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The Almighty Buck

CD-R Prices Could Triple This Summer 320

Posted by timothy
from the stock-several-spindles dept.
Suppafly writes: "According to this story at pcworld.com cd-r media prices are going to skyrocket once the surplus of CD-R media is used up and companies return to having a shortage. 'Consumers ... can expect discs to sell for about 35 to 40 cents at retail.' This doesn't sound good for those of us who backup damn near everything to CD-R." Some spares couldn't hurt, either way.

CD-R Prices Could Triple This Summer

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  • ...will the price of an Eminem CD at Sam Goody be MORE than $16.99 this summer?
  • by oGMo (379) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:08PM (#236046)

    OK, so there's a lot of surplus, and they aren't making a whole lot from it all. Solution? Report it's all running out, and prices will "skyrocket" (35 cents a cdr isn't that high, c'mon, last time I bought them anything under a buck was great). So people go out and buy a lot, thus creating their shortage. Nice work.

    Then again, this could be even worse for them, people buy a whole lot, and then don't need any more for a couple years, and then they drop to nothing because there's no demand... ;-)

    OK OK enough conspiracy theories... ;-)

  • by Tim (686) <timr AT alumni DOT washington DOT edu> on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @09:22PM (#236048) Homepage
    "So, I guess the moral is, if you see any "free after rebate" deals, take advantage of them because they won't be around long. Race you to Best Buy!"

    Me: "I'd like to buy this spindle of CD-Rs, please."
    Best Buy Cashier: "OK. I see that these have an instant rebate, so the price is only $2 today."
    Me: "Cool."
    Cashier: "However, with our convenient CD-R protection plan, for the low cost of only $35, we'll provide you with a replacement if your purchase should be found defective for any reason."
    Me: "uhm...wait a second..." Cashier: "We also highly recommend these special CD-R cleaning cloths, available for only $19.95...you can't clean CD-R's any other way, you know..." Me: "wha? cleaning cloths? I don't think..." Cashier: "...and don't forget these special CD-R labelling pens, only $7.50, which are guaranteed to work with your new CD-Rs." Me:"Hold on just one second now..." Cashier: "better not to argue, sir. See the cameras? They're watching...ok then, your total comes to $70 after tax...sir? sir?"

    Sound of car tires peeling in parking lot...

  • > As a side note, too many people who've never learned economics confuse
    > demand with quantity demanded


    Unfortunately, so do many taking economics courses . . . I drill it through them. I ask the question again and again. I call on random people to explain the difference. Still, come test time . . .

    I'm not bothered by those who have trouble learning. It's those that *refuse* to learn that bug the daylights out of me . . .

    hawk, econ professor

  • drifting a bit, but HDD's are getting close to the price of tape, too. I'm looking at $35-$40/cartridge for 40g tape, and $100 for a 40G cheap hard drive.

    my new workstation will be u160 scsi, but we'll be tossing in 3x40G in raid-5 instead of a tape. I'll need 3 disks to fail to lose any data . . .

    The next step seems to be using those warm swap front panel disk cages and just using hard drives as tape . . .


  • ON the heels of the "$3 gas!" warning, the wall street journal cited a couple of analysts who swere downgrading their recommendation on gas stocks, and expecting it to go *down*. The increasing margins have led to new supply, which will push price and profits back downt.

    Still, I won't be happy until unleaded is back below $1/Gallon (yes, I'm one of*those* people :)


  • You were far too soft on the issue.

    there's only a handful of cities in the US dense enough for public transportation to be a practical alternative--SF, NY, Chicago, uhh . . . there must be a couplemore . . .

    In many (most?) cities/towns, both the total cost *and* the energy consumed are *higher* on a per rider basis.

    Too get people in to mass transportation for other than ideological reasons the system needs to meet at least one of these:
    1) It's actually more convenient or faster than driving
    2) The individual trip costs less than gas
    3) mass transit supplemented with taxi and/or car rental costs less than the total cost of car ownership.


  • > Bicycle vs. Chicago Winter.

    sissy :)

    I bicycled through the iowa winters, including heavy snow, rain, and days where I needed to swap sunglasses every mile because they had developed too much ice from my breath.
    Ice, however, is another matter. That stuff *hurts*, and is how I broke the second helmet. Then again, one day when I had my wife drop me due to ice, when I stepped out of the car onto the curb, I discovered that *it* was covered in a sheet of ice (IIt was painted under the ice, so it wansn't obvious).

    > Bicycle vs. Phoenix Summer.

    It was Vegas, not Phoenix (OK, so that's about 5F cooler on average). The quack said my cholesterol was high, so to get aerobic exercise. The second evening, someoen didn't want to wait for a light, hit me, and sent me flying 20 feet. *that* hurt a lot more than ice (but my homeowners insurance replaced my laptop sfreen and the first helmet I broke). The bicycle landed on top of me, and I'm still using it . . .


  • Yes, that's wwhat I mean by the per trip cost :)

    I love my crown victoria, but unlessi's icy I take a bicycle.

