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Originally Posted by phogg
Music is'nt tanking though. Just the old line recording industry....
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Originally Posted by Sonist
Hm, I hadn't noticed that the "music industry" is tanking.
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I'm guessing that's because you (nor I) are equity analysts at an investment bank whose specialty is in the entertainment industry.
Global record sales are down, CD sales are in free-fall,
record stores large and small are closing. Online sales are increasing, they are not making up for the losses in CD revenues, and those sales are highly concentrated into the iTunes music store -- a fate publishers (and apparently, quite a few MR posters
) -- desperately want not to get repeated, especially if Amazon is the "winner." And all of this is likely to accelerate. The only semi-bright spot afaik is the big concerts, which charge increasingly higher ticket fees, and there is no equivalent to concerts in the book field.
You may applaud the troubles the big record labels are in -- that is, if you're a tad short-sighted. Small labels are getting bashed about the same as major labels, and when they fail they will likely need to sell their catalog to pay off creditors. These problems lend to more consolidation in the industry, e.g. the "Big Six" circa 1998 down to the "Big Four" today. And one of the remaining "Big Four" is - surprise! - Sony, whom many MR readers currently tout, among other Great Things, as the potential savior of ebooks as they are innovative in the space and are switching to the open ePub format.
Even if this is primarily an industry adjustment due to the introduction of a disruptive technology, telling the book industry "hey, lookit the music industry!" is NOT going to make them feel all warm and fuzzy about the upcoming changes.