response 79 of 160:

Oct 23 15:47 UTC 2002

Harrumph.  Those people were holding off buying CDs, waiting for Napster.

Well, I couldn't find it, but I read an item recently claiming the whole RIAA
"piracy" fight was really intended to stifle small competitors, especially
in Web radio.

response 81 of 160:

Oct 23 16:20 UTC 2002

        That's something that's true at the moment, but five or ten years from
now, you may well have realtime access to 144 or 192kbps mp3 quality audio
streams in realtime to the average American user.

response 83 of 160:

Oct 23 18:22 UTC 2002

I hope 32K sounds a lot better than the 16 20 and 24K I have been hearing
(which is still less hissy than the mono broadcast radio I listen to since
there are no longer any local classical stations).  I have seen 128K stations
listed already.

response 85 of 160:

Oct 23 18:52 UTC 2002

(I had a response lost by a connection lockup which was going to say
essentially what jazz did in resp:81 :: we assume that the bandwidth 
available to home users is only going to get better, and the sound 
quality of Internet radio will only get better.   So it's not irrational 
for the music business to be planning for this future in which 
digital streams are close enough to CD quality for most people; we've 
already seen that a tremendous number of people find MP3 files 
"good enough.")
 
The essay Scott mentions in resp:79 is most likely titled 
"Raising the barriers to entry" and it's at:
  http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/raising.html

response 87 of 160:

Oct 29 22:13 UTC 2002

        If an internet radio site has a maximum of say, 128 listeners,
it is negligeble to a small FM station that usually reach 12,800 listeners
(small town) or or 128,000.  What are the royality/air-play rates those
stations pay?

response 89 of 160:

Nov 7 06:57 UTC 2002

Assorted sales news:  A story reports that online sales of CDs 
have taken a sharp nosedive this year, down 25% from last year, 
which is much sharper than sales overall.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021104/ap_on_hi_te/onli
ne_music_sales_1
 (note the URL wrapped)
 
Meanwhile, USA Today reports that while overall CD sales are down 
over 10% this year, country music sales are *up* 5%.    
This correlates with sales being up at Wal-Mart and other 
"rack accounts;" such retailers sell about half of the 
country sales.  

Is this the effect described by Moby: would country music fans
be less computer-literate than rock and rap fans?
Or is this evidence that what's going on is a huge shift in 
public tastes?
 
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/2002-11-06-cover-country_x.htm

response 91 of 160:

Nov 8 14:31 UTC 2002

I know that I've actually gone out and bought at least three country
albums in the last year or two. That's a big jump up from zero, which is
what it had bee n for many years.

response 93 of 160:

Nov 11 22:53 UTC 2002

Gotta give him credit for chutzpah.

response 95 of 160:

Nov 14 01:18 UTC 2002

What a great strategy.  That'll certainly increase CD sales.

Huh?

response 97 of 160:

Nov 16 06:53 UTC 2002

It seems that Roxio, the CD burner software maker, is going to buy
the assets of Napster for $5 million.  As I expected, this is 
substantially less than the $8 million offered by BMG; the bankruptcy
court was convinced to rule that the BMG offer was a sweetheart
deal which wasn't maximizing value for the creditors. 

(I argue that the record companies, which made this argument in their
role as holders of damage awards against Napster, didn't care that 
they were going to get less money in the bankruptcy: instead, 
the record companies were trying to screw the other creditors, 
mostly Napster's lawyers, as much as possible.  This seems to me to 
be a serious perversion of the bankruptcy laws; the rejection of
the BMG offer by the court was supposed to lead to *better* offers.)  

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-965960.html?tag=lh
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/28126.html

-----

Followup on resp:89, on the report of a study claiming a sharp decline
in the Internet CD ordering business.  The first reports claimed 
a 25% decline in sales for the first three quarters of 2002, relative
to the same period in 2001.  The NY Times had a story which was even
more alarmist: a 39% decline for the third quarter, relative to 
2001, and the base period in 2001 includes the weeks after the 
September 11 attacks, when US entertainment spending dried up 
for a few weeks.

But the bottom of the Times report was taken up with reports by Amazon, the 
dominant  online CD retailer, and from CD Universe (#5 in the field, I think)
saying that their sales were doing just fine.  This doesn't make sense:
if sales are down 25-39%, we should see online retailers folding; 
we shouldn't see reports of sales holding steady.

So I'm suspecting the study reporting such a sharp sales decline online
is bogus.

response 99 of 160:

Nov 17 04:18 UTC 2002

I dunno. I buy CDs online from small retailers more than not. But then I like
to buy odd and obscure stuff when I get music -- folk music, from other
countries, that's not available on Amazon. I haven't gotten that much bought
music this year -- and most of that has been at a brick-and-mortar store, or
from the artist directly, though. (OhMIGawd, I just figured it out. It's all
my fault! I'm the reason they think all the sales are declining! I haven't
been out there spending money on CDs so the slump is all my fault! I must go
hang my head in shame now.)

response 101 of 160:

Nov 18 15:33 UTC 2002

I rarely buy new CDs from "brick and mortar" stores, these days.  They
rarely seem to have what I want in stock, and if I have to special-order
I might as well cut out the middle man and go straight to Amazon or
CDNOW.  When I go to a record store these days, it's usually to buy used
CDs.

response 103 of 160:

Nov 18 20:20 UTC 2002

gulag