Then you can apply the e-commerce strategies of the music industry to help your company cut costs and increase revenue. Now that sensory-rich rite of passage, familiar to generations of Americans, is going the way of the phonograph. Already, tens of thousands of consumers are buying recorded music with a few mouse clicks on home PCs connected to the Web. Of course, most buyers have to wait at least a day for delivery before cranking their new discs, but a growing number of technologically savvy music lovers have mastered the trick of recording digitized songs directly off the Web. As millions of Americans go online, the Web's impact on the recording industry and on music retailing is becoming more apparent.
Music is, after all, a natural for Web sales.
There is a demographic bull's eye in the overlap of many young CD buyers and youthful Web users. And there is the technological ability to translate music, like software and print, into digital form, which can be sent over the Internet. Many in the business predict that when high-speed modems, recordable CD drives and broadband Internet access become commonplace, the music buying experience, from ordering to fulfillment, is likely to be a primarily electronic transaction. The seventh annual Retail Technology Study by Computer Sciences Corp., a respected industry consultancy, predicts that most of the growth in retail profits in all industries over the next decade will come from Internet sales, not from physical stores. S OME recording studios and smaller, more adventurous music retailers went online years ago, long before URLs were as ubiquitous as corporate logos.