Retailing records series; (part 10) A voyage down the Amazon.com (continued)

This led Music Boulevard to start an experiment in 1997. It was aware of the collegiate using MP3 to exchange music files. Why not, the company asked, try to actually sell music online? It hooked up with a proprietary music compression technology called Liquid Audio and started to sell tracks on its website for 99c. Most of them were either advances of more conventional CDs, or non-CD tracks. It was not an idea whose time had quite come yet, and even Music Boulevard realised it. For one thing, it was still very inconvenient to download a song at that speed. “A three-minute song,” Liquid Audio’s Scott Burnett said, “with a 28.8 modem, you’re looking at somewhere around 12 minutes.”

However, with the introduction of secure web connections that made financial transactions possible without endangering your credit rating, the online marketplace boomed. Amazon.com, already one of the biggest sellers of books on the planet, expanded into music during summer 1998. Its site, like CDNow, was information rich. Said Amazon’s David Risher:

If you don’t know the difference between, say, acid jazz, traditional jazz, free jazz, or ambient jazz, we describe each of these, plus we list the essential CDs for each genre, with reviews. It’s a way of learning about a genre so you don’t wind up with a couple of ridiculous easy-listening jazz discs that’ll embarrass you in front of serious jazz listeners.

The ability to preview records, a hallmark of the days of glass and lacquer, when most record shops had listening booths, became such a popular aspect of the online buying experience that brick-and-mortar retailers started to install listening kiosks in their stores. Some discovered that record companies were willing to pay for them to put certain artists in their listening stations. Others had their entire selection of recordings available for listening by putting on a pair of headphones and waving a CD’s barcode under a scanner.

The competition became intense as the online CD stores had at it on the battlefield of commerce. Columbia House bought out CDNow in 1999, making it the online arm of its mail-order operation. Similarly, Bertelsman wound up buying out Music Boulevard, putting it under the aegis of the RCA record club by the early years of the new millennium.

Despite the fact that a consumer can buy pretty nearly every CD in print and quite a few out-of-print CDs online, not many people seem so inclined. While online sales of physical CDs continued to climb over the course of the early 2000’s, they still account for less than 6 percent of total physical CDs sold. Why? Perhaps simply because of the culture of instant gratification – we want what we want and we want it NOW! Some people do not trust online commerce, feeling a little suspicious about putting credit card information into cyberspace. And perhaps people just don’t have enough information to take advantage of all the choices the internet provides, an ironic situation for the information superhighway.

Beyond this, technology has taken hold in a different way as more and more people gained access to more and more speed on the internet. At 28.8K or even 56.6K baud, downloading music was a painful process, but as broadband started to penetrate deeper and deeper into U.S. households via DSL lines and cable television online services, suddenly you could download a song in less time than it would take to listen to it. Many people began to explore the possibility of eliminating (or reducing their intake of) physical product, choosing a new digital container for their digital music.

“Five years out,” Scott Burnett predicted of downloading music in 1997, “you may look at this as becoming a mainstream distribution alternative.” He didn’t know how prescient he was.