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Old 29th Dec 2018, 11:04 am   #19
Paul_RK
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Fakenham, Norfolk, UK.
Posts: 4,245
Default Re: HMV in administration.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dglcomp View Post
...a lot of artists are going towards selling physical media through their own methods, i.e. pledge music/own website...
Yes: I wonder how much all these completely or in part independent sales amount to relative to the size of the "music industry", and to what extent if any they find their way into the figures. I'm pushing sixty, will never have any interest in streaming and only buy downloads as a last resort. I make monthly payments to a musician and a band, which helps them make ends meet and in return their latest work comes to me as they produce it. Outside of those, various individual pre-orders and pledge campaigns, plus purchases at gigs, must amount to well over half my recorded music expenditure lately.

I'll admit to not having set foot in a record shop in, oh, probably ten years: I remember them largely as places of frustration which usually didn't have what I was looking for and would take often six or eight weeks to get it were I to place an order, if it ever arrived at all. Most likely I'll break my fast by visiting, possibly even regularly, one or two shops in Norfolk which appear well stocked with second-hand LPs, once we've settled in there and I've easy access at home to at least one turntable. Clearly, though, the market for physical media has been in fierce decline as well as becoming more various, CD sales in the USA are a tenth of what they were at their peak and I can't imagine that's very different here, and the days of the High Street chain are pretty much over. Unless, that is, something of the sort can emerge on a model I heard proposed on the radio the other day, somewhat emulating Apple, where shops forgo actually having much if any stock to sell, and reinvent themselves as social hubs and purveyors of Experiences. Something like that...

Paul
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