Burn baby, burn: kiosks give CDs new lease of life

[KiwiCoromandel]

Have rumours of the CD's impending death been greatly exaggerated?

Sales of digital media players have grown by 870 per cent in 18 months and countless pundits have assigned the humble disc to the terminal ward.

As a Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic, Philip Greenspun, puts it, "Why would you want to devote a whole bookshelf to storing a collection of 500 CDs when the same music would fit onto a pocket-sized MP3 jukebox?"

In a sprawling downtown Sydney music store, shoppers clutching MP3 players are weaving through a phalanx of CD racks to queue before what appear to be two sleek new automatic teller machines. They are, in fact, Virgin's answer to Apple's online iTunes Music Store, repositories of vast amounts of music that can be downloaded to the minute, ubiquitous gadgets one in five Australian adults has bought.

But perhaps surprisingly, it is not the MP3 player at the receiving end of this new technology. The vast majority of customers are downloading their favourite tunes onto individually compiled CDs.

"I mainly use my MP3 [player] because you can move around with it," said 19-year-old Lexi Langley as he scrolled through the music kiosk's playlist. "But at home I still play CDs - the sound is much better quality."

Leigh Scully, 20, agreed. "You have to have a hard copy too," he said. "Having the CD makes your collection more tangible."

Virgin's holding company, Brazin, which also owns HMV Australia and Sanity music stores, has installed 10 Fast Tracks kiosks in five of its largest stores and is expected to install at least another two at Sydney International Airport in the next few weeks.

But Brazin's chief executive, Greg Milne, says a more efficient, easier to use model with the capacity to store about 700,000 songs will be up and running in a few months.

Although he declined to give an exact breakdown of the kiosks' use for CDs and MP3 players, he said the former was the more popular medium.

So does he think the CD is riding a final crest?

"People still value the CD, with the packaging, all the stuff inside ... and many still believe it's just a better quality product," he said. "About 85 per cent of music is still being sold on CD."

source:smh.com.au

image:Bob Pearce

Choice.....Ashwin Gore uses a Virgin machine.