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Here's an article which nudged me to start this item.

http://www.latimes.com/business/cotown/20010418/t000032721.html
"The Oldies Are Still Goodies."

The article's hook is that "Journey's Greatest Hits" sold 11,185 copies in 
the retail reports listed last week, a bigger sales figure than recent albums 
from Dr. Dre, Ricky Martin or Macy Gray.   The sales power of back catalog
classic rock items is glossed over by the music industry; ever since the biz  
tired of the embarrassment of Pink Floyd's eternal position on the charts,
albums over two years old are now banished from the official Billboard 
Top 200 to a segregated catalog chart.  But back catalog still accounts for
a third of the albums sold in the US.

The article cites a Sony Legacy marketing survey which claims that almost
half of the customers for Janis Joplin CDs are under 25.

The industry worries about the Napster threat to their catalog wealth.
Even legitimate downloads, song by song, could threaten that wealth, 
because currently back catalog sells in album-sized chunks for between
$10-$19 per album, depending on the artist.   The industry also worries
that many current top-selling artists -- both the bubblegum pop and the 
hip hop fields -- are not showing any staying power for their older albums,
in comparison to the durable classic rock stars.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss