The death of the CD

Reports of the death of the CD aren’t exagerated.

Wired magazine reports that Apple’s ITunes store has sold over five billion songs.

Meanwhile, Price WaterhouseCoopers LLC released a report that sales downloaded songs will surpass that of CDs by 2010.

In other words, your jewel-cased discs will soon be going the way of the 8-track tape and the reel-to-reel.

What’s different about this change, though, is that music downloads aren’t just albums in different formats. They are a fundamentally different forms, obviously pushing the single instead of the album.

So is the long-form song set, with a specific order, dead? Will such works as The Beach Boy’s “Pet Sounds” and The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” ever happen again?

Does the loss of this form make it more difficult for us to discover songs? Or are there plenty of other new ways now, such as Pandora, to discover unfamliar music?

And what will up-and-coming bands sell at the back of the club after a show?

Your thoughts?