The world’s largest producer of CDs has announced that it will drop the price of the average disc sold in the U.S. by 30% this fall. Universal, which has suffered from a 3-year slump in album sales, will lower the retail price of an average CD from $17-$19 to $13, and lower the wholesale cost from $12.02 to $9.09. The price cut is seen as an acknowledgement by Universal that the problems of the industry go beyond the phenomenon of online piracy, and that consumers are no longer content to pay inflated prices for pop music.
Tag: 09.04.03
Universal To Lower CD Prices by 30 Percent
As CD sales have dropped 15 percent in the past two years, recording companies have become more shrill in their contention that piracy is hurting their business. On the other hand, maybe CD prices are just too high. So Universal – one of the Big Five – is dropping its album prices. Come October, the company will lower the “suggested” price in the US for most CDs to $13 – down from $17-19.
EMI Exec: CDs Aren’t Overpriced
An EMI exec defends the pricing system for CDs. “The gap between the perception of how record companies like EMI work and the actual reality is now a chasm. I sometimes wonder if it’s because music is intangible that people forget that there are many more costs involved than merely manufacturing a piece of plastic.”
Men In A Bad Light
Increasingly, media seem to be portraying men in unflattering ways says Australia’s Advertising Standards Bureau. “Negative images of men are prevalent in advertisements, news, television drama and films. Their effect? Blokes are starting to mobilise with rumblings of complaint.”
The Auction Market Sweet Spot
“The stereotypical image of the auction buyer as chief executive with a seven-figure salary isn’t the only customer that auction houses are considering important these days. Now they’re seeing a growing number of buyers with perhaps only a few thousand dollars to spend but who add up to a vitally lucrative market in their own right.”
Is Living In The Midwest A Career Handicap?
Charles Baxter is an accomplished writer. But he has had less attention than many other writers with his achievements. “Part of the explanation may lie with the label ‘Midwestern’ and the mostly dubious associations it implies that hover over his fiction like, well, storm clouds over the prairie. ‘When others think about Midwesterners, they think: naïve, somewhat simple. Why else would you live here if not for some failure in judgment’?”
Detroit’s New Cultural Campus
The Detroit Symphony is moving into a renewed home this fall. But that home will be part of a new complex of cultural groups – a new Detroit High School for the Fine, Performing and Communication Arts be built there. “The $122.5 million high school is under construction, and after it opens in 2005, its 1,200 students will study in closer contact with symphony musicians than almost any students anywhere. Detroit Public Television will open a studio there, and there will also be a 50,000-watt AM radio station.”
The Eight-Year-Old 2000 Year-Old Carvings
In July carvings on rocks in Norfolk were discovered and archaeologists suggested they could be 2000 years old. “But the mystery was solved after the Great Yarmouth Mercury local newspaper reported the ‘potentially very important discovery’. Jobless construction worker Barry Luxton, 50, saw the report and a photograph of the rock and recognised it as one that he had engraved.” In 1995.
Art Of The Disappeared Art
“There are hundreds of thousands of missing works of art. Some – like the Cellini sculpture that has just been ransomed for £3.5m and the ‘Leonardo’ that was stolen from the Duke of Buccleuch last week – have been taken by thieves. Others have been destroyed by war or natural disaster. All of them acquire special significance once they disappear.” The Guardian puts together a virtual gallery of the disappeared.