Word: lps
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John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the music industry is entering a new era. He sees the 20th century as a time when music was stuffed into containers--LPs, eight-track tapes, CDs. Now that musicians can reach fans directly, there's no need for "container makers," i.e., record labels. "Record companies are in a death struggle with the Web," says Barlow. "They're using techniques that have been used in the war on drugs--zero tolerance, ramping up education and enforcement and trying...
...composition by a particular pianist, and he will rattle off all the details: the record label, the date and place of the recording, possibly even the precise microphone placement for the session. It's also likely that the recording will be in Deacon's personal collection of 25,000 LPs and 10,000 CDs. So when Philips decided to anthologize the work of this century's finest pianists, Deacon was a natural for the job of executive producer of the series...
...course, the boom years of the 1980s--when music lovers were replacing their LPs with CDs--are over. Classical sales have declined from 10% of the record market to about 5% now. To turn a penny, most record companies have halved their output of new classical recordings; instead, the buzz word in the business these days is compilations...
...people who produce and sell the music. "The music industry is still much closer to its artists than to its customers," says Paco Underhill of Envirosell Inc., a consumer-behavior research firm in New York City. Record companies, he observes, sell CDs exactly the same way they sold LPs: as one-size-fits-all package deals. Meanwhile, consumers with shrinking leisure hours and attention spans are demanding that their music be portable and personalized or at least varied. Movie sound tracks like the one from Titanic, for example, are scoring big, while such unlikely music retailers as Starbucks...
...lovers of the wired generation may demand it. "Kids prize their computers more than their stereos," says Wendy Hafner, director of music marketing at Intel. Record companies "would have to be crazy not to take advantage of that," she says. Baby boomers who came of age transferring songs from LPs to cassettes--often in various kinds of smoke-filled rooms--can think of it as the '90s version of rolling your...