Do the CD's you buy nowadays get skippy more easily- has the quality gone down?

I have some of the first CD's I ever bought that look like they would skip like crazy, but play fine. Conversely I have newer CD's that feel lighter and scratch and skip really easily. (It's 2006- and they can't make a music medium that doesn't get screwed up really easily???) And the record industry wonders why everyone just downloads stuff.