    When I closed down my practice to go to grad school, we sold the second car. THis was because we'd be living cdloser than I could park :) I quickly came to love only dealing with one car. Now I commute by bicycle and leave the car for my wife. (mm, and you can goo 100k without tuning that model. 110 turned out to be a different story--two spark plugs completely corroded . . .)

    at my visiting professor gig last year, it was actually *faster* to bike than drive--I had to cdircumnavigate the campus with the car, and could take a straight line in by bicycle. (and bicycles tend to be faster than bus, too . . .).

    I'm not against mass trnasit (though I still regret voting for the .5% sales tax in Vegas--it caused a functional private system to be replaced with a crummy public one . . . ). I *am* against subsidizing systems that people won't use.


  • bah.

    In Iowa, it spends 2 months at 100. We just kept riding . . .

  • Nope, 3--the raid-5 is a backup device :). The system is scsi; the atas are the backup device. To lose data, I first need a scsi to fail (and this is frealistic; these are cutting edge 15k drives), at which pint I need to go to the ata raid backup system. When the first of those fails, I still have the parity drive to rely on (raid 5). If *another* tdrive fails, I'm in trouble (but then, hopefully, I've used the CD-RW recently enough, or my scripts copying critical data to my account on the server that gets a nightly tape backup are ok.)


  • by hawk (1151) <hawk@eyry.org> on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @11:15AM (#236060) Journal
    The tax was approved in (iirc) the 92 election (or was it 91?). The first thing the new board did was try to revoke the charter of the existing bus company. THey were forcecd to buy it out instead (that pesky "takings clause" of the state constitution). Soon thereafter, we had empty buses all over town.

    Anyone who has only been there in the last five years has never seen a bus from the former system . . .

  • I would say even if you use 300 CD-R's a year, $30 for a spindle of 100 is probably not going to hit you all that hard in the wallet. We are talking about $90 a year. If it became $300 for a spindal of 100 disks you might change your habits, but $30 or even $45 probably not. (Ofcourse you might but in general most people won't)
  • You Canucks and Euros neve cease to amaze me in your ability to miss the Big Picture. You almost pride yourselfes at paying more for gas and say how we're not really paying the "true costs", when in reality, gasoline costs prety much the same everywhere on the planet.

    It's the 300% tax in those countries that jacks prices up.

    So instead of bitching that we have it cheap, why aren't you bitching that your own governments are extorting you blind with taxes making up well over 2/3 of the price of the item being taxed?

  • USB CD-R burner most likely. . .
  • anyone who has ever tried to drive down the Las Vegas strip in the past 5 years can tell you that that system could not be described as a "functional private system".

    You can walk the length of the strip and back faster than you can drive a block.
  • There are certain areas in the US where $6 US is not an uncommon price for bottled beer. (Chicago, Orlando, New York City, San Francisco)

    Of course, run out the the grocer across the street and pick up a case for $1.50/bottle.
  • If only the US would tax fuel at that rate, and use the funds to build roads, so we decrease the demand for roads, but increase the supply, causing traffic problems to go down, so lazy dishonest fat ugly stupid evil real estate developers can build more strip malls and tract housing. . .
  • I would die for your American prices...

    Several of our soldiers have.

  • by Squid (3420) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @10:21PM (#236072) Homepage
    Well, for one thing, I'm an artist [flyingmice.com] and lossless high-DPI scan files take up a LOT of room...

  • $0.28 for an 80 minute CD-R (in 100 silver spindles)

    I've always found I get about a 30-50% failure rate on those spindles too, enough to make it worth extra for branded disks... making them about $0.80 each to avoid having to reburn the stupid things.

    GBP 75.9 per litre surely 0.759 :) It's expensive, but not that expensive - I fill my car for about UKP35 ($50ish).
  • nope, I know what a buffer underflow looks like - this is with a P3-500 and more recently a TBird 1Ghz system, Yamaha SCSI CRW-824 & 2Mb buffer.

    With branded disks both systems are quite happy to write while I compile & debug DC stuff in the foreground. These disks are so cruddy you can more or less see through them, and in a couple of cases rub the foil off with your fingers. They're are sold as own-brand disks through PC World (UK equivalent of CompUSA, roughly).
  • >If you NEED to back up data, hard drives are >VERRRY cheap, and high capacity tape drives are >cheap as well.

    You might be thinking hard drives are cheap, but
    only until you buy the first couple, or three or
    four... I can't imagine using them for daily or
    weekly archival backups and still calling them
    "cheap" especially compared to CDR.

    And since when are "high capacity tape drives" CHEAP? Cheap ones still cost over a grand, and
    the media are certainly not cheap. Especially
    not cheap like CDR. Where the drives are maybe

    On the other hand, are there any backup systems that use CDR effectively? Scenario: I have a
    40 gig drive and a spindle of CDR's. I want a restorable copy of this drive, partition table, boot sector, and all filesystems. All I want to
    do is change CD's when prompted. They don't have
    to be ISO9660 discs, just have to be restorable to the raw device. A multi-volume tar seems like
    the way to go.

