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Frightened shorts are what took this stock over $20.00 imho
Lets hope you are right and they are being set up again.
Markets are funny things.
BTW ARDI is in the process of dumping more shares on the market.
What the?
The only thing changed about the market is the date on the calender.
The continued Increasing revenue and decreasing costs point the way,imho.
People make millions each day on companies without profitability yet.
The market is all about the direction of the future.
Today I'm looking at ARDI
Up 229% YTD and climbing
No Profit in sight.
Think I'll avg up.eom
Looks like a good time for Digitalway to get their foot in the door at Best Buy.
Could the HD-100 (O-1000) be next?
imho yes
Best Buy to Offer RealNetworks' Service
Mon Aug 18,12:00 AM ET Add Business - AP to My Yahoo!
By HELEN JUNG, AP Business Writer
SEATTLE - RealNetworks Inc. and electronics retailer Best Buy plan to announce a deal Monday in which customers can try out and sign up for RealNetworks' online music service at Best Buy's 560 stores across the country.
The deal, which unites traditional sales with the fledgling Internet business of digital music, boosts competition among companies racing to distinguish themselves in the market for legally downloading songs and albums over the Internet.
RealNetworks has been aggressively inking deals with high-speed Internet service companies to drive customers to its Rhapsody digital music subscription service, which it acquired in its recent purchase of San Francisco-based Listen.com. More are to come, said Dan Sheeran, RealNetworks' senior vice president of marketing.
With Rhapsody -- including the new Best Buy Rhapsody service -- customers pay a $9.95 monthly fee to listen to songs from a vast library of music from the major record labels as well as independent producers. Rhapsody subscribers can also burn songs onto compact discs for 79 cents each.
The service is one of several emerging in recent months. Apple Computer launched its iTunes Music Store in April, offering digital downloads of music for 99 cents a song. Microsoft Corp. last week teamed with a British company to offer a European service selling songs over the Internet for 99 euro cents (about $1.12) each through Microsoft's MSN Music Club or Tiscali Music Club, depending on the country.
The deal with Minneapolis-based Best Buy -- in which the two companies will share revenue from subscribers -- will help RealNetworks spread from its base of technology-savvy customers to a mainstream audience, Sheeran said.
He added that RealNetworks plans to offer a service by the end of the year that lets customers burn songs onto CDs without having to be a monthly subscriber.
Although he would not disclose other possible partners for the service, he said it is "the type of thing that e-retailers are interested in."
Companies have been increasingly casting about for legal ways to sell songs over the Internet that do not handcuff consumers' use of the music, but that also respect record labels' copyright concerns. Besides Apple and Microsoft, Seattle-based Internet retailer Amazon.com has also said it is interested in selling digital music, once it figures out the best way to offer songs over the Internet.
The deal is good for both companies, letting them "tie the online and offline worlds of consumers," said Michael McGuire, an analyst with Gartner G2. "The more information like that you have, the better you are in the long term."
___
On the Net:
http://www.realnetworks.com
http://www.bestbuy.com/
Thanks, Maybe I should listen again.
And Cassy knew that too?
She does that a lot, nice to see someone takes the time to read all of her mistakes.
I only have time to skim and see she thinks she can tell the future after it happens.
Airline to be announced in Sept, did you know that already?
Four Qtrs in a row to have increasing revenue.
Did you know that already?
Disney...
You knew?
.31X.32
Oct. Major Disney Press Event and Sept Airline Press Event.
Much to look forward to imho
What's a Head Unit? The In-Dash Unit? tia
Here they go.eom
It's hard to understand how such good information can lead to Confusion. Looks pretty clear to me. LOL
Question anyone...
If I wanted a installed hard drive music player in my car today, do I have any other options than the Phatbox?
Retail Sales Show Broad Strength in July
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. retail sales posted an unexpectedly strong advance in July, as spending on a broad array of items shot up, the government said on Wednesday in a report likely to bolster hopes of a faster economic recovery.
