Iridium Drops Prices From Ludicrous to Ridiculous

Music, Music, and more Music

from the shake-your-money-maker dept

Thu, Jun 10th 1999 1:20pm — Prash Agarwal

NEWS.COM has three interesting music stories today. First is a story on the latest music piracy estimates from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The most striking thing about these numbers is that while piracy is up, so are sales of legitimate music. Has it occured to them that piracy drives legal sales?

Second story is about Sony digital delivery kiosks in Virgin Mega stores. The idea is you can walk into a Virgin store and burn your own CD/DVD/MD or download songs to SDMI compliant HW. How is that anymore appealing to consumers than the typical brick and mortar experience? Guys, do it over the net, so I can do this from home!

Last but not least is a story about EMI taking a stake in MusicMaker.com in exchange for rights to include EMI recordings in the MusicMaker catalog. This is cool because EMI, 3rd largest major label, is taking a big step on the web. But I'm not sure how well custom CD's will do in general. I still remember back in the 80's when you could do a custom tape at Tower Records. Big flop as I recall.

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Mike (profile), 14 Jun 1999 @ 1:06am

Problems with kiosks/making own CDs
Apparently one of the problems with instore kiosks was just that folks would spend a ton of time there going through all the available music and not actually buying. Since only one person could use the kiosk at a time the returns were dismal (not to mention all the maintenance issues). However, by just doing it over the web and letting people make custom CDs from home might be a different story. Of course, the record companies have obviusly reasons to go against this (they want to sell full albums, of course). Also, how many people think through the process enough to want to make their own custom CDs?
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- Alex Blust, 30 Oct 2003 @ 5:01pm
  
  Re: Problems with kiosks/making own CDs
  Mike,
  I own a small company and think that this is the future of digital music. Controled Downloads, I am developing larger machine that can speed up the process by light year and am looking for distribution partners. Controled Downloads, Is the Future of Digatal Music
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