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Variety and Prices Draw Music Fans to Web
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
im Auman has stopped wolfing down his lunch. He used to spend his meal break in the music
marts of Raleigh, N.C., hunting for hard-to-find compact disks by Yes and the other
progressive-rock bands he enjoys.
Now, instead of scarfing a sandwich on the run, Auman, a
28-year-old network administrator, munches in front of his
computer while shopping at CDnow, a huge music boutique
located solely on the World Wide Web.
"The Blockbuster Musics and Wal-Marts have billions of copies
of whatever is in the Top 40, but I'm usually going for the more
obscure stuff," said Auman, who figures that 10 percent of the
500 CD's in his collection have been ordered from CDnow.
He is not alone in turning to the Internet to satisfy his musical
needs. While music sales nationwide through online retailers will reach only $81 million this year,
according to Jupiter Communications, a new-media research company in New York, they are
expected to grow to $1.1 billion in 2002.
Online music retailers are essentially mail-order vendors who post interactive catalogues on the
Web. Those catalogues are searchable databases attached to distribution and credit-card billing
systems; orders may also be placed by phone.
Auman occasionally pays extra for overnight delivery so a hot new release can be delivered to his
desk before Raleigh's stores open.
Online music stores can offer a vast selection, long lists of CD's that would dwarf most real-world
inventories. The entries are often supplemented with song titles and cover art. Even ardent fans may
be surprised by the availability of imported recordings and other rarities by their favorite performers.
Another benefit can be price: the time spent waiting for music to arrive in the mail is often offset by
attractive Web prices. An informal survey of eight music retailers, four on line and four off line,
showed that a trio of chart-topping disks bought from CDnow, Music Boulevard or Amazon.com
was as much as 4 percent cheaper than the same albums purchased at the lowest-cost chain store,
once shipping charges and sales taxes were factored in.
But every music vendor's prices fluctuate regularly, especially with sales on current hits.
It pays to shop around: choose several sites and open a browser window for each site, then register
at each, pick identical items and choose the store with the lowest price. The options include Sound
Stone, Tower Records, Total E of Columbia House and Tunes.com.
Virtual merchants also capitalize on the Web's multimedia capabilities by offering hundreds of
thousands of 30-second song snippets that encourage you to sample before you buy. Auman said
he had been inspired to buy a John Wetton album -- a disk he would never have found at a Tower
Records listening station -- after sampling its tracks on the Web.
In online music catalogues, as in any database, accuracy is critical for
conducting searches. An errant keystroke can alter results -- is that band's
name Figdish or Fig Dish? (It is the latter.) Nor should the data necessarily
be trusted; two sites list "Some Girls," a 1978 Rolling Stones album, as
having been released in 1994.
Sometimes a database by itself is valuable, as is the case with the Global
Electronic Music Marketplace, a clearinghouse for used, out-of-print and
esoteric recordings that is little more than an enormous text-based registry.
Other online retailers routinely decorate their shops by adding digital bells
and whistles, typically including album recommendations meant to spur
further buying.
Shoppers truly seeking guidance should turn to specialty retailers like
Descarga, a Latin-music purveyor in Brooklyn that opened its Web site in June.
Or they might consider returning to the real world. Chicago Compact Disc in Evanston, Ill., had the
highest prices of the eight sites participating in the informal survey. But its owner, Michael Bernard,
has been selling used CD's to this collector for nearly a decade. Asked to suggest a new disk he
thought I might like, he immediately volunteered a recently reissued Miles Davis title. "I don't even
have to think about it," Bernard said. He was right.
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CDnow
Amazon.com
Music Boulevard
Soundstone
Columbia House's Total E
Tunes.com
Global Electronic Music Marketplace
Descarga
Matthew Mirapaul at mirapaul@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.
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