C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2007 12:03:44 -0300 (CLST)

On Tuesday evening we went out for Sushi (at "Too Much" in Providencia -
it was OK, I think Pauli was more impressed with it than me, and she's the
Sushi person) and the following came up in conversation:

Why don't music shops (places that sell CDs) burn them on demand?  I've
read recently that books may soon be printed on demand - it seems that CDs
should be an easier problem.  The printing is smaller volume (although
perhaps higher quality) and burning a CD should be pretty easy.

Looking at my files, a flac track is about 30MB.  So an album is about
300MB.  A 1TB disk (not expensive these days) could hold 3000 CDs and
cover art.  That's about the number of CDs in a small-ish shop, by my
reckoning (I estimated 2500 CDs in my local store).

Disk, printer and burner can't run to more than $10,000 which is probably
about the price of the stock.  So we seem to be at about break-even point.

I assume the big record companies would ship out hard drives already
loaded with music, and perhaps HD-DVDs or Blue Rays or whatever with
updates each month.

Moving past the break-even stage, imaging what will happen - the variety
of Amazon on the street corner!  I wonder how Amazon feels about this?  I
wonder who is doing this already?

Andrew