Total retail purchases rose 1.4 percent last month to $317.19 billion after an upwardly revised 0.9 percent gain a month earlier, the Commerce Department (news - web sites) said.
Auto dealerships saw sales rise by a hefty 3.2 percent in July, but even stripping motor vehicles out of the equation, retail sales increased a solid 0.8 percent.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected sales to rise 0.9 percent overall and 0.5 percent excluding autos.
The July increase in sales, the biggest since March, and upward revisions to both June and May lend credence to forecasts for a sharp pick up in economic growth.
Retail sales for June had originally been reported as rising a milder 0.5 percent and the figure for May was revised to an increase of 0.5 percent from an unchanged reading.
The strength in July sales was broad-based. Sales of building materials and garden supplies rose 1.3 percent,electronics sales increased 1.2 percent, general merchandise was up 1.1 percent and receipts at gasoline stations gained 1.6 percent, reflecting a rise in prices at the pump.
Sporting goods stores and non-store retailers, such as mail-order firms, were the only retail categories in which sales fell last month.
It's not hard to find the bitter investors that have an agenda of bashing a stock they poorly traded years ago.
Let's hope at some point in their lives they give it up and move on.
I'm invested in a company who's stock is up 58% YTD and has been showing increasing revenue and decreasing expenses for two quarters now.
I expect more of the same this past quarter and do not care what traders did to this stock some 3 years ago.
I suggest all others bury the past as well.
The past few Quarters they have given guidance of increasing revenue and they have hit such guidance.
PluggedIn: Memory Cards Ready for the Big Screen
2 hours, 25 minutes ago Add Technology - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Daniel Sorid
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Portable memory cards that store digital photographs and music have become affordable enough to store video, sending gadget makers on a quest to put movie screens onto all sorts of portable devices.
Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - news) will release at the end of the year a cell phone that can record and store video clips. In September, Sony Corp (news - web sites). (6758.T) will sell a hand-held computer with the ability to record and play high-quality video.
Flash memory, sold as matchbox-size cards under brand names such as Memory Stick and Compact Flash, can be found in stores for about $60 for 256 megabytes of space, enough for several music albums or a small video file.
One gigabyte and larger memory cards -- enough to comfortably hold a full-length movie -- sell for about $225 in one version, and prices are dropping fast.
Of course, using a memory chip is not the only way to hold a movie in your hand; DVD lasers and hard drives have been crammed into portable devices that can play movies as well as any memory-based device. What makes flash memory so desirable is that it doesn't skip like a CD and requires no moving parts to read it, saving on power consumption.
Flash memory is also small enough to include in mobile phones. By 2007, the primary destination of flash memory cards will be mobile phones, according to technology research firm Gartner.
Motorola, the world's second-largest mobile phone maker, has embraced flash memory as a way to build phones that store large road maps for global positioning functions and more Web pages for use on the high-speed mobile Internet. Video and music will also be stored on phones with flash memory cards.
"These are small devices that are by necessity constrained by space and power, and so memory is always a challenge," said Rob Shaddock, general manager for Motorola's GSM/TDMA product group. "As memory becomes more abundant, as the cost per bit starts to fall, then you see increasingly richer experiences on the devices."
STRIVING FOR VIDEO
Flash memory varieties in recent years were most popular at the 64-megabyte size -- enough for music but inadequate for video. With multi-gigabyte cards showing up on store shelves, video on flash memory has finally become desirable.
Sony's newest Clie, its palmtop computer that runs on the Palm operating system, is already creating a stir -- not least for its $699 price tag. The UX-50 model, in addition to connecting to the Internet not with wires, but with a built-in Wi-Fi chip, can record movies, play them back, and can store data on Memory Sticks.
"The devices are finally starting to get up to the times," Alex Slawsby, an analyst for IDC, said.
