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Her Special Place For Innocence
When you live in New York City, downtown represents, the up and comers, or the new money, as its called. Uptown represents the established and entrenched, the old money as its called. Bob had always worked downtown, he loved the narrow and...
Legal Music Download Sites VS P2P File Sharing.
This article compares the differences between legal music
download sites VS file sharing networks.
1) Music files available for download:
The p2p file sharing networks heavily out number the legal music
sites when it comes to the...
Mp3 Music Downloads
A REALLY COOL INDEPENDENT MUSIC WEB
SITE
A REALLY COOL INDEPENDENT MUSIC WEB SITE
Today there is a massive market in the Mp3 and music world, now
with the edition of podcasting and faster broadband we can see
what the...
Sony Music / Nashville Star's Tracy Gershon to speak at Indie Music Week!
Nashville, Tennessee - Indie Music Week has announced that Tracy Gershon, Senior Director of A & R and Artist Development, Sony Nashville, will be participating as an Indie Music Week panelist. IMW, taking place in Nashville March 11-12, will...
Who else wants to burn CDs off the internet for free?
It’s all over the news. Every few months the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA sues a couple hundred people because they wanted to burn CDs off the internet for free. You thought about it and you don’t want to be one of them. Maybe...
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Is the Record Album Dead? Not by a Long Shot.
In 1982, Sony and Philips introduced the compact disc, a digital music playback format that used a laser to read the disc. The compact disc was expected to quickly replace the long play record album (LP) that Columbia had introduced in 1949. The product took off quickly, even at a retail price that was nearly double that of a record album, and sales of record albums plummeted. The CD, as compact discs quickly became known, offered what audio magazines called “perfect sound forever” while offering immunity to the effects of the wear and tear that often left records noisy. The record companies reduced the price of manufacture through improved production methods, and the cost of manufacturing a CD soon fell below that of manufacturing a record. Even so, compact discs continued to sell well at the higher price, making the CD quite a profitable product, indeed.
In order to maximize their profits, the record companies decided to phase out the phonograph record. They told their retailers that they would no longer accept returns on defective albums. This caused many retailers to stop stocking records altogether, and the record album had more or less disappeared from the market by 1990. And then something strange happened. The record began to make a comeback. Sparked by a few artists that demanded that their record companies issue their product in record form, the LP never quite went away. New albums by bands such as Pink Floyd and Metallica were issued in the mid-1990’s in LP form, and those releases not only sold out, but
now command a hefty premium on the collector’s market. A number of independent bands that were signed by small record companies began to issue records in addition to CDs, partly just to be “different” and partly because the band members just liked listening to records. In some cases, in order to spur sales of the record, artists would include an extra song or two on the record that was not included on the compact disc of the same album. Throughout the 1990’s and to the present day, several million record albums have been sold every year.
Granted, records are harder to find in stores than they were fifteen years ago, and an interested buyer might have to seek out a collector’s shop or buy them online. But new albums by major and minor artists, along with older, “classic” albums, continue to be released in the LP format. Last year, in Japan, EMI Records issued every album by the Beatles in LP form as limited edition items. They sold out quickly, even at nearly $500 for the set. The market for records is smaller than it used to be, but the record album still thrives.
About the Author
©Copyright 2005 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm that operates several retail Websites, including AluminumChristmasTrees.net, a site devoted to vintage aluminum Christmas trees and accessories, and RarePinkFloyd.com, a site devoted to rare records, compact discs and by the band Pink Floyd.
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