Music Companies
To Launch Format
With CD, DVD
By ETHAN SMITH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 25, 2004; Page D3
In an attempt to shore up music sales, a consortium that includes the four global recorded-music companies announced yesterday plans to introduce a new kind of disc that plays like a CD on one side and a DVD on the other.
The new format, known as DualDisc, is set to reach stores in October, with a handful of releases from Warner Music Group, Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG's Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group PLC and Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group.
The discs were test marketed in February and are expected to reach wider audiences in October. The music companies have high hopes for the discs. Though album sales are up 7.5% for the year, they have fallen much more than that since 2000, and music retailers are struggling. At the same time, consumers continue to complain that they don't get enough for their money when they buy CDs. The DualDisc is an attempt to address these issues. Music companies for the past year have had some success bundling bonus DVDs with CDs.
The first batch of releases is likely to include a mix of new and old titles, by Miles Davis, Nine Inch Nails, Jane's Addiction and others. Prices will vary from title to title, but will mostly be near the cost of traditional CDs -- especially for those titles released only on DualDisc. The DVD side of some DualDisc titles will include surround-sound mixes of albums, much like the existing DVD-Audio format. Others will include material such as music videos, short films and the like.
DualDiscs are slightly thicker than traditional CDs, according to people familiar with the matter, potentially causing playback problems for about 1% of users. These people say that rate is virtually indistinguishable from the number of problems encountered by people playing traditional CDs. A spokeswoman for the DualDisc consortium said the new product "is totally within the overall thickness specification for both CD and DVD."
Past attempts to introduce replacements for the 20-year-old CD have been lackluster. DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD, or SACD, releases have appealed mainly to a small audience of audiophiles. Even the best-selling DVD-Audio titles, for instance, typically sell just a few hundred copies a week, according to people in the music industry, compared with tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies for top-selling traditional CDs.