Spending on flash memory cards in 2003 is forecast to be $2.6 billion this year, growing to $4.5 billion in 2007, according to new data from Gartner. Nevertheless, flash memory cards face fierce competition from other data storage, including hard drives, which remain the cheapest and most popular way to hold large amounts of data.
Perhaps the best known hard drive portable device is the iPod, Apple Computer Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) music player. Apple has won the praise of electronics critics for sticking a massive, but tiny, hard drive in a device that can be easily held in one hand.
Archos Inc., an electronics maker in Irvine, California, sells a slightly larger variant on the iPod, but it can play video as well.
(The PluggedIn column appears weekly. Comments or questions on this one can be e-mailed to daniel.sorid(at)reuters.com.)
Music Mismatch
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48988-2003Jul26.html
Music Mismatch
By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page F07
After years of chances for developers to get this stuff right, digital music on the PC remains a "yes, but" proposition.
Yes, Microsoft provides free music software -- but its Windows Media Player can't save your CDs as MP3 files.
Yes, other developers provide free MP3 jukebox programs -- but they'll spam your desktop with ads, defy your comprehension with illogical interfaces, or both.
Yes, you can download most of the songs you want from the Internet -- but you'll be taking music without paying for it and incurring security risks.
Yes, you can try several legitimate download services -- but all impose bizarre restrictions on your purchases, and most demand monthly subscription fees.
(Lest a quality MP3 program and music service seem like too much to ask for, both are available on the Mac.)
This dismal state of affairs isn't improving, to judge from two recent examples: MusicMatch Jukebox 8, an update to the widely used music program, and BuyMusic.com, a new service advertised as an answer to Apple's iTunes Music Store.
MusicMatch, often bundled with new PCs and digital-music players, gets a few things right. Both the free and $20 "Plus" versions will save CDs in MP3 format (as well as Windows Media Audio or MP3Pro), manage playlists, transfer music to many portable players and make mix CDs with nicely formatted labels. For $5 a month, MusicMatch can also tune in to custom Web broadcasts.
But this is also an exceptionally ugly, clumsy chunk of code. Consider these two "duh" moments -- just a sample of the bugs and misfeatures in this product.
First, try to save a CD to your hard drive while it's playing. The title and artist info in MusicMatch's playlist frame, pulled from an online database, will not migrate to its separate CD-recording frame, and instead you get this brain-dead prompt: "CD-ROM Busy, Stop playing CD-ROM to see track data."
Then click on MusicMatch's "Playlist" link before you create a playlist. An error message directs you to a tutorial on creating playlists, and after you click its "OK" button, a dialog box invites you to select a playlist file.
Track management is MusicMatch's weakest function. You can't see what songs are in a playlist before you select it. Finding particular songs takes too many steps. The limited "AutoDJ" feature can't generate song sets from your own listening habits (say, what you've listened to most or least often), as competing players can. And if you use other software to rename or move your MP3s, MusicMatch will lose track of them.
An inconsistent and cluttered interface rounds out this application's problems.
On the other hand, MusicMatch doesn't turn your computer into a billboard for Microsoft or RealNetworks. If you can stomach its sloppy programming, that alone may make its free version palatable in comparison. Just realize that you'll lose fast CD burning -- the freebie 2x speed limit makes writing a CD a lengthy procedure -- and some helpful options to manage playlists and mix CDs.
BuyMusic.com, which debuted Tuesday under the unfortunate slogan "Get Loaded," breaks ground as the first Windows-based site to sell major-label songs without charging a subscription fee.
But its advertised prices -- "from 79 cents per song" and "from $7.95 per album" -- are misleading. CEO Scott Blum said 150,000 of the 300,000 tracks available retail at 99 cents, and 52,000 of them cost $1.04 to $1.99. Many albums cost $9.99 each, and a few go for $12.95.
