If you think the musical compact disc is dying or dead, you're probably younger than it is.
"Show me a teenager buying a Susan Boyle album on CD and I'll show you someone buying a gift for their grandparent -- for Christmas," jokes Billboard senior chart manager and analyst Keith Caulfield. "There is definitely an age component to the consumption of music."
As the music industry as a whole struggles in a down economy and direct download business models like iTunes flourish, the compact disc -- which was commercially introduced in 1982 -- has the appearance of going the way of vinyl.
And contrary to the recent declaration of singer Prince -- who said that the Internet is dead and released his latest CD for free via European newspapers -- there's some evidence that consumers aren't as enamored with ripping the cellophane off that new CD as they once were.
According to data from Nielsen SoundScan, in 2007 CDs accounted for 90 percent of album sales in the United States, with digital accounting for the other 10 percent. Just two years later, that number had shifted to 79 percent CDs and 20 percent digital, with the remaining percentage point being made up of vinyl and other media.
