Music Industry Experimenting With Enhanced CDs

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the closer,-but... dept

I’m actually fairly surprised to see that the music industry actually is finally testing other ways to extend their offering beyond the CD. The latest, is a new trend to offer additional features to the folks who actually buy the CD. A bunch of new CDs include keys that let people access additional content online such as videos and live recordings. Already, though, people in the industry are complaining that not enough people are using the features. I don’t think that’s a big surprise. These sorts of enhanced features probably have a somewhat limited audience (right now), but as other features become more widespread, this more complete offering from the record labels makes a lot more sense than the old “sell a plastic disc” business model. However, if you’re just offering live videos, you’ve already limited your audience to people who are really big fans, who are interested in the videos, and who have computers with high speed internet access – so the actual implementation of enhanced CD will have an impact on how many people use the enhanced features.