    Show me a better backup method for the home user,
    I'm all ears. $800 tape drives aren't even in the same realm as $50 CD writers. $20 tapes??

    Sure, the professional user needs a robotic DLT system to backup their Netapps. So we're into
    half-milliondollar fileservers and fifty-thousand dollar tape machines.

    What's in between for, e.g., my mom?

  • I haven't had any problems, and I have a spindle which is almost two years old. Still burns fine. Just avoid AZO media and go with cyanine (decent) or phtalocyanine (much better) and it should be just fine.
  • Oh yeah? Back in MY day, we had to pay $450 for a CD-R drive.

    You kids have it so easy.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • It appears to me that pricing on CDR disks has been greatly effected by its relation to the dollar. Prices continued to fall until one disk was less than a dollar. When someone is concidering to buy a CDR disc and see that the price is 99 cents, they think, "How cheap! Thats under a dollar!" The price drops. They buy another CDR disc thinking, "Only 20 cents! Thats under a dollar!" The price goes back up. They buy a third disc thinking, "Only 40 cents! Thats under a dollar!" Its kind of like the nine tenths of a cent added on to a gallon of gas. Most people concider such small numbers to be meaningless. The same factor could be at work on computer prices, only operating at the $1,000 mark.

  • Three times free is still free.

    Oh, you mean you actually pay full retail for the things instead of waiting for rebates? Silly boy.

  • In related news, the price of Clay Pigeons is expected to return to normal. Charlton Heston of the Shotgun Association of America stated at a press conference, "Our recent sources of cheap plastic clay pigeons are expected to dry up. We will be returning to clay clay pigeons."

    You mean AOL is going to stop sending me free skeet?!?

  • Agreed. I work 80 miles from my home, and there is NO existing mass transit of ANY type running between the two. If there was, I'd use it. But there isn't, so I burn about five gallons of gas a day commuting back and forth. And no, I CAN'T do anything about it right away. I live in a city with 18%+ unemployment, no jobs in my field, and an insufficient client base to strike out on my own. Luckily, I'll be moving closer to where I work in about nine more months.
  • I just make disposable music. In order to avoid clutter in the car, I only carry 10 CDs at a time. They're all copies or mixes made from CDs or MP3s on the computer. When I get sick of them I pitch them in the trash (or leave them on the driver's side window of other cars in parking garages...) and make new ones. At $0.17/ea I hardly feel guilty; a pack of gum provides less enjoyment per dollar.

    Even at $0.51/ea I wouldn't feel guilty. I'm old enough to remember when a 10 pack of quality cassettes was $25. Sure they were reusable, but I seldom reused them. Even at $50/100, CD-Rs are a major bargain.

  • by Jethro (14165)
    I guess all us people will have to get used to paying the same price for CD-R media that we used to pay 4 months ago... the horror!!!

  • by Robotech_Master (14247) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @10:55PM (#236105) Homepage Journal
    My brother just got a CD-ROM burner, and through the miracle of Enlight cases, I've borrowed the drive for my own nefarious purposes.

    I just finished burning all 200 episodes of Sailor Moon [tuxedomask.com] onto 11 CDs...got them off my hard drive, at long last. I only have a few gigs, I need that space! :) I've also burned a couple fansubbed episodes of the new Transformers series, Car Robots [tfw2005.com] to CD, so I can take and show them to people.

    I've also archived about 450 megs in textual logs generated by a private roleplaying chatserv I frequent (and felt guilty about "wasting" 200 megs of space, if you can believe it :). I also have plans to master some personal mix CDs, maybe do a few copies of them for friends. I'll also make some personal MP3 CD-ROMs for playing at the school computer lab, since they capped my cable connection to a point where I can no longer stream them from home.

    I'm not sure what else I'll do with them. Download more video eps and burn them, perhaps archive all my Webscription [webscription.net] and other e-books . . . maybe I'll even back up my hard drive.

    It's kind of sad, in a way. Now that hard drives with dozens of gigs are affordable, 650 megs doesn't seem quite so big anymore.

  • You mean several *Iraqi* soldiers have, and a few of *our* soldiers have ;)
  • The only thing I can't figure out is why they're called "CD-R", Compact Disc Readable?

    Um, "CD Recordable"? You have to admit that "CDW" sounds like you have a mouth full of oatmeal.

    Reservoir Zig [prmsystems.com]

  • Congratulations! You just figured out how the stock market works.

  • Well... #2 doesn't really apply. Oh, it used to, back in the day when I could use it.

    And #3 is slightly off. I don't download music from napster. I use usenet instead.

    And #1. I never never NEVER NEVER *N*E*V*E*R*!!!!!
    lend out my CD's to anyone. Anyone is free to come over here and copy them to their hearts content, but the CD's stay here. There is a mystery CD I made once, put a whole bunch of cool stuff on it. Lent it to a friend like 3 years ago. And he's STILL looking for it. Something along the lines of "I lent it to someone and he lent it to someone and that someone's phone got disconnected so we can't get ahold of him....."

