response 41 of 55:

Dec 7 03:16 UTC 2007

i haerd that rcord cmpanies are no longer ot suport  the    cd  format
as of jan 08 .. is this ture?

response 43 of 55:

Dec 7 16:16 UTC 2007

I'd be curious, ts, if you can find the source on that.  I follow
music biz news about as much as any consumer, and I have heard 
nothing of the sort.  The closest I can come up with is widespread
reports that the major chain retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Target,
Best Buy, and maybe even Borders, are going to cut 30% or more of 
their CD space after the holidays, which would be January 2008.
 
And DRM embedded on CD appears to be a completely dead issue for
normal consumer releases.  There may still be some DRM software 
applied to promo/review copies to try to control early file-sharing
leaks on new releases, but I believe that the four major labels
have dropped all copy-protection efforts on consumer CDs.
There were two things driving that decision:  
  (1) the messy fallout from the "Sony Rootkit" DRM; 
  (2) the labels finally were forced to accept that a
large number of CD purchasers intend to put the music on their iPods,
an operation which was obstructed by most of the on-CD DRM systems.

<krj realizes that the second paragraph is probably incomprehensible
 to anyone who hasn't been following the "Music War" saga. >

response 45 of 55:

Dec 7 17:20 UTC 2007

(Copy protected in ways other than CSS encryption, I mean.  They're
being designed to make it hard to copy the encrypted VOB file from the
CD to a computer.)

response 47 of 55:

Dec 7 18:07 UTC 2007

Gull:  Bring us some references if you can?  I'm so saturated in 
music-biz coverage that I am not keeping up with much of what is 
happening in Videoland.

response 49 of 55:

Dec 7 18:34 UTC 2007

Ah, same sort of trick that was done by Cactus Data Shield, among
others, for the CD market.  

Incidentally, I don't have the link immediately available, but 
the expectation is that DVD sales are going to finish down 4%
for 2007, compared to the previous year.  This will be the first
decline in DVD sales ever.   I think these are USA numbers.

response 51 of 55:

Dec 11 03:52 UTC 2007

hmmm    a   0  or a  1  ?

response 53 of 55:

Dec 13 19:11 UTC 2007

This one is an ugly URL, sorry:

http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNjcmZm
diZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTcyMjc5OTMmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3

It's a report on New Jersey-based small CD labels which are
encountering more and more difficulty.  The main label profiled in the
story is Shanachie, which handles a great deal of Celtic folk and
reggae.  Indie rock label Bar/None is also in distress.  In contrast,
metal label Eclipse is doing well; they get more from iTunes sales per
copy than from physical CD sales.

Shanachie says sales are down 20% over the last five years.  The loss
of Tower Records and small retailers has been a blow.  Borders is no
longer welcoming to small indie labels; they are demanding a $2/copy
"co-op" payment to stock the discs in their store.  (I did not know
that Borders had moved to demanding a stocking fee from labels; I
thought that was only a policy at Trans World.)

Shanachie used to be able to work some with Wal-Mart (!!) but Wal-Mart
is now streamlining their CD selection and Shanachie and other
specialty labels are now mostly frozen out.

-----

The Nielsen Soundscan numbers for CD sales are turning into a rout
at the end of the year.  These are gleaned from the week-by-week 
sales reports from Billboard and no one story has yet assembled the 
threads:
 
In early November, off the top of my head, year-to-date album sales
were down 14% from 2006.

For Thanksgiving week, including the famous Black Friday shopping 
day, the downturn accelerated: sales for that one week were down 
18% vs. that week year ago.

For the next week, the downturn accelerated again:  sales for the one
week were down 23% vs. year-ago.  That's the most recent sales report.

Those numbers are for album sales, defined as [CDs + downloads sold 
in an album-bunch].  Including single track downloads probably makes
the number look a small bit better, but this is still awful for the
labels and for retailers.   The rarely-reported numbers on physical 
CD sales are usually -5% from the commonly cited album sales number,
so that would speculatively put last week's CD sales as -28% compared
to the same week last year.

response 55 of 55:

Dec 13 20:53 UTC 2007

re 53 ... jhere ios the shlrot non-ugly version:
  
   http://url.rexroof.com/16616