the company will shutter the facility and 300 workers will be out of jobs. A Sony spokeswoman recently cited an ailing U.S. economy and sagging interest in physical media as the reasons for the closure. A longtime employee sized up the situation more succinctly for CNET last week: "The CD is dying."
Another interesting passage here:
by selling CDs, the poobahs at the record labels also placed the equivalent of digital-master recordings in every home, Holzman said. They had no way to foresee how the CD would enable ripping, iPods, peer-to-peer networks or how those things would slam into their business like a wrecking ball.Last year I read a fascinating book about the music industry called Appetite for Self-Destruction. [review link]
It talks about how the CD business was a massive bubble just waiting to burst. Sure, music sales have declined drastically in the past few years, but after reading this book, you can view the sales decline more as a matter of a market correction rather than anything else.
CD's started out around $20, and the industry claimed that prices would go down eventually... they never did, which is why the Napster phenomenon was able to cripple their business model the way it did. Appetite paints the music industry as an old-boys network unwilling to adapt to the times, and we all know what happens when you don't adapt.
Spotify seems like something that could save the industry (or at least prop it up for a while), but as usual, it's business as usual.
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