    But a packrat I am. It hurts to delete anything, unless I know I can easily get it again. I still have copies of all the files from my old BBS days, still preserved (probably not very well) on 3 1/2 inch floppies, and even some on 5 1/4 HD floppies (remember those?? :) I've got like 8 boxes of them in my closet. I have absolutely no practical use for them anymore, but dammit!!!! I might NEED them someday and I'll just hate myself if I got rid of them.

    However, I will be the first to admit that its truely pathetic that of all the music I have archived, I've only ever listened to about 1/4 of it, and if I someday got the urge to play all of it, end to end, without ever repeating a song, it would take a solid 6 months at this point to go through all of it. And since I accumulate music faster than I can listen to it, this cycle is unlikely to change. But don't expect me to stop saving all of it. :)

  • because we can, should we be gluttonous? there is a difference between the rolling around in your own feces and abusing resources. i dont believe i mentioned anything about foregoing sanitation.

    while bringing the rest of the world up to our standards is a nice sentiment, it is a goal that is not feasibly achievable. leveling the standard of living on a global basis would require us to lower ours while the others raise.

    as i mentioned before, if

    those who could use public transportation did

    those who could use alternative forms of transportation did

    then those who needed cars would be able to use them as inexpensive transportation. because most americans consider driving around in their cars to be some sort of right the gas prices will continue to climb until you are forced to either

    fork out a substantial amount of money for gas

    move closer to work

    find a job closer

    get a more fuel efficient car (if you dont already have one>

    or walk to 22 miles to work.

    i really think americans are very childish about this sort of thing.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that

  • your sister isn't safe with a bigox like you to protect her? sorry i couldnt help myself. for what it's worth public transportation is very prevalent in europe. i personally dont have evidence for this but i am under the impression that travel there is very safe. this comes from talking to my friends who have lived there (both male and female). perhaps some europeans could comment on this.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
  • You forget, us Americans *deserve* cheap and unlimited fuel. It's our God given *right*, nay, a *responsibility*, to burn tons of energy carefree. You Europeans sacrificed it when you turned your back on manifest destiny at the Atlantic.
  • > Between CD-R's at $0.30 each, and gas at three bucks a gallon, it looks like a gloomy summer ahead for Joe American Consumer and Pr0n Hound.

    Yeah, but with no power in California, what good is pr0n on CD-R?

    Gas is going to $3.00 per gallon 'cuz all the environmentalists who opposed power plant construction in CA will be sitting in their SUVs, idling the engine to run the air conditioning during the rolling blackouts.

    If you want pr0n, better start stocking up on AC inverters, hard drives, and flat screens!


    That is the coolest thing I've heard of this week.

    Best use for a CD-R that you don't need anymore? Leave it where someone else might find it. Stick a note on it saying "when you're done listening to me, leave me somewhere for the next person to hear." Far out.

  • > I'll give you a kilo of carbon and nitrogen. How much would it cost you to make one CD-RW disk?

    Nothing. All I have to do tell you to go out and buy me a CD-RW disk or I'll release two kilos of cyanide into the air, and we'll see which of us can hold his breath the longest.

    (Aaw shit, all I've got is this lump of coal sitting in a nitrogen-enriched atmosphere. Well, no point holding our breaths... but if it's a small enough room, maybe the partial pressure of oxygen in the room will drop to the point that we'd still be better off having you go out and buy me a CD-RW :-)

  • 40 gig HD 10X faster then the burner, cdr's 10x cheaper per gig then the harddrive... All depends on what's important to you...
  • What on earth do you use all these CDRs for? Seriously, how can you amass so much data so quickly that you need spindles atop spindles of them? =)

    In my case data isn't amassed quickly. Instead, it has accreted slowly like a stalagtite. I have over fifteen years of data on CD-R, and there are still 400K Mac diskettes I haven't copied yet.

    Here's a couple from '85:

    maczip212212000.list:TN.020.Server 13K WORD MACA 2/9/1985 4:43 PM
    maczip312212000.list:System 124K ZSYS MACS 4/8/1985 6:01 PM

    Wow, a whole operating system in 124K. Too bad it only supports one button mice.

    I keep track of everything with flat text files that I can grep (or point htgrep at for a web-enabled search). The big list of files is about 15Mb.

    sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]1985" filelist.html | wc -l
    sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]1990" filelist.html | wc -l
    sarah:# grep "[\/|-]1995" filelist.html | wc -l
    sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]2000" filelist.html | wc -l

    From '85 to '94 it's mostly MIDI and Sound Designer I audio files. After that it's all 3D objects and textures, Director files, and digital video. Sorry, no pr0n.

    sarah:$ grep -i \.3ds filelist.html | wc -l
    sarah:$ grep -i \.tga filelist.html | wc -l

    Also, I remember that '42 Slack distro. IIRC, it was nicknamed "Victory Slack" and came on olive drab diskettes. They gave them out for free if you bought a $50 War Bond or collected more than 100 lbs. of scrap metal.


