Re: [ARSCLIST] "All hail the analogue revolution..."

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I love the little bit at the end about people who buy LPs "to use like a poster ... especially if 
they don't have a record player." Vinyl posers!!

One comment -- a millions LPs sold in the UK does not a trend make. How many million iPods were sold 
in the UK? No, vinyl is not "making a comeback" but it was never killed off and is now a profitable 
niche for some. Unlike the CD, I could see the vinyl niche surviving into the all-download era 
around the corner. The economics of that niche are such that you can be (mildly) profitable with 
short runs and inventory/warehouses. CD's are essentially an overpriced commodity right now, which 
is why the economics don't work. The music companies would love to do away with manufacturing and 
warehousing and having to rely on the likes of Wal-Mart and Amazon to sell physical products. If 
they could figure out some way to get Joe Public to pay the same net profit-per-artist in a 
completely "virtual" online transaction, they'd be there tomorrow. The problems are that first of 
all Joe Public first of all doesn't want to pay for all the junk songs on most albums, so the net 
recoverable per artist goes down and second of all there are all the piracy fears (which may or may 
not be overblown). And then there are those of us who think 99 cents for a crappy-sounding MP4 file 
with semi-onerous copy protection is the biggest ripoff going. But the key thing is, the prime 
music-buying agegroup is inexorably moving away from physical CD's and to the iPod/download world, 
so that's where the business will inevitably go. LPs will be there as a niche, no doubt. And I think 
high-resolution digital may survive as a download model, but the pricing will be such that it won't 
be mainstream. I can't for the life of me understand why Apple doesn't nip the quality issue in the 
bud and put a security wrapper around their Apple Lossless Format and offer high-rez (CD quality) 
downloads for maybe $1.25 or $12 per album. Apparently, quality isn't an issue to the vast fat 
middle of their market.

BTW, the trend away from physical libraries of music is also big in the upper crust. I know a guy 
who gets $5 per CD to rip it into iTunes and turn over a loaded hard drive to his clients. They send 
him their whole CD library. He loads up a hard drive with MP3 or AAC or ALF or WAV or whatever they 
ask for (to his credit, he advocates ALF or WAV but you'd be surprised how many clients get all 
tight-wallet about a 400gig drive vs. a 200gig drive). He then installs the hard drive in their 
system and reads it all into their iTunes. Sometimes they pay him another $150 to load up their iPod 
so they can be the coolest player in business class on their next flight without having to actually 
know or do anything "technical." This guy has all the business he can do, just from advertising in a 
few Upper East Side society-type publications. In fact last I heard, he had farmed out the ripping 
jobs to his kid brother and the brother's college buddies. Oh, and some of his clients don't want 
the CD's back, so he does a booming trade in used CD's (that's how I got to know him).

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Milan P. Milovanovic" <mijel@xxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2006 5:23 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] "All hail the analogue revolution..."


> Well,
>
> our subject is even at Yahoo, today:
>
> http://www.yahoo.com/s/397244