BuyMusic's catalogue exhibits the usual annoying omissions (no Rolling Stones, for instance) and some unusual ones (22 of 201 U2 tracks and 69 of 143 Bruce Springsteen songs listed here can't be bought).
Shopping on BuyMusic.com is best described as Soviet. Purchasing a song required using Internet Explorer for Windows, clicking through a lengthy user agreement, entering payment info, checking out, then returning to an "order summary" page to download each track.
Four songs arrived as promised, but the download link for another song I'd bought didn't work on my test computer.
Wait, did I say "bought"? As the site's Orwellian user agreement states, you never buy anything, you only license a limited right to listen to it: Songs "are sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms 'sell,' 'purchase,' 'order,' or 'buy' on the Site or this Agreement."
Downloads, provided as 128-bit Windows Media Audio files, enforce widely varying limits on copying to other computers, portable music players and audio CDs.
Each time you move a song to a new PC -- if that's allowed at all -- you'll have to enter your BuyMusic.com user name and password so Windows Media Player can fetch a license from the site.
Songs can only be copied to "SDMI-compliant" players a set number of times. (The "Secure Digital Music Initiative" was a copy-control scheme that the recording industry gave up on years ago; good luck finding out whether your player supports it.)
You can usually copy a song to CD at least once, but BuyMusic's user agreement forbids recopying songs off a freshly burned CD in a more open format. (There isn't any technological barrier to doing it, though.)
The worst of this theft-via-fine-print is well hidden: You can't back up or transfer your licenses to these songs, so if your hard drive dies or you sell the PC, your music dies, too.
Both MusicMatch and BuyMusic.com trail far behind the best efforts on other platforms. Yet these products are somehow considered "good enough" for the vast majority of the market that uses Windows. That's really sad.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
( BW)(CA-MUSICMATCH) MUSICMATCH Signs Deals for A La Carte Download Service to Launch to Consumers This Fall
Business Editors/High-Tech Writers
Jupiter Plug.IN Conference & Expo
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 28, 2003--
Catalogs From Three Majors and Six Independent Labels On Board for Personal Burning and Portability
MUSICMATCH, Inc., the global leader in personalized music software and services, announced today here at the Jupiter Plug.IN Conference & Expo, that it has obtained non-exclusive download sale agreements with nine music labels for its MUSICMATCH(R) Downloads service to be launched broadly to U.S. consumers this fall. The new agreements include extensive digital catalogs from BMG, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Hollywood Records, Lyric Street Records, Roadrunner Records, Rounder Records, Sanctuary Records and TVT Records.
With these deals, MUSICMATCH can sell digital albums and tracks to consumers for personal burning and transfer to portable devices, as well as playback on multiple PCs. The service will be available for the Windows environment and does not require a subscription fee.
"MUSICMATCH has been offering digital music services to consumers since 1998, but we decided years ago not to provide music downloads until we could offer them in a way that would be truly compelling to consumers," said Dennis Mudd, MUSICMATCH chairman and CEO. "We can now provide the download service we envisioned and are excited to team with the music industry in this next phase of digital music commerce."
The MUSICMATCH Downloads service will be fully integrated with the company's already award-winning and best-selling digital music software and services -- MUSICMATCH Jukebox, the subscription-based MUSICMATCH MX and free MUSICMATCH Radio -- providing a better and more convenient way for people to find, buy and enjoy music that matches their unique preferences.
About MUSICMATCH
San Diego-based MUSICMATCH, Inc. is the global leader in personalized music software and services that let people find and listen to the music that best matches their unique tastes. The company invented the digital jukebox concept in 1997, and since then has registered more than 37 million users of its number-one selling MUSICMATCH Jukebox. Its MUSICMATCH MX service is the most popular online music subscription service, with 150,000 active paying subscribers. For additional information on MUSICMATCH, visit www.musicmatch.com.
MUSICMATCH(R) is a registered trademark of Musicmatch, Inc.
