[ARSCLIST] the long-predicted tipping point

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/media/26music.html

There was also an article in the Wall Street Journal this week about how the hit-dependent major 
labels are in a bad bind because a bunch of high-profile artists won't be delivering their albums in 
time for holiday sales. Most interesting, according to that article, the top-3 music retailers are 
now, in order:  iTunes, Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Given that Wal-Mart and Best Buy have both reduced 
floor-space for CD's, the only places left to find reasonable variety are big online merchants like 
Amazon or, if you will settle for lower audio quality, iTunes. The WSJ article also mentioned this 
new trend of major artists both self-releasing and also doing exclusive intro-time deals with one 
retailer (for instance Wal-Mart for the Eagles and Best Buy for Guns n Roses). This puts further 
pressure on the (very) few independent and regional-chain music stores still in business.

However, not all is glum, for now. For the classical fan, ArkivMusic has thousands of CD titles back 
in print via their ArkivCD on-demand CDR program. And for the jazz fan, some old chestnuts that were 
not remastered to the highest quality as CD's are back out in well-mastered black vinyl as part of 
the LP niche-revival. For any genre, some to much of what was in print in the phat years of the 
mid-90's is out of print now (what percentage is out of print depends on the genre), but there is 
still a decent variety choice if you're willing to deal with an online retailer (a place like 
Wal-Mart or Best Buy would probably admit, if you found a semi-honest spokesperson, that they are 
not about deep variety but rather are about moving the chosen hit-hopefuls quickly via high-traffic 
displays).

The bottom line, however, is that the printed/published/retail-channel CD is slowly heading to the 
dustbin. I would say the download alternative, at least the most popular versions (iTunes, Amazon, 
Real, Yahoo, etc) are an inferior replacement due to lossy encoding and lack of 
graphics/lyrics/discographical information in many cases -- yes, there are a couple of niche players 
now offering CD resolution and better, but they are for now small-time with limited variety and few 
mainstream titles. Perhaps once the industry gets its head around the idea of not being the 
physical-printed-matter business (and fully exploits the biggest advantage of download selling --  
variety so buyers have the maximum number of one-cut choices to cherry-pick -- thus having much less 
of the back-catalog out of print becomes an economic imperative, but cheaper to accomplish since 
there's no need to produce and manage physical inventory of CD's), download quality and download 
economics will improve.

-- Tom Fine