Even in this digital age with numerous ways of listening to music available, and despite reports that CDs are on their way out in replacement of digital music – CDs are still the most popular way of listening to music.

Music Ally Speakerbox recently conducted its annual survey and out of the 1000 respondents polled a massive 73% of music buyers prefer to purchase CDs rather than downloading, CD burning is still the top method of sharing music and 59% of music fans listen to CDs every day (like yours truly).

Interestingly, a huge 66% of teenagers preferred to listen to CDs – an age group which it was believed were amongst the highest for downloading music or listening via an MP3 player or iPod. This research also goes along with recent statistics that piracy levels are dropping – many online listeners instead choose to purchase music legally or listen via a streaming service.

Tim Walker, Chief Executive of The Leading Question said “Digital is still the future but rumours of the death of the CD are premature. The continued popularity of the CD should be looked upon as an opportunity. We believe that labels and online stores could and should be doing more to build on music fans’ familiarity with CDs to provide them with additional digital content and to use the CD as a bridge into the digital world. Music fans have spoken and digital is evidently not the clear cut replacement to the physical CD”

How do you listen to your music? By MP3 or by CD on your home stereo system or PC?

The communications minister Lord Carter set a target last month for analogue radio to be switched off (no pun intended) by 2015. However, in a conference in London yesterday he made reassurances that the switchover would not happen until DAB quality matches that offered by FM.

In a bid to make Britain completely digital, Lord Carter compared the move from FM to DAB radio to the digital TV switchover and said “OnDigital wasn’t good enough, so only when Freeview emerged did the analogue TV switch-off start."

With the quality of DAB inferior to FM radio, the small number of cars fitted with DAB radios and the large number of portable FM radios still in use, many critics see the 2015 target as ambitious. Addressing this, Lord Carter has claimed that car manufacturers have “responded better than we expected to the DAB plan” and went on to say that the target date of 2015 will allow enough time to deal with “consumer disruption issues”.

How would you rate the quality of DAB and can you see it improving in less than 6 years?

Source: What HiFi