Report: Wal-Mart Replacing Music with Blu-ray

[Bobby Henderson]

There is one critical issue people may be overlooking regarding the poor sales of music CDs at Wal-Mart: the store typically sells "edited" versions of popular music discs. I usually don't buy music CDs at Wal-Mart for precisely that reason.

The declining quality, or rather lack of any really new, fresh ideas in terms of popular music, is another culprit in overall falling music sales. A handful of giant media companies have a very tight control on what kinds of music are published anymore. And they want the general public eating the same vanilla flavor of music they've been spooning out since 1990 -the last time we had any sort of healthy house-cleaning of music styles in that industry. For nearly the past 20 years it's just been a lot of the same old shit.

The music industry is at its best when there is tumultuous change happening in styles and ideas for music. Those changes can often make or break recording labels. Media corporations HATE change. They want to be able to control and predict what consumers will like and buy. Unfortunately you can't really do that with any sort of creative endeavor. And when you do you end up selling blah-quality crap in the end. That's where the music industry is right now.