Internet looks set to kill off music stores

[sickmanofasia]

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The music buisness is in crisis and record buying has gone down by 15.4%this year according to the british phonographic industry .

It's a simular story in the states with cd sales dropping 7% on top of 5% last year.

A predetor has been stalking the record retailer for a number of years=the internet.

Using a £50 cd rewriter hooked up to a laptop computer ,you can burn off as many home made cd's you want often months before their official release.

There is paranioa in the music industry .

High street giants HMV are trying to combat the pirates and yesterday unveiled a new way of buying music over the internet.

For only £4.99 a month subscribers to their website can choose from a catalouge of nearly 100,000 individual tracks by current stars .
From next month subsribers can use the new service in 3 ways -either listen to individual tracks once,known as streaming,rent them for a month or buy a permanant copy.BUT this is unlikely to threaten the hundreds of file sharing programs which allow users to swop music with one another for free.

But Stuart Rowe,e-commerce director for HMV,said the move further toward internet sales did not herald the end of the traditional record shop .

In America ,the craze for downloading music is costing the industry £200 million a year.

Record companies are getting tough-2 years ago the first popular file sharing service,Napster,was ruled to have violated copyright law.But when Napster closed dozens of copycats sprang up to take it's place.

Pirates are making a killing-burning off thousands of copies to flog at markets and boot sales.

Iremember buying bootleg tapes as a teenager then forking outlater for the oringinal because the sound quality was so bad,not so with cd downloads-the digital quality is almost perfect.the only thing you loose out is the packaging.

In the seventies LP's were stamped with the warning Home taping is killing music.

The internet may well finish it off ..


This article has been taking from local newspaper [UK]

[kaine]

If we were not charged such a high price for something that costs pence to produce would there be a black maket for it???????????????

[BILL YATES]

i agree drop the price a little for the **** then it will be easier for them cuz even though the music is like perfect quality if the originals werent so expensive then i would buy it

[xoutlawx]

Exactly. If they would take the price down then people will probably start buying again. Internet has changed how we get our music and it will probably stay like that for a long time.

[Sting4life_MB]

I cant agree more. Prices are too high, especially when u dont know what ur getting. If you've ever bought a cd that was total crap, u will agree too...

[sonic25]

Legal robbery i think !