http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Jennings-t.html
Also suggested, though not endorsed, as one man's recent reading list ...
"Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper
and
"The Life and Death of Classical Music" by Norman Lebrecht, which is actually now a few years old.
For an earlier look at where things were inevitably heading, see "Hit Men."
For a look at where the dot-com crowd wants to see all this go, see "The Long Tail" (which actually
describes a viable business model for the vaults once the intitial cost of full digitization is
borne by someone somewhere) and "Free" (which I don't think produces a viable model for intellectual
content that takes any time or effort to produce but may be where things are inevitably headed),
both by Chris Anderson.
One other data point. I've been watching this huge Concord Music Group inventory purge at
Oldies.com:
http://www.oldies.com/collection-view/Fantasy-Warehouse-Clearance-Sale.html
After weeks of this sale, very few titles are sold out. I'm not sure if this means that
Concord/Fantasy had a massive inventory glut that may never get worked all the way down, or if
demand for some pretty darn good jazz and classical and soul CD's is so low that even at $5 a disc,
far below the download-album price, these have no takers. I don't have enough facts to say one way,
the other, or some other way I'm not laying out here.
A final possible data point. I was told but can't confirm that most plants built to manufacture CD's
now mostly manufacture DVD's and production of music-only 5" discs in any week is limited to a few
runs for a few titles. This might not be true in all plants all the time, for instance I bet Sony
was working overtime to get Michael Jackson "Thriller" CD's into the pipeline after he died.
-- Tom Fine
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