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Technology Stocks : e.Digital Corporation(EDIG) - Embedded Digital Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mark cox who wrote (7824)	9/24/1999 2:25:00 PM
From: chris431	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18366

DOWNLOADING IS SLOW GOING FOR BOWIE CD nypostonline.com By ALLYSON LIEBERMAN David Bowie's new album, "Hours," is living up to its name, taking diehard fans plenty of hours to download. The British rock legend, with his label Virgin Records, a division of EMI Music, took the future into his own hands Tuesday, becoming the first major recording artist to launch an entire album for downloading from the web. But the release didn't exactly rock everyone's world. "There were glitches. This was the first time this was done with such a high-profile artist. But glitches are to be expected," said Meghan Cast, Manager of Retail