Idolator
The record business will have a very important meeting on May 11, when the RIAA hosts a meeting for record labels to figure out the future of their business. Will the discussion focus on innovations in DRM? No. Antipiracy initiatives? Nyet. It will instead focus on a new physical medium to "replace" the CD on record stores' ever-shrinking shelves:
"Other new format efforts have failed in the past, but we want to explore if there's a play to be made to come up with a replacement for the CD," says one executive who will attend the meeting. "While individual companies may have their own thoughts on new formats, when new ones are introduced it usually works better when everyone shares their ideas with each other."
We're just hoping that the innovation that comes from this meeting is something as forward-thinking as the record industry has proven itself to be over the past few years—perhaps the time has finally come for the "U-8," the 8-track-welded-to-USB innovation that is, at the very least, backwards-compatible.
RIAA, Labels Plan New Format Meeting [Billboard.biz]
Comments
They should shape it like a knife pointed at their guts and be done with it.
From the press release:
The Interwebitron! You can't see it, touch it, smell it or taste it, but we'll sell it to you! Plays right out of your computer speakers! Buy NOW!
First up: Reissues of all the albums we've sold to you already... twice!
(Disclaimer: exclamation points theirs.)
i "replaced" the cd with vinyl years ago.
Awesome! I've been waiting for years to buy my 10th copy of Pet Sounds.
May I suggest to the RIAA and friends that they wait for the market to recover from its colostomy?
Bring back the laser disc! At 12" imagine how many Terra bytes can be stored using a blue laser!
Try fitting one of those inside your computer!
It's been said before, but I think it needs to be said again: I (and perhaps most other people who enjoy paying for music) really, really wish they would accept the fact that a significant paradigm shift has occurred, and adapt a new profit model that would allow the music-buying public to either own high quality digital copies, or to add in enticing extra value to the existing physical mediums available.
That said, I'd be super-happy if they went insane and decided that the format of the "future" is vinyl, and started doing something similar to what Merge did with the vinyl release of Gimme Fiction: I gots me my gorgeous vinyl record and a wav encoded CD-R.
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