what do you get when you mix together Holy Water and Castor Oil?
A religious movement.
what do you get when you eliminate hard copy media sales?
a movement aimed at price gouging and distribution of unverifiable content.
do bare in mind, current online suposed HD file sales are presently based on retail CD sales!
competition is based on a set of altrnative paths for consumption of goods, and it is competition which serves to maintain more or less appropriate pricing with respect to merchandise.
removing alternative buying choices erases aspects of competition thereby enabling inherent price controls to be less encumbered..
essentially, this loss at wally World is just the tip of the iceberg and others are folowing suit.
once ther are no online, local, or secure sales of CDs, then what?
we are already seeing streaming subscription service wars.
soon we'll see or there will be proprietary file sale wars from BMG, SONY, UNIVERSAL, EMI, WARNER, POLYGRAM, and various independants, as they attempt to obtain their market share for the artists on contract., and themselves by foregoing the 'middleman'.
thereafter how long do you think dedicated music stores wil stand?
Hard copy vinyl sales will either die off or their cots escalate enormously .
I see the eventual online only file sales as just one more forced change in formats. one which carries with it an extremely inflated profit margin, and simultaneously an unverifiable product.
luckily, this theme will take longer than I have time on this planet, to fully culminate but it bodes poorly for new generations and falsely adds to a upwardly spiraaling needlessly inflated economy.
as was near immediately said, some are deliriously content with this prospect whose only saving grace is pure convenience at higher costs.
If they are loving this burgeoning business plan they must be unbalanced as they are merely being taken unjustifiably. and rapidly to the cleaners.
least I appear at all hypocritical or hard lined I am unopposed to online files sales. I have and likely will again buy them, now and then.
however, I am against having different possible outlets for obtaining media inordinantly removed. in the guise of some inauspicious formulae.
in spite of the complaints about the environmental impacts of hard copy production, it seems easy for them to ignore the loss of jobs that entire process endows.
manufacturing, distributing, archiving, shipping, receiving, displaying marketing, inventoring, selling, all require hands on.
BTW isn't recycling the move to reduce or eliminate environmental impact and prevent landfills and off shore venues from being over burdened with shiny discs, straws, cups, balloons, etc.?
if so, its not the CDs that is the problem, it is those who refuse to recycle,.
the bottom line IMO is IF indeed this is a better more cost effective, safer for the globe maturation of technology whose inherent attributes convey lower operational costs, then there should unquestionably be a comensurate more modest purchase price attached to a verifiable product.
if not, its just another format change which refuses to, or can not, give an appropriate justification to its end result
or re-learn how to be happy with MP3s again.
this should indeed make everyone deliriously happy.
that is of course when no one can recall when music could be acquired, touched, held, admired, , and enjoyed without the need for connectivity and redundancy.
BTW... due to the online forum colective bargaining agreement i'm paid by the syllable, not the word.
i've reached out to local 'On & On' self help groups, consequently truncated or abridged posts may be delivered by me soon enough.
today however is not 'that' day.
sorry.😉
