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One would think that the Internet was growing crowded with online music retailers such as CDnow/N2K, Amazon.com, EveryCD, and Tower Records, just to name a few, all hustling CDs. But the lure of gold in them e-commerce hills is hard to resist. Last week, barnesandnoble.com jumped into the fray and announced the launch of its own Music Store, featuring what the company describes as the first "online classical music superstore." Notably late to market with its online bookselling franchise, barnesandnoble.com hopes to gain ground against arch-rival Amazon.com by expanding beyond books and…
Nearly six years after suffering a debilitating stroke, Sony Corporation co-founder Akio Morita has died. One of the world's most charismatic business executives, Morita succumbed to pneumonia on Sunday, October 3, in Tokyo. He was 78.
The embodiment of the "new Japan," the tireless Morita nurtured a small startup electronics firm into the world's most widely recognized brand name. With only $500 in seed capital loaned by his father, Morita and his partner, Masaru Ibuka, set up shop in a war-ravaged Tokyo department store, making and selling kits to turn AM radios into shortwave…
Sirius Satellite Radio may be positioned to make the next great leap forward. In mid-May, Kenwood and Audiovox announced the first transportable receivers, which will let Sirius listeners enjoy the service wherever they go—home, office, boat, beach, etc—not only in the comfort of their cars.
Kenwood's "Here2Anywhere" model KTC-H2A1 and Audiovox's "Satellite Radio Shuttle" (SRS), both described as "plug and play" devices, will arrive at dealers during the last week of May. The new receivers have a feature called S-Seek that notifies listeners "when their favorite songs are playing on any…
CD audio recorders are becoming affordable and more available. Philips' CDR880 (reviewed by Wes Phillips in the current issue of Stereophile) will be in dealers' showrooms soon at a suggested retail price of $649. Pioneer will also have an inexpensive recorder on the market---the PD-R555RW, which will reportedly sell for $599. These two---and others that will no doubt follow---are welcome relief from the four-figure machines that have dominated the recordable audio CD niche.
Recording enthusiasts on a budget shouldn't overlook offerings from the computer industry, where CD "burners," as…
An Internet startup being organized by Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood and auctioneer Ted Owen will offer John Lennon's 30-year-old Steinway piano for auction some time in July. The piano is now on display in The Beatles Story museum in Liverpool and will remain there until October 9, which would have been Lennon's 60th birthday.
The wood-finished upright Steinway was built at the Hamburg factory and purchased by Lennon in 1970, and is the same instrument on which he composed his hit song "Imagine." It could bring as much as $1.6 million at auction, making it the most expensive item…
Dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the music industry may finally be settling into an uneasy acceptance that its market and business model have changed. Only two months after the successful launch of Apple's iTunes Music Store, Billboard magazine announced that it would begin accounting for downloads in its weekly music rankings.
On July 2, the popular music journal began to include data from downloads in its Billboard music rankings. Based on sales information gathered by Nielsen SoundScan, Billboard's charts have long been the standard that measured the popularity of…
MP3 audio files have quickly become the dominant format for downloading music over the Internet, and have just as quickly raised the ire of music labels and artists looking to protect their musical assets. For example, a petition signed by nearly 400 European recording artists (including Mstislav Rostropovich and Barbara Hendricks) was handed to the European Parliament last Tuesday by French composer Jean-Michel Jarre to protest lax copyright protections exacerbated by digital technology. The petition states, in part, "We want to use new digital technologies like the Internet to create and…
The Wednesday before the official start of the CES is traditionally a day devoted to press conferences and room set up and today was no different. Many mainstream companies put on dog and pony shows announcing products they think will answer the mass market's thirst for more and better—but a few high-end companies make announcements as well.
Thiel Audio had a press conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center, choosing to publicize its less well-known in-wall, on-wall, and custom-targeted speaker products to a press corps that wasn't all that aware of its high-end credentials. This made…
Prior to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, federal law limited broadcasters to ownership of only four radio stations in any one market, and a maximum of 40 nationwide. The act loosened regulations to allow ownership of as many as eight stations in a single market, and hundreds nationally.
Although one intended purpose of the act was "to encourage competition," a wave of mergers and acquisitions followed its passage. One small broadcaster after another caved in to buyout offers, and the resulting larger companies were purchased in turn by even bigger ones.
The Federal…
Is retailing headed up or down? North America's two largest electronics retailers have reported vastly different results for the second quarter.
Best Buy, the region's largest retailer, is riding an updraft. The electronics giant doubled its net earnings in the second fiscal quarter, reaching a total of $139 million, a huge leap from the $62 million reported for the same period in 2002. Earnings from continuing operations grew more than 75%, to $140 million, up from $79 million in the second quarter last year.
The Eden Prairie, MN–based retail chain enjoyed 17% revenue growth in the…