On a recent walk about HMV in the Blanchardstown Centre i was amazed to find, well to be honest i was amazed to find it still selling CD’s at the rate they were and them taking up so much room instore!
With DVD’s and with the new arrivals of the Ipod era and the upcoming (?) era of the Blu-Ray Disc rsdf and the MP3 revoloution that has been rocking the music industry for so long it’s hard to see a long and fruitful lifetime in hte music industry, well so if your to believe TheWeekDaily.com.
I mean people are not gonna stop listening or making music, are they?
The article describes how the middle-man controlled industry has been torn to shred with illegal downloading and a general down turn in sales. In HMV i saw a Steps Greatest Hits (i know, i was confused aswell) CD for €16.99, i shit you not! It amazes me how they can peddle it at such a huge margain and complain when people find a way of doing it cheaper!
According to the article the days of downloading might be numbered as we’re told ;
Not very effectively so far. The industry seems to have devoted most of its energy to largely futile efforts to prevent illegal downloading. It can claim some legal victories, most recently in October, when an industry association successfully sued Jammie Thomas, a 30-year-old single mother in Minnesota, for downloading 24 songs. She was ordered to pay damages of $220,000—or $9,250 per song. But while it’s understandable that an industry would want to crack down on people stealing its product, the notion of big companies hunting and suing single moms and students has been a public-relations disaster. Besides, as one music executive told the Los Angeles Times, piracy is impossible to stop. “You can’t stomp it out. People are going to get it one way or another.”
Another alarming fact is that Ring-Tones are a bigger indsutry than selling CD’s!! I had to read this a second time!
Ringtones, in fact, are now the fastest-growing source of music-industry revenue. “I find myself, when I’m signing a record deal now, asking, ‘Can this sell as a ringtone?’” said Steve Rifkind, president of SRC, a label affiliated with Universal.
Crazy frog is representing more and more of buyers culture, and why not, if you don’t venture into the illegal file sharing side of things, people want music on demand and the day of perusing your local CD shop are gone it would seem…
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