Hypebot reports – You know that things are bad when the exclusive supplier of the nation’s top brick and morter music seller decides to call it quits. In another sign of declining sales, Wal-Mart rack jobber Handleman is exiting the music business in North America.
Albert A. Koch, President and Chief Executive Officer of Handleman, said, “Our decision to exit the North American music business was difficult but unavoidable. CD music sales have been declining at double-digit rates for several years both industry-wide and at our customers’ stores, resulting in a sharp drop-off in our business. Unfortunately, even the significant steps we’ve taken over the past two years to reduce our costs have not enabled the Company to return to profitability. We have reluctantly concluded that there simply were not enough further cost reduction opportunities available to offset the margin erosion in future years from continuing sales declines.
people shouldnt shop at wal mart because small business gets killed and they sell guns and people get discriminated against.
lol!11!.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:21 amDoes any of the aforementioned “significant steps” include reducing the retail cost of the CDs, or rethinking their distribution altogether (as in, get out of the CD business)? The magic 8-ball on my desk says… “Signs point to no.”
June 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pmi can’t think of a product that soared so high in coolness and crashed so low. remember the long cd packages of the late 80s? i bonded with depeche mode and pink floyd in those days.
a cd these days has been reduced to a useless step in the way of actually listening to the music. the great thing about vinyl is that it requires a step back from your computer. cue up the turntable and enjoy being disconnected.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:12 pmI know this is old old news, since the book has been out forever now, but William Gibson summed this all up very nicely in his thriller, Spook Country. He said–and I paraphrase–that when it comes to CDs, their physicality worked because they existed as a mass media product in a culture which consumed those products. Now the culture IS mass media, so physical product is redundant.
I know that’s basically the Gospel of the P-Moose, but it was exciting to read it in a work of fiction and nicely summed up in a single paragraph that even a right-wing republican dosed with acid could understand.
June 6th, 2008 at 5:29 am