MUSICMATCH Jukebox(TM) and MUSICMATCH Radio MX(TM) are trademarks of Musicmatch, Inc.
What did you find out about price and selling dates?
I did not see anything mentioned in your links.
TIA
Schwarzenegger Calls for Tougher Piracy Laws
38 minutes ago Add Entertainment - Reuters to My Yahoo!
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (news), promoting his new Terminator movie in Mexico, on Thursday called for tougher laws against film and music piracy.
A journalist at a news conference presented Schwarzenegger with a pirated DVD of his "Terminator 3; Rise of the Machines," bought from a Mexico City street vendor before the film was even released in the country.
"We need stricter laws so that the people who do this (piracy) are treated the same way as somebody who steals something," said Schwarzenegger, who is considering running for governor of California.
U.S. film and television studios this week unveiled plans for their largest public awareness campaign against digital piracy, which they say threatens the industry with extinction and the loss of thousands of jobs.
In Mexico, pirated CDs, DVDs and video cassettes are openly available on street stalls throughout the nation's cities.
The "Terminator 3" movie led the field during the July 4 U.S. holiday weekend, grabbing the No. 1 slot with $44 million worth of ticket sales.
So you think e.Digital could be getting revenue from this player?
Think Global !!! ...
http://www.rueducommerce.fr/sonnum/showdetl.cfm?product_id=1071
https://www.k55.ch/shop/index_single.php3?art=287
http://www.dagbladet.no/dinside/2003/06/06/370583.html
http://www.pcp.ch/artikel.cfm/Mpio.HD_100,_Harddisk_MP3_Player,_silber/ArtNr.12048115/
http://www.offlinestore.de/mp3store/10008/3100025%20MPIO%20MPIO%20HD%20100%2020GB%20MP3-Player.html
http://www.preisvergleich.co.at/Preis/MPIO_HD100/0AD8BD5C522EA72A88D2FE294E0C5AE5.html
http://www.geizkragen.de/preisvergleich/audio_und_hi_fi/tragbare_mp3_player/details/mpio_hd_100_4404....
http://www.preissuchmaschine.de/product_315507.html
http://www.itavisen.no/art/1301400.html
http://www.digimania.be/en/prod_det.asp?ProductID=354
http://www.kelkoo.nl/b/a/sbs/nl/hifi/keyword/hd/type/MP3+Player/122701.html
http://www.preisvergleich.co.at/Preisvergleich/MP3-Player/315507/MPIO/HD100.html
http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shopping/pages/buyodyssey1000.html
http://www.tu-and-tu.com/hd100.html
http://xenses.com/se/default.php?break=yes
http://xenses.com/se/product_info.php?products_id=237&osCsid=4d861ec92a79ee9b2110d544e5c2e05f
http://www.procell-media.com/html/product_html/portable_products/MPIO/Mpio%20HD100.htm
http://nt.interia.pl/id/akt/www/news?inf=390603
http://www.tiggypig.com/acatalog/HITECHGEAR.html
http://www.cprh.ch/produkte/mpio/neue%20Modelle/NEW_MODEL_LINE.htm
http://www.mmport.nl/
http://www.k55.de/shop/single_article.php3?nArtikel_ID=287&VID=5d6XFb9HdCQEKeYW
http://www.pluspark.de/cgi-bin/pluspark.pl?f=NR&c=19143005&t=temartic
http://jukebox.mp3man.be/
http://www.pcpro.no/tilbehor/mp3/mp3konkurransen.htm
good picture of the box...
http://forum.fok.nl/showtopic.php/339177/1/1000#11691128
I spent some time on buymusic.com last night.
Very nice...
Almost every song I looked for that I found was .99
except one...
"The Chicken Dance" can be had for .79
Add an O-1000 and some speakers and you too can become a Wedding Party DJ.
LOL
Not sure about international but US parks in 2001...
