[Harry Lavo]

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"Harry Lavo" wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"Harry Lavo" wrote in message


That's a reasonable position, Dick. All I am saying she
is well positioned to judge as opposed to many other of
us. I just found it another in an interesting string of
anecdotes the pickup in this market over the last
five or so years. She struck me as a reasonably
well-positioned source.

I question the logic. The management of a single retail
store or a small retail chain is basically just one
small data point.

Agreed to the single point, but this does happen to be
the largest music retailer in NYC.....not exactly podunk,
Iowa.

So what? The NYC area is an important market, but it is only a tiny
fraction of the US market.

It and the two California cities are the trendsetters in the US.


Furthermore, anybody whose making money selling a
certain kind of product is obviously biased.

J&R sells everything electronic, everything music,
everything photo, everything kitchen, every.....man,
that's a lot of biases!

At this point vinyl is a sort of an exclusive product for them. Most of
their competition wisely abandoned it decades ago.

And your factual basis for this is......? It has a reputation for being one
of the better vinyl markets in the country....new and used.


Let's face it, only a miniscule percentage of all
retailers of media or audio electronics even bother with
vinyl any more.

More and more every year...even Barnes and Noble, about
as conservative a music retailer as there is, is
experimenting. And I daresay there are many more doing
so today than ten years ago.

But nothing at all like they were doing 30 years ago.

Did I say they were doing that? Arguing off the point.


Reality is a series of ups and downs, with the
current numbers appearing to be highly anomalous.

RIAA vinyl sales (millions of units):

1991 29.4

1992 13.5

1993 10.6

1994 17.8

1995 25.1

1996 36.8

1997 33.3

1998 34.0

1999 31.8

2000 27.7

2001 27.4

2002 20.5

2003 21.7

2004 19.2

2005 14.2

2006 15.7

2007 22.9

2008 56.7

We've chatted here many times about the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the
RIAA numbers. Even so, let's look at them.

We can probably agree that 1993, ten years after introduction of CD,
represented the low point for vinyl, both in sales and in distribution.
After that, it appears we've had four broad patterns:

* A sharp rise in sales from 1993 to 1996 representing compound growth of
50% per year. This coincided with the rise of catalog mail-order companies
such as Music Direct and Audio Advisor, and the concurrent rise of
audiophile vinyl through these specialized distribution channels.

* A broad plateau from 1997 until 2000-2001 at 30.0 +/- 10%, while CD sales
peaked. This most likely reflected a mature audiophile vinyl market.

* A substantial decline from 2001 until 2005 at an annual compound rate of -
9.7%. This coincided with similar overall decline of the total music market
for "hard product" as computer downloading (both illegal and legal) and Home
Theatre gained prominence. CY2001 was peak sales year for CD's, if I recall
(or maybe it was 2000). During this decline bricks and mortar retailers
(particularly the smaller ones) as well as audio retailers (who also handled
audiophile recordings) went out of business and bigger chains retrenched and
reduced their floorspace for music. Vinyl being a minority product if it
was distributed at all was among the first to go and the decline in audio
retailers definitely hurt audiophile vinyl sales.

* An increase since 2005 at a compound annual rate of 41.5% due to....what
we are arguing about.

I would suggest that this hardly suggest a moribund market for vinyl. Now
that catalog and internet distributors assure easy purchase even of niche
products, industry changes in technology and distribution no longer affect
sales as severely as in the past. So long as a substantial portion of the
market for well-recorded audio continues to eschew the complexities of tying
musical servers into their audio systems, conditions are ripe for continued
rise of vinyl with audiophiles forming a base and new young users
discovering the medium as an alternative to CD (which they've already ruled
passe').



Certainly is improbably....after all, "Perfect Sound
Forever" was supposed to do in vinyl.

You mean Harry that you haven't noticed that the CD knocked vinyl from
100%
of the consumer recording marketplace to less than 0.4%?

Yep, and McDonald's continues to make the best hamburgers in the US, right?
Just look at their market share. What does that have to do with the rise of
Red Robin and other premium hamburger chains?