Remember way back when the RIAA used to sue people for sharing and downloading music? You probably haven’t noticed but they seemed to have stopped doing that, although it’s probably because it wasn’t a constructive tactic rather than that people learned their lesson and stopped pirating music.

In fact retail music sales are much worse. Back then, Toronto had Sunrise Records, Music World, Sam the Record Man, HMV and a bunch of retail places (Zellers, Walmart, Future Shop, Best Buy, etc). The music stores have since closed down or transformed into media stores giving much more shelf space to DVDs, games and even books than CDs. I don’t think Toronto is a special circumstance, in fact the best selling places to get CD in retail in America are places like Wal-mart or Target. Have you tried looking for a CD there? I hope you only want to buy something from the chart.

I don’t think people are listening to less music now, but where are they getting their music? If they’re buying legally online, they only real options are to buy from iTunes, Amazon or the Zune marketplace. If they’ve replaced music stores, then those must be cash cows! Even then, I suspect people are buying singles now instead of entire albums.

So I am guessing that the RIAA threw in the towel and the music industry is really tanking. Even in the UK, where a lot of great music is still being created, the HMVs look like the ones in Canada – selling mostly video games and movies. But the difference is that their CDs are now cheap! Many CDs were 2 for £10 (I picked up La Roux, MJ’s Off The Wall, and James Morrison’s Songs for You, Truths for Me deluxe edition) and some were only £4 (like Michael Bublé’s Call Me Irresponsible, but I resisted buying Lady Gaga’s debut). That works out to about $16 and $5.40 taxes in! And if you can wait until you get into a duty free zone, it’s 17.5% cheaper! If the prices were like this in Canada, I’d buy a lot more (but then again I’m not the typical consumer). In fact it’s impulse buy territory. I bought James Morrison’s double CD without having listened to it before. I knew him from his duet with Nelly Furtado (although I had him confused with an adult contemporary singer, maybe James Taylor?) but recently I’ve been listening to his older single You Give Me Something and I like his music:

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: CDs, EuropeMarch2010, music