In a further blow to the CD industry (particularly of note in a week where Nine Inch Nails and Avril Lavigne are expected to peak at 200,000 units), Wal-Mart is removing approximately half of the square footage dedicated to physical album sales and replacing it with iPod accessories.
I won't buy music at Wal-Mart, nevertheless shop there in the first place. But I can still complain: Not just MP3 player accessories, but only for iPods? Next Wal-Mart will install physical iTunes download stations where I can download edited tracks onto my iPod for 93 cents each. Gotta shave a few pennies off, don't ya, Waltons?
Source: Kings of A&R
2 comments:
Why should Wal-Mart continue to provide so much space for CDs if fewer people are buying them? Music will be completely digital before long and Wal-Mart is just reacting to that reality, as any retailer looking to maximize profits would. And I guess their edited tracks are good enough for the people who buy them, so what is there to complain about really?
Granted, I'd like to see more love for non-iPod accessories (I would put my iriver clix up against any similar Apple product and would like to see more things for it), but until people stop being sheep about music devices (and/or start using music-enabled phones), iPods and their accessories is what sells. Part of that whole maximizing profits thing, I guess.
SC hit it dead on. Wal-Mart is just following along with what everyone already knows: that before long, all music sales will inevitably be digital. I'm totally fine with listening to Wal-Mart's edited music, by the way, since most of the language that is edited out of music these days is not imperative to getting the song's point across.
I also am tired of seeing so many iPod accessories. The iPod is a good PMP, but there are other devices out there. I have a Zune and I would LOVE to start seeing new accessories for it, but there isn't a market for it because everyone just buys iPods when they need an mp3 player because they ARE "sheep" of the iPod marketing scheme, and they won't take the time to learn about the options that are out there. Basically, iPods are marketed toward the 99% of the population who have NO IDEA what they're doing on a computer, and all the other PMP devices are marketed to the <1% that actually know how to make folders on their computer.
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