bill
 
I lived in the town were the Indiana plant is and had been thinking it must be hurting.

It is a neat place. Robots load and unload the disks from the pressing machines.
 
jdrum1 said:
It is a neat place. Robots load and unload the disks from the pressing machines.
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It is pretty cool watching robots operate. Earlier in my career, I spent a lot of time around robots, and while the pick-and-place robots that you describe are cool to watch, the ones that are really cool are the ones that weld. I've seen set-ups where a car body, loosely tagged together, is brought into a welding station with three welding robots literally attack it, moving so fast they almost have a muscular bounce. 90 seconds later, the fully welded car body moves on.
 
jdrum1 said:
I lived in the town were the Indiana plant is and had been thinking it must be hurting.

It is a neat place. Robots load and unload the disks from the pressing machines.
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Maybe the workers will buy up some vinyl producing machinery and help get us all back to real music. ;)
 
cwall99 said:
It is pretty cool watching robots operate. Earlier in my career, I spent a lot of time around robots, and while the pick-and-place robots that you describe are cool to watch, the ones that are really cool are the ones that weld. I've seen set-ups where a car body, loosely tagged together, is brought into a welding station with three welding robots literally attack it, moving so fast they almost have a muscular bounce. 90 seconds later, the fully welded car body moves on.
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Robots are cool but I prefer humans doing the job.
 
tawny said:
Maybe the workers will buy up some vinyl producing machinery and help get us all back to real music. ;)
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Good luck with that. Vinyl volumes are increasing on a year-over-year percentage basis, but CD still outsells vinyl by more than 100 to 1. Vinyl is a tiny niche market and is likely to remain so.
 
This thread contains similar discussions: http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=321590

I quote myself from there, making the point that Sony is a giant company that may have different marketing strategies than other ones:

guiller said:
There are some people in the business that have a different opinion on this. For example, this seems not to be the case in the classical music market. Here there is an extract from an interview to the classical music label Naxos founder published in Gramophone (Naxos is one of the most active labels):

Gramophone: Describe the challenges the rapid growth of online music has posed you.

Klaus Heymann: We have to be quite clear about the fact that there will be the CD – or a physical carrier – for many more years to come. The classical CD is not declining at the same rate as pop or rock. This year, if we look at various territories for the first four or five months, it’s actually pretty stable – some are down, some are up, but on average I think CDs this year will be the same as in 2009. We don’t have that rapid decline.

G: How would you explain that – is it the collecting aspect connected to classical music?

KH: I think we are basically down to the core collector. And I think that’s at a stable level. Any changes in sales are more due to repertoire, or one-offs – like in Japan, where Harmonia Mundi sold 100,000 copies of Nobuyuki Tsujii [pianist, and Gold Medal winner of the Van Cliburn Competition]. These kind of things can change it dramatically. But by and large I think we’ve now found a fairly stable market for physical product. Beyond that of course we all look at where will it happen online – what is there beyond the physical business? And it looks like downloads will not be it.

Source: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature...ce=ADESTRA&utm_medium=EMAIL&utm_content=Click
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just dave said:
Robots are cool but I prefer humans doing the job.
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I fully appreciate the thought behind what you're saying, and I do lots of stuff to maximize the impact of my spending on keeping jobs alive a) here in Michigan, and b) in the rest of the country. I won't bore you with the details.

While I'm open to discussing the trade-offs involved in automating a plant, I'm not going to go there because I think it may quickly go beyond the bounds of the rules of AK.

Feel free to PM me, though.
 
just dave said:
Robots are cool but I prefer humans doing the job.
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You may have lost jobs on the assy line, but you have to have people maintain, build and program the robots.. so no jobs really lost, just have to have people with higher skill levels... I'd rather have the robots weld my car. That way you you know the welds are always going to be as close to perfect as they can be.
 
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Nope... just someone that has to keep stepping up his smarts to remain employed as times and ways change..
 
similost said:
Nope... just someone that has to keep stepping up his smarts to remain employed as times and ways change..
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Consistency is the foundation for quality. Robots enable consistency (provided, of course, they're attended to with an actively followed preventive maintenance schedule).

Robots probably pose much less of a threat to jobs in the US and Canada (and probably Europe and Australia as well) than outsourcing manufacturing to places with substantially lower wages, lax environmental regulations, and a more laissez-faire attitude when it comes to providing a safe place to work.
 
Ausjoe said:
I picked up some more CD's last night. I do my share!:D
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I did the same this past weekend... only I only buy used CD's... never new..

Got a hell of a deal at GW on them too.... a buck a disk... they are normally three bucks a disk, so I snagged 19 of them.. all really good stuff too.. no fluff..
 
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