Hi, Casey,
I personally haven’t bought a CD in years. Partly due to the fact that (at least for me) I don’t have the money to, but also you can listen to pretty much everything online for free now. plus if you want to pay for sites like Spotify, they are so cheap for what you get in return. It’s sad, but I think for most people, CDs are a bit of a luxury now. Also what with current technology like iPhones, Bluetooth etc, it kind of kills the CD player.
On a side note, I saw the new Apple MacBook Pro laptop doesn’t even have a CD drive any more…
And in terms of audio quality, digital formats are just as good. I actually did a large empirical study at University to see if people could tell the difference between CD and digital, and almost no one could, even professional sound engineers from the studio I was working at.
I even worked at a record store for a while that almost went bankrupt due no one buying hard formats any more.
I know that a lot of artists will sometimes do “special editions” that include artwork, information and maybe some extra tracks, but ultimately that all ends up on the net too.
If you have requests, it might be worth producing a limited few, but I think demand is much lower than it used to be.
Oliver