(not sure about semantics but this is how the news media sees it)
Top 20 US Amusement Parks based on 2001 Attendance
- Magic Kingdom, Orlando -- 14.7 million, down 4%
- Disneyland, Anaheim, CA -- 12.3 million, down 11%
- EPCOT, Orlando -- 9 million, down 15%
- Disney-MGM Studios, Orlando -- 8.3 million, down 6%
- Disney's Animal Kingdom, Orlando -- 7.7 million, down 7%
- Universal Studios Orlando -- 7.2 million, down 10%
- Universal's Islands of Adventure, Orlando -- 5.5 million, down 8%
- SeaWorld Orlando -- 5.1 million, down 2%
- Disney's California Adventure, Anaheim, CA -- 5 million
- Universal Studios Hollywood -- 4.7 million, down 9%
- Busch Gardens Tampa, Tampa Bay, FL -- 4.6 million, down 8%
- SeaWorld California, San Diego, CA -- 4.1 million, up 13%
- Knott's Berry Farm, Buena Park, CA -- 3.58 million, down 3%
- Six Flags Great Adventure, Jackson, NJ -- 3.56 million, up 1.7%
- Morey's Piers, Wildwood, NJ -- 3.4 million, up 3%
- Adventuredome, Las Vegas, NV -- 3.4 million, up 7%
- Paramount's Kings Island, Cincinnati, OH -- 3.36 million, up 4%
- Six Flags Magic Mountain, Valencia, CA -- 3.2 million, down 3%
- Cedar Point, Sandusky, OH -- 3.1 million, down 9%
- Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, Santa Cruz, CA -- 3 million, n/c
4 Parks?, talk about way off...
1. DisneyLand (CA)
2. Disney California Adventure (CA)
3. Magic Kingdom (Fla)
4. Disney-MGM (Fla)
5. Epcot (Fla)
6. Animal Kingdom (Fla)
7. Disneyland Paris
8. Walt Disney Studios Park (Paris)
9. Disneyland Tokyo
10. DisneySea Park (Tokyo)
11. Hong Kong DisneyLand (2005)
Who knows how many headsets per park will be needed
and how about...
Disney Cruise Lines
and
Disney Vacation Resorts
And if they land Bud they get all the Busch Gardens and Sea World locations
With Annual Revenue at 2.5 million and increasing, Im not sure your eBay finds that make up 300s of a percent of revenue are very relevant to anyone but yourself.
Your attempts to call it dumping are humorous but getting old and call into question the standards of this forum.
Its very sad to see someone waste so much time doing irrelevant research regarding something they don't now and don't ever wish to own.
Maybe they herd Moxa will buy under .30 so they think thats the action they seek.
I may get some of that action.
moxa~ I wouldn't count on the Bashers being successful. They can't even tell firmware from OS.
IMHO if we go under .30 consider it a gift, I think most of the traders got out yesterday.
I put your odds at 50/50,
good luck
lickily~Today? Just another 795K Shares.eom
EDIG 0.38 +0.03 0.38 0.40 578,300 10:24:09
This thing is ready to break out!!!
While everyone was looking at eBay someone starting buying.
EDIG 0.31 +0.01 0.305 0.31 856,700 15:22:18
Or it could be cassie selling and buying thin air.
With all the time she spends doing research on something she does't own, I would not be suprised. She would seem to have lots of free time to spend setting up bogus accounts and bidding on her own bogus sales.
And look for her reviews under the name "twomil"
And for all we know Cassandra could be the seller.
It appears she may have thrown it against the wall a few times when she saw how great it was working.
imho
1. For all we know the units being sold were never offered for sale but were units that did not pass QT and dumped on the seller with some good ones thrown in to close the deal.
2. The Treo is no longer being sold and the company that made it(Musical), is not the same as the one that makes any current products like the O-1000(Digitalway) or MXP (Maycom).
