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[ARSCLIST] Are CDs Going The Way Of The 8-Track? I sure hope so !
Posted after the Virgin story.
I went over to tower.com,to buy the new Green Day on vinyl,nobody else had it,and the number of pages devoted to new vinyl is astounding.l stopped looking at 100 pages.I don't see why, though anybody would spend $21.99 on a nonremastered new vinyl pressing of something like REM's "Murmur",when you can get mint originals on eBay as cheap as 99¢.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/13/eveningnews/main5086775.shtml
June 13, 2009
Are CDs Going The Way Of The 8-Track?
Play CBS Video
Video
Facing The Music
After
a thirty-year run, music compact discs, (CDs) may soon go the way of
eight track tapes. The closing of two major retail outlets may signal
the end of an era. Anthony Mason reports.
Photo
(CBS)
The song is over at Virgin Music Megastores.
The shuttering this weekend of Virgin's last two stores - in
Manhattan and Hollywood - marks the death of a once booming chain - and
another nail in the coffin of the music CD, reports CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason.
CD sales nationwide are down by half since 2000. So Virgin's parent
company closed its 25 Megastores and is leasing the space to other
businesses.
"Everything on these racks, though I don't like to say it, is
available on iTunes, is available on Amazon," said Simon Wright, the
CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group.
And that's where music sales have shifted. Apple's iTunes is now
the nation's largest music seller - with 20 percent of the market.
Amazon has about 8 percent. And some studies show most music is now
downloaded for free illegally.
"The only reason people are coming here is because they like the
buzz of it," Wright said. "They like the sound, they like the feeling,
they like that they can hang put, pick things up and look at it."
Which leaves music lovers longing for that special browsing experience.
"CDs now are catering to fans who like the object, who like high
sound quality of a CD, but then they also want the pictures and the
booklet, and they want to look at the liner notes and the lyrics and
the photos," said Michael Endelman, a senior editor at Rolling Stone.
Two years after the lights went out at the once mighty Tower
Records chain, Virgin was the last giant standing. The void affects
music fans, and artists.
"The death of the CD and the sort of shrinking of record labels
makes it a lot harder for small acts and even for mid-level acts to get
their music out," Endelman said.
And the big acts simply aren't selling albums like they used to.
Back in 2000, when 'N Sync's album "No Strings Attached" debuted at
number one on the charts - the album sold 2.6 million CDs in its first
week.
This year, Green Day needed to sell only 600,000 copies of its "21st Century Breakdown" to hit number one.
"There's a huge generation gap in music," said Russ Crupnick, a
vice president of NPD Group, a marketing research firm. "If you take a
look at teens, for many teens the CD is to what an 8-track might be to
me - it's an antique, it's an artifact."
An artifact, that's getting increasingly harder to find.
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