Despite a Marketing Blitz, CD Sales Continue to Slide

The New York Times ^ | 12/23/2002 | Lynette Holloway

[cherry]

"borderline crap"

how true....

real reason that music sales are down is that there is just not enough good music to buy anymore..

after collecting all that you want from the 70's and 80's and 90's what else do you buy?

when I went thru my country phase I was buying like crazy....well, look at "country" now....

[Tench_Coxe]

bookmarked

[willyboyishere]

Around here, BORDERS bookstore has begun to put real dents
in the business of both BARNES and NOBLE and TOWER RECORDS.
Tower also claims to be suffering because of NYC's Virgin Records store, not to mention the 'net, like Amazon in particular. One wonders if Tower would have even lasted this long were it not for their ability to find an endless stream of kids willing to work for minimum wage just to be around "the music" 24/7. And most of the local Tower's business seems to come from young people who look like the
clerks and cashiers (a nose-ring here, a flourescent hair-do there). The same fate maybe on the horizon for Home Depot, which has no less than 3 huge stores within a 25 mile radius of my house. The Depots all start out well, but within a few years the same problems set in: long waits on line, inevitably followed by some problem with bar codes, or prices coming up wrong, followed by too few cashiers at
busy times, on top of the inventory starting to spill out in the aisles, and the stores themselves getting dangerously unkempt and sloppy.
A new store called LOWE'S is going to open in the vicinity, and I expect people will flock to it, and continue patronizing it, if they play their cards right, if they've learned any lessons from the Home Depot example.

[js1138]

Rental stores like Blockbuster's are on borrowed time. They are never going to get over the hassle involved with going down to the store, waiting in line and then having to scramble back before the deadline to drop the movie off in order to avoid late charges. It's a real inconvenience to rent movies. Eventually consumers will either just buy the movie or go "pay-per-view"...

That must be why Blockbuster owns the pay-per-view channels on DirecTV.

My guess is the entertainment industry will eventually go to a service industry or utitility business model -- charging for convenience and packaging rather than trying to sell prepackaged products. You will pay a monthly fee based on usage rather than buying shrink wrapped disks. CD and video stores will be able to give you any package you can define, eliminating the need to burn your own.

[Darth Hillary]

Rip at 320 with atleast a 20Khz bandwidth, I find it very difficult to tell the difference between a high quality MP3 and it's original source, even on high end stereo equiptment. You can still get a 4->5 fold compression ratio at 320.

[steve-b]

Besides, homemade CDs just don't sound very good

Unless your computer and/or software are defective, a homemade CD should sound exactly like the original -- it's digital data, sampled with enough bandwidth to fully capture the normal human hearing range.

Or did you mean that homemade CDs from phonograph records and cassette tapes don't sound very good (becuase of the limitations of the original medium)? If so, you can get considerable improvement with sound processing software, once you learn how to use it.

[steve-b]

MP3's have poor sound a cd has better sound.

The sound of MP3s is highly sensitive to the bitrate (64kbs is rather thin-sounding, 128kbs is generally good enough for portable listening through headphones, 192kps is close enough to CD quality that only careful listening under excellent conditions will reveal the difference) and encoding parameters.

[MSgt Smith]

Rental stores like Blockbuster's are on borrowed time.

Netflix.com

Not that I would advocate such things but

DVD Burner + Smartripper,Infoedit,Nero burner