Because, simply, DVD-A is dead and has been rejected by the market. In addition, the use of a single medium is necessary for market success as the format wars have shown.
Well actually surround music in the form of dvd-a........
and sacd
and DTS-CD
and 5.1 dvd-video is effectively dead except for a tiny subset of the music fan population (who are probably already all registered right here!
). Why? Because in my mind,
99.9% of the music listening population doesn't even know of surround music's existence. But if given the choice, for surround music purposes - stereo music listening can be handled by CDs and MP3s - I truly think dvd-audio would have made it as a niche format.
I do agree that one format definitely helps, and I've said so myself on this very forum, but that leads to another problem with using Blu-ray for surround music (at least initially) and that is the cost of the players. Even generic brands still cost @$200, but even major brands like Sony and Panasonic now regularly offer basic SD dvd players for $45 to $50. Plus the discs themselves are still costly to manufacture. Just two more stumbling blocks for an already fragile "what-the-heck-is-that?" format (I mean surround music, not the Blu-ray format).
The SD dvd format is very probably going to be around I'll bet for another decade at least because it can still do many things that many people like (well, except for interactive/animated menus
like a BD disc) and is now seriously inexpensive to manufacture, software and hardware. And all BD players I know of can play them.
But those DVD player users have rejected DVD-A already.
See first paragraph above.
So while Blu-ray would seem to be the next logical choice with which to sell surround music, if the labels want surround music to succeed even in a minor way, it would require a really wise decision on their part to not repeat what they did with sacd and dvd-audio, which was NOT marketing it in any coherent/effective manner. Plus the lousy title selection for newer rock/pop didn't help at all.*
I still see the Beatles' CD+dvd-audio package available for sale, and the King Crimson dvd-audios are still on schedule, so someone must still believe in dvd-audio's viability.
* and even as a fan of the format, I have to say the authoring of many dvd-a discs was horrible, even if AFAIK the standards include options that can cause a dvd-a disc to act essentially like a conventional CD
: discs that started playing whether or not you pushed the play button; discs that automatically repeated playback after it ended without the user choosing that option
; discs that would not allow the user to switch to other mixes during playback i.e. to stereo by using the remote's "audio" button; menu music that never stopped, etc. Based on what I've read, all these features can be chosen/rejected by the person authoring the disc and thankfully, are not mandatory features of the dvd-audio standard. Warner Bros' and DTS Inc's discs are the best discs I've used navigation-wise and act much like a regular CD most of the time. And dvd-audio discs don't even need a video portion to work - the
Elv1s greatest hits disc was proof of that.