RE: MEDIA: Reuters.com: Record Labels say CD sales drop 7 Percent , Blame Web.

From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Aug 27 2002 - 18:32:09 MDT


Anyone heard of Janis Ian? I hadn't, but apparently the more ancient among
you will have.

Here is her take on this Web-is-eating-our-lunch position (she thinks it's
garbage). It's well worth the read.

http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html

from the site:
"Or take author Mercedes Lackey, who occupies entire shelves in stores and
libraries. As she said herself: "For the past ten years, my three "Arrows"
books, which were published by DAW about 15 years ago, have been generating
a nice, steady royalty check per pay-period each. A reasonable amount, for
fifteen-year-old books. However... I just got the first half of my DAW
royalties...And suddenly, out of nowhere, each Arrows book has paid me three
times the normal amount!...And because those books have never been out of
print, and have always been promoted along with the rest of the backlist,
the only significant change during that pay-period was something that
happened over at Baen, one of my other publishers. That was when I had my
co-author Eric Flint put the first of my Baen books on the Baen Free Library
site. Because I have significantly more books with DAW than with Baen, the
increases showed up at DAW first. There's an increase in all of the books on
that statement, actually, and what it looks like is what I'd expect to
happen if a steady line of people who'd never read my stuff encountered it
on the Free Library - a certain percentage of them liked it, and started to
work through my backlist, beginning with the earliest books published. The
really interesting thing is, of course, that these aren't Baen books,
they're DAW---another publisher---so it's 'name loyalty' rather than 'brand
loyalty.' I'll tell you what, I'm sold. Free works."

I've found that to be true myself; every time we make a few songs available
on my website, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot.

And I don't know about you, but as an artist with an in-print record
catalogue that dates back to 1965, I'd be thrilled to see sales on my old
catalogue rise."

Emlyn

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian D Williams [mailto:talon57@well.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 28 August 2002 5:05
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: MEDIA: Reuters.com: Record Labels say CD sales drop
> 7 Percent,
> Blame Web.
>
>
>
>
>
> Reuters.com - Record Labels Say CD Sales Drop 7 Percent, Blame Web
>
> http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=internetnews&Story
> ID=1375234&fromEmail=true
>
>
>

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