On Thu, 10 Sep 2009, Andrew Barss wrote:
David Nebenzahl wrote:
: On 9/7/2009 5:29 AM Arny Krueger spake thus:
: "David Nebenzahl" wrote in message
: s.com...
:
: But there's *nothing* inherent in the production and sale of
: music discs that similarly would preclude someone from being able
: to choose one format over another;
:
: Sure there is, the fact that selling music is a business. There is no
: business case for putting all music out in both LP and CD format.
: Just to address this small point, I can certainly remember when much
: music (not all, to be sure) came out in both LP and cassette formats
: (remember that?)
Yes I do. Cassettes were great for portability, not so much for
durability or ease of changing tracks. Vinyl was impossible to
port around (well, almost: see http://ookworld.com/hiwayhifi.html),
but didn't get eaten up by a malfunctioning player, and you could skip
tracks with the greatest of ease. So each one filled a marketing
niche the other couldn't. As Arny pointed out, there's no such equivalent
for vinyl/CD. (Aside from the retro appeal, or people confused by the
claims that vinyl reproduces music better).
, and I'm pretty sure there was even a period where some
: was released in three formats (LP, cassette and CD).
Perhaps the transition point, when CD players were new enough that they
were very pricey? A few years ago movies were standardly released on DVD
and VHS tape for that reason. Didn't last long.
It was a longer overlap period, close to a decade. Cassettes were pretty
standard from the early seventies, so virtually anything that came out in
record was on cassette. Then CDs came along, and it took some time to
ramp up, and obviously old releases stayed on CD and cassette as they
were introduced to CD. New releases, they coudln't be on CD only since
the market wasn't there.
I thought the last record I bought was in 1988 or 89, but a check shows
the record I'm thinking of came out in 1986. I may have bought something
a couple of years later.
The 1986 record I could have bought it on cassette, I could have bought
it on CD too. There was a bonus track on the CD.
After that I bought on cassette for most of a decade, though it was
a sparse music buying period for me. I erroneously thought I wanted
the more compact nature of cassettes, and I couldn't afford a CD player
(or what seemed to be too high prices on CDs). Records were definitely
still being sold, but they were gradually disappearing from 1986 on, which
may have impacted on my buying, but I also didn't have a good cassette
deck until 1986 (all I had previously wsa old portable cassette players).
It was also complicated, since when the Walkman and their like came along
in the early early eighties, that was a big incentive to go cassette. It
wasnt' the death of records, it was the portability of cassette. So
cassette sales took off at about the same time as the introduction of
the CD, while the CD was a lot more sluggish. Records lost ground to
cassettes before they lost real ground to CDs.
The thing about DVDs is they made a much faster impact than previous
things. One minute they were there, the next the players were fairly
cheap. Almost if you blinked, you'd have missed it.
The switch to CD required a willingness to spend more on the CDs and to
buy the fairly expensive player, and "sound" apart, you would mostly be
buying music you already had.
VCRs took a long time to drop to the under $100 mark, but their adoption
came earlier since it was something you couldn't really do before, watch
movies on tv. It was likely helped along by videotape rental, which
lessened the cost of buying tapes (but of course, was offset by an initial
concept that the movies should cost a lot).
But DVD players were cheap within a few years of them getting much
attention. Some have said they were sold at lower profit or below
cost in order to fuel sales of the actual DVDs. Who knows. A DVD player
is mechanically simpler than a VCR, and they'd already had good experience
with the transports via CD players, so while there was development cost,
it was likely less than when CD players were introduced.
If most people were merely watching movies, then the loss of recording
ability didn't really matter. But in return, they got a machine that
wasn't likely to damage the medium. I've lost a number of videotapes
because the VCRs have jammed. DVDs take up less space. So there
probably was good incentive to switchover, and fast.
Michael