    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people
    are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
  • > and high capacity tape drives are cheap as well.

    Yep SIR. And they're fast and tapes can be overwritten. Click on my .sig for the best deal.

  • Then you'll save money by buying new Motherboard, Processor and RAm.


    No. You will only have to have 2 disks fail to use data. If all three failed, you wouldn't have any data!

    Mark Duell
  • Okay, sure, you can get a 100-disc spindle for $15 bucks at pricewatch, but those are pretty weak discs. I'll never buy generic media again after a fiasco last summer where my reflective surfaces actually started PEELING...

    This isn't the kind of thing you want to archive to. So you gotta buy brand name media, which are ALREADY like $0.40 per disc in bulk. So, my question is, what happens to those? It's not gonna be $1 for a decent CDR again is it?


  • I will give you my firstborn male for those northern exposure episodes....
  • This week at CompUSA you can get a 100 pack for $14. Head over to pricewatch and see 100 for $15, 50 for $5. That's no more than .15 each ;)

  • by garcx (86318) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:53PM (#236163)
    Dude, you forgot pr0n. ;-)
  • by holos (88324) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:10PM (#236165)
    I usually buy Sony's @ 12.99CAD for a 10 pack, or spindle's of 50 for $25.. at best they're $0.50 each.. how do prices triple and still stay under $0.50USD?
  • by sheckard (91376) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:08PM (#236169) Homepage
    CD-Rs are way too cheap as it is, as a matter of fact I pretty much refuse to buy them unless they're free after rebate. Chances are that you won't have to wait but a week or two to find some sort of deal like that.

    And I find myself using CD-RW disks much more anymore, even though CD-Rs are practically free I still have a problem throwing them away after burning something for just one use. CD-RWs are perfectly suited for backing stuff up week after week.


    Too expensive to drive to the beach and too expensive to back up all that pr0n. And with cable rates going up... we might have to start talking to each other or something.

  • by briancarnell (94247) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:11PM (#236172) Homepage
    This is, after all, from the same people who successfully predicted the now skyrocketing price of RAM!!! ;)
  • 5-10 copies of the Gig [1-2 CDs each] for use by the band members to improve future performances.

    So are you trying to tell me that the Gig can be anywhere from about 500 to 1500 Megs? What happened to standards!
  • CDRs are great I suppose for burning the latest insert-your-favorite-OS-here ISO images, but they are a bit small for backup purposes, in these days of 180GB hard drives.

    Anyone have a clue when DVDR prices are going to come down to a level where they can compete on a $/GB basis with CDRs?
  • I just came back from my local computer store and would you belive it if I told you that I didn't find a SINGLE CD-R? I was told by the salesman that a bunch of geeks were here not too long ago and took them all.

    Hmm. Must be Slashdot readers. Next time I am checking Slashdot posting every 1 minute.

  • by Leto2 (113578) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @11:39PM (#236185) Homepage
    For reference: In Western Europe we pay:

    ~$0.75 for a CD-R (DFL 1.75 in NL)
    ~$4.25 for a gallon of gas (DFL 2.70/liter in NL)

    I would die for your American prices...
  • Uh-oh. Surplus is gone, but "[S]ome spares couldn't hurt, either way."

    It's a self-fulfilling news story.

  • We better switch to your superior socialist form of government real quick, huh?

  • by alexburke (119254) <slashdotmailNO@SPAMalexburke.ca> on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @11:13PM (#236195)
    This reminds me of the rumors about 4 years ago of increased taxes on CD-Rs being implemented in Canada to compensate the music industry. The next day we went driving around to about 6 different stores and they were all sold out. I actually suspect that they (the stores) were stockpiling their discs so they could put them back on the shelf with an increased price blamed on the tax, and make extra profit because they bought the CDs before the tax was implemented.

    This reminds me of a painful memory. December 1998, I ordered 1000 pieces of Sony CDQ-74CN (really nice discs) from my distributor at the then-decent price of $2.11 per disc. I got 10 boxes of 100 CDs each, retail packaged. I figured since everyone thought the price would go up to about $3.50 at the least, I could make a nice little sum since it was said that the tax wouldn't be retroactive, so selling stockpiles amassed before the tax came in would be golden!

    Pissed doesn't even begin to describe how I felt when it was revealed that the whole fscking thing was *WAAAAY* overblown by the media, and that prices would essentially stay the same.

    Now my cost on the same disc is $1.06 from the same distributor, and I have more than 250 left from the original order more than two years ago. I'm selling them at a loss to get rid of them.

    Oh, but I'm not bitter or anything...

  • Um, maybe because the cost is due to factory tooling and scheduling?


  • by malahoo (128370) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @09:50PM (#236201) Homepage
    What on earth do you use all these CDRs for?

    Copies and copies of demo CDs for my band [guyadeen.com]. Cheap, DIY CD replication is a godsend for small indie musicians with no money. Instead of spending $100-$500 for a few hundred demo discs, we can pull it off for about $100. Plus, we can make exactly as many as we need; no extras piling up, no shortages, and we can change the content any time we want.