Thus all the discussion is mute imho
"We rely on Maycom Co., Ltd. for the manufacture of our MXP 100 and our wireless product developed for Softeq, Musical for the manufacture of our TREO products, Digitalway Co., Ltd. for the manufacture of our Odyssey and IFE products and Orient Power for the manufacture and assembly of the Eclipse-branded audio products."
If you guys don't have anything to post of substance couldn't you just stop posting.
Digital Music Player Changing a life...
(it may be an iPod, but our player could do the same)
NEWS - New John Mayer Album Expected This Fall
07/10/2003
(7/10/03, 6 p.m. ET) -- John Mayer's eagerly-anticipated follow up to 2001's Room For Squares will be released in the fall. Mayer recently spent five weeks in a New York City studio working on the release before beginning his current co-headlining tour with the Counting Crows. Mayer said he enjoyed working in the Manhattan space, and that "the studio had a great vibe that allowed me to focus all my energies on creating music."
Mayer is one of the many musicians using the latest in computer technology to help him produce his material. He tells LAUNCH Apple's iPod has been instrumental in his writing. "I have the Apple iPod, it's great. Because I can burn my demos and put them into the iPod and then listen to them as I'm driving, or as am going to a radio station, and just really just have time to sit in it and think about it," Mayer said. "And it's really fun. It's really really fun."
Music industry faces 5-8 pct CD sales fall - IFPI
Thu July 10, 2003 01:00 PM ET
(Updates with analyst quote, background, shares)
By Merissa Marr
LONDON, July 10 (Reuters) - The music industry, limping from the effects of epidemic piracy and an out-of-date business model, is heading for a five to eight percent decline in CD sales this year, the industry's trade body said on Thursday.
A day after music heavyweight EMI Group Plc EMI.L warned that the Japanese market was in sharp decline, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said the $32 billion industry was still on track for single-digit decline.
"The Japanese market has been soft for three years now ... I would still say that CD sales are set to fall between five and eight percent this year," IFPI Chairman Jay Berman told Reuters on the sidelines of a presentation about music piracy.
The IFPI chairman previously predicted in April that global CD sales would fall around five percent in a best-case scenario -- bringing the industry's decline to four years in a row.
EMI sent shivers through the industry on Wednesday, saying a "significant decline" in Japan would hit its first-half results, sending its shares four percent lower. EMI shares recovered slightly on Thursday to end 2.2 percent up at 118-1/2 pence.
"The IFPI figures provide a bit of comfort after what EMI said," said Kingsley Wilson, analyst at Investec Henderson Crothswaite.
PIRACY BLOSSOMS
Piracy is blamed for much of the music industry's woes.
In its piracy report, the IFPI said the sale of pirated CDs had risen 14 percent to 1.1 billion discs or an estimated $4.6 billion in 2002. Music executives say sales will continue to fall until the industry gets a better handle on fighting piracy.
Faced with such an outlook, the big five music companies have been slashing costs. The smaller of the five have also been exploring mergers and other ways of joining forces.
Media giants AOL Time Warner AOL.N and Bertelsmann [BERT.UL] have been holding talks about a joint venture for Warner Music and BMG's recorded music businesses in recent weeks and could hammer out a deal in the next couple of months, sources close to the companies said earlier this month.
Music executives say troublesome markets such as Germany have continued to slide this year. According to Nielsen Soundscan, the all-important U.S. market has also fallen almost eight percent in the year to date.
Japan, the world's second biggest market, has shown a steady decline. EMI and rival Sony Music 6758.T are among the most heavily exposed in that market.
However, EMI said on Wednesday it had turned a corner in the U.S. market and recorded music sales outside of Japan had been well up in the quarter to end-June.
Music executives have also been more upbeat in recent months, in the wake of the success of Apple Computer Inc's AAPL.O online music store.
What is the EDIG IFE Device called? Sky View?
I see PoGo took all mention of Fullplay Media off their website. Wonder who they are using to help design Audio Players?
Cellular News carries e.Digital news...
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/9202.shtml