I think i bought my last CD (‘Original Pirate Material‘ by the Streets) in 2002 only to rip it to my computer and then to leave it in a train running along the river rhine from Cologne towards Karlsruhe (in the hope that someone else would find it and enjoy it). I have not bought a music CD ever since (with the exception of a couple of baile funk CDs in Rio de Janeiro in 2006, but these don’t count because they were burned on demand by the sellers).

As everybody who hasn’t spend the last couple of years under a rock or in Gunatanamo Bay will know, CDs are not exactly selling well anymore. This is not only evident from the sales figures from 2007 (another 20 percent drop in volume) but also from this little gem of a story (‘Robbie Williams CDs will be used to pave roads in china‘) from BLDGblog:

EMI has announced that “unsold copies” of Rudebox, by British pop star Robbie Williams, “will soon be used to resurface Chinese roads.” More than a million copies of the CD “will be crushed and sent to the country to be recycled,” we read, where they “will be used in street lighting and road surfacing projects.” […] In any case, does all this imply some strange new infrastructural claim to fame? “You know that CD they used to pave the King’s Road?” a man asks you, putting his coffee down as if to emphasize the point. He crosses his arms. “I played bass on that.”

Guess those CDs won’t make it very far beyond the year 2008…