    The convenience + low $$$ lets us give them away [guyadeen.com] to fans who can't afford a dollar to cover our costs.

    CDRs RULE!
    Plugging your band on Slashdot RULES!

    If you're not wasted, the day is.

  • I remember when 3 1/2 inch floppy disk prices rose in the summer. The reason is that people who store these things in warehouses have to cool the warehouses in order to prevent the plastic from warping.

    Could it be that the CDR storage requirements are the same as for the floppies? If this is the case stock up on them before spring has sprung.



    A couple years ago, I purchased several hundred CDRs at Fry's one night, and I got this attitude from the woman at the checkout counter... that I was mass copying music, software, etc.

    I had recently put together a cdrom-based catalogue for the company where I work. I ended up doing it because I was the only guy who both had a cd writer (at home) and cared enough to put a bit of time into it.

    Some company was supposed to duplicate the disc for us, but they dropped the ball. I never did find out if they couldn't do it or were just late.

    There was a major trade show going on, and a few of our sales guys were going to head out to the show the next morning, and they need a big pile of cdroms to take with them.

    The cleck at Fry's was a bit embarrased to learn that there actually are some legitimate uses for a big pile of CDRs.

  • Actualy you can get CD-Rs for DFL 0.99 (and CD-RWs for DFL 1.27) in NL.

    My p0rn^B^B^B^B *cof* *cof* educational imagery collection has been higly improved because of that.

  • One blank CD-R is enough to hold a 1-hour episode...

    Similar use here, except I encode shows for Realplayer since I watch most of my TV while at the computer. I can easily put 6 hours on a disk at a quality that's fine for me.

  • New business model: offset the high cost of CD-Rs (and CD-RWs) by letting AOL and others imprint their logos on them. Or have free ones that have a session already burned with AOL software.

  • by Prof_Dagoski (142697) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @04:28AM (#236216) Homepage

    Cool, now maybe AOL will stop sending me trial cds. They used to send nice, reusable floppies. Gee, if this trend continues, they might have to start sending trial zip disks.

  • I still have my $650 yamaha cdr-102 burner here (in storage). burns at the high rate of 2x and requires a caddy.

    this was back in '95 or so, when blanks were well over $10 ea. didn't complain then, bought in high quantity even then ("here's my Jackson - how many cdr's can I get for that? really? cool, I'll take 2 cdr's then, please.")

    ...less than a Washington per disc, now. Awww - poor babies - life is too rough for you, I can tell.


  • What sucks even more is blank CD-Rs have a horrible shelf life. After sitting a few months, half the blanks just burn coasters. Probably have to store them in the fridge to keep them fresh.
  • by Klowner (145731) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:09PM (#236220) Homepage
    This is great, now all the STORES get slashdotted.

    Almost as good as telling everyone that we're going to run out of gas in about three weeks, "GO GET SOME BEFORE ITS GONE KIDS!".

    watch me get modded down..
  • I've given up on CDRW myself. My Yamaha CRW8824 is installed as an external SCSI device and isn't directly supported by MacOS 9.1 (needs a separate driver). I don't trust it to be bootable, and my internal CD-ROM won't read CDRW, so I just don't bother.

  • I can say this about TDK -- a CDR is a CDR, but the writing surface on a TDK 650 CDR is the prettiest of any on the market :-)

    Actually, TDK is the brand I'm using right now, but as a general rule I'll go for pretty much any branded CDR (don't trust the unbranded ones). I'm debating whether to buy Kodak or a spindle of black Memorexes for my next media restock...

  • Burn copies of Live Concerts.

    I'm a part time sound engineer in a small venue, we have about 1 gig per week and we routinely record them [unless asked not to]. From a single live recording we generally produce


    If some songs have come out well we then produce

    10-100 copies of the best songs of the Gig for promotional & sale use.

    Buying CD's in Jewel cases it works out at around $1.50 per disc to produce once you factor in the cost of high quality blanks, CD writers, hard disks & duds. [A CD writer lasts me between 100 - 1000 burns before it starts to get flaky].

    This is all done on a 16 speed writer with better than average quality media for reliability.

  • And I'm proud of it.

    Data has a way of disapearing sometimes, and I want to maintain its accessibility to me. A good contemporary example is the amazing video compression software FIASCO, which has recently been yanked from distribution due to some unexplained patent concerns.

    ...I kept a mirror of it, and of so much else. I also store my favorite television programs, because VHS tape degrades so very quickly. No piracy, though.

  • Slashdot reported [slashdot.org] thet the tax rate on CD-R's in canada had increased to 21 cents ($CDN) per blank CD-R.
  • Whenever CompUSA sells 100 CDR's for $15, i'm there like johnny-on-the-spot! I think that any cd-burning geek worth his/her salt has probably already managed to squirrel away at least 200 discs! (I know I have).
  • how do prices triple and still stay under $0.50USD?

    Retail/rebate rat race. Best Buy had a 50-pack Imation spindle for $5 after rebates one week, and a 50-pack Maxell spindle for $5 after rebates the next. CompUSA had a 100-pack Imation spindle for $10 after rebates and a 50-pack of Imation slim cases free after rebates.

    Also, it may depend on patent royalties and piracy taxes in your area. The article claims CD-R royalties are $0.08USD, and I think there's another penny or two for the piracy tax, so I guess the disks are being sold at close to cost in the US.

  • CD-ROM drives have been known to fail in such a way that the laser stays on while the motor does not. After a few days, maybe a week of that, the plastic on the CDR starts to bubble.

    I am holding a cooked piece of media in my hand right now. Oh, it's a CDRW. Same difference. Fortunately, it just had legally ripped MP3s on it, so I can recreate it. Lesson: always backup your irreplaceable CD media.
  • Well, no.

    Draw a graph, label the left side "Quantity Demanded", label the bottom "Price". Draw a straight horizontal line across somewhere above the horizontal axis. This is what I was describing (my apologies if it wasn't clear). As price changes, quantity demanded does not. This is what I believe is the case around the $0.25-0.75 price range.

    As someone pointed out, "inelastic demand" was the term I was looking for - it's been a little while since I've had an Econ class, forgot about that term until now.
  • by proxima (165692) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:32PM (#236238)
    I'm not a bit surprised to read about this surplus of CD-Rs - I wondered how they became so cheap between 1999-2000. This tripled price of CD-Rs probably won't affect quantity demanded much.

    As a side note, too many people who've never learned economics confuse demand with quantity demanded Demand of these CD-Rs will remain the same if the only factor that changes is the price - the demand curve simply determines how many CD-Rs will be purchased at a given price. My personal opinion is that the demand curve is rather flat (on a quantity vs price graph) around the current price range.

    Prices may double, triple, whatever, but I still find a 50 CD-R spindle at $15-25 a bargain. Besides, shouldn't we be saving plastic and backing up on CD-RW anyway? According to the article, CD-RW prices will remain stable - perhaps CD-RWs will become even more common in a year.

  • CD-R Prices Could Triple This Summer

    what? are they made from oil?
  • You've got to love it when a one-line comment about pr0n is modded up as insightful!

    So you're a karma whore, eh? For the right price, I'll be a karma pimp...
  • by grammar nazi (197303) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:18PM (#236259) Journal
  • We (americans) have a lot further to drive to get anywhere.

    Most of us pay for our own health care, and our own retirement. We in the IT sector work 60 hours per week 50-52 weeks per year.

    So there is a reason you pay more.

  • Too late. Some friends and I just purchased 600 in bulk at $.15 each. All your CDR are belong to us!
  • ..Thats ridiculous.

    Why not carry on with your comparisons:

    Vintage Beetle vs. Suburban
    Suburban vs. M1 Tank
    Motorcycle vs. Blue Whale dropped from great height

    ..Oh. And what about:

    Pedestrian vs. Everything else?

    Or where you never ever ever going to get out of that car?

    (flaps arms around)
    *buck* *buck* *buck* *Bucawck!*
  • Honestly, 40 cents for a blank CDR is still a good deal. It would only make a difference to the people who buy hordes of CDRs. And to these people, I have a question:


    I have some theories:

    1) Packrat. This person loves collecting everything. TV episodes, movies, software. Obviously this person doesn't actually do anything with these CDRs other than lend them out to people who make copies and do the same thing.

    2) Rampant Windows pirate. This person makes illegal copies of Windows software and carries all the CDs around in a black CD-binder/case thing. Need some outdated version of Photoshop? He's your man.

    3) Music Leech. All of this person's blanks go to hold the massive amounts of Napster downloads. Obviously this person does not have a long enough lifespan to listen to all of the audio acquired.

    Ok enough jokes :) What do you guys use your CDR's for? Or did I nail it on the head? The last time I burned a CD was SuSE 7.1 last month. Before that? Probably Slackware sometime in 1942.

  • CD-R blanks are made with cyanine dyes, not cyanide, as I said earlier. The materials are cheap. The article implies that there are plenty of CD-making machines. The article says that the royalties have dropped. There is therefore no reason to predict that CD-R prices will rise.

    If you want to find out what kind of dyes your CD-R blanks use, there is a program that supplies this information, and manufacturer and capacity. The program is free. To get it:

    1) Go to http://www.cdpage.com/

    2) Click on Software Archives

    3) Click on CD-R Identifier. The program will download.

    Unzip the archive and run the program. Click on the UPPER icon to display information about your CD-R. The CD-R does not need to be blank.
  • I'm wondering the same thing. I just picked up a spindle of 100 Maxell discs for CAD$65. This works out to about US$0.43 per disc.


    It turns out that nothing came of the tax increases. They stayed at $0.06 per disc.

    This makes me wonder...were we being manipulated? I mean we were strongly driven to go out and buy something. Isn't that what the corporations want their consumer ants to do? And is this what is happenning again now?

    I suggest we carefully think about what we're saying and doing. Already the poster of this message has branded the post as "from the stock-several-spindles dept." Is this just some form of manipulation? Did seeing this message make you go look to see how many blanks you have on the shelf? Perhaps this is what the corporations want you to be doing. Perhaps you're being motivated by fear.

    That's just what I think anyway.

  • I was really annoyed when AOL started sending me CDs rather than floppies because I can't use the CDs for anything but coasters, and now I have plenty of coasters.

    Why can't they start sending me CD-RWs, at least I could use those. Especially now, since I'll actually have to pay for them. AOL-Time/Warner should consider it a PR expense. Most of the people who gripe about AOL would stop complaining if AOL was supplying them with CD-RWs.

    And now in these harsh economic times when the price of CR-Rs is going through the roof... (I'll have to check my couch for lost change).

  • by sonofepson (239138) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:16PM (#236298)
    That comes to .05 - .06 cents (US) per Mb, still a better deal than floppies. Even a better deal than the last 10 Gb drive I bought which was about 0.9 cents per Mb

  • by mahmud (254877) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @12:08AM (#236309)
    Here in Finland, and elsewhere in EU gas costs 1.2$ /liter. I guess if gas was more expensive in US it would be easier for you people to sign the Kyoto agreement:)
  • by Vess V. (310830) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:06PM (#236322) Homepage
    Time to go pick up a whole bunch before the hoarders get to them. Oh, wait...
  • by Waffle Iron (339739) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:11PM (#236331)
    40 cent CD-R disks produced by greedy, price-gouging corporations are going to bust my budget.

    Wait a minute... I found some spare change in my couch. Forget what I just said.

  • by Guppy06 (410832) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @07:57PM (#236336)
    There's an awful lot of "just buy a new HDD" posts here, and I'm failing to see why they're so much better. Sure, they're faster. Sure, they're pretty darned cheap, and will only get cheaper. However, unless you spend some more money on a removable HDD setup, the disk will be something you want to archive, not something you want to archive with (unless you intend to set up a RAID scheme). Your new hard disk will be just as vulnerable as your old one.

    And even if you do intend to use removable HDDs as your archiving system, they're still a bit more fragile than optical disks. If you drop a CD off of a two story building, unless you're dropping it onto shear granite in Point Barrow, Alaska in the middle of February, odds are it will still work. CDs aren't anywhere near as sensitive to static discharge or EM, either. And even if the info on the platters are still OK, you could still fry a chip on the controller.

    Continuing along that thread, hard drives by defintion have more points of failure. It is both the medium and the mechanism to read it; CD and CD-ROM drive in one. Not only do you have to worry about how volatile the information is on the platters, but the fact that every time you power it up, it spins itself closer to mechanical failure. If it moves, it WILL break. The more it moves, the sooner it will break. So sayeth the second law of thermodynamics. If your CD-ROM drive dies, you can get a new one, borrow a friend's, scavenge an old one, et cetera. Your CDs will be fine. If your HDD dies, you're stuck with paying out the ass to a manufacturer or a specialist to get your data out of the drive.

    Yes, CD-Rs write a heck of a lot slower than an HDD, but it's not meant to be anywhere near as dynamic as an HDD. The concept is to know what you want to hang on to beforehand, and then put it on the CD where you'll have it for a decade or two. You may change hard drives, you may change computers, but you'll still have the information.

    And last but not least, when was the last time you tried moving a hard disk from one computer to another?

    At any rate, I think CD-Rs are probably the best option for archiving/backing-up data among all the options available. Everything else you might use (be it magnetic tape, proprieatary magnetic media, or DVD-RAM) require a proprietary drive to read and write. Odds are, you'll be out of luck hardware-wise if you want to read it from another computer. A CD-R, on the other hand, can be read by just about any computer manufactured in the past decade or so. It might as well be a floppy disk it's so universal.

  • by nuclearcamel (412533) on Tuesday May 08, 2001 @09:39PM (#236337)
    My very first thought... could this be a tactic to produce a huge buying rush right before prices actually go down for CD-R's?
  • by Tyler-Durden255 (447448) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:45AM (#236353)
    UPI WarezWire

    With the price of CDR media getting close to $0.0061538461538 per megabyte the entire warez economy is showing signs of going into a slump.

    The warez economy had been on the upswing as a side effect of the crash of the dot-coms because many employees were given illegal copies of the companies' software as severance.

    Economists speculate that the upswing in the warez economy may also have been due to many more dot-commers left with a few weeks of broadband connections previously used to telecommute and no income to buy legitimate software.

    With the bad news about CDR pricing on the horizon investors are taking profits from their holdings high-tech stocks associated with warez like MP3.com, hotline.com and Napster. Said one investor "D00Z! 17'S T1ME T0 BA1L! TH3 3L33T M0N3Y 1S 1N B0NDZ!"

    President Bush reaffirmed his hands off policy towards the CDR market. Spelling out that there would be no price freezes in CDR the president addressed a gathering of WAR3Z kids and said "WATZ Y0U WAN7 A HAND0U7? LAM3RZ!"

10 to the 6th power Bicycles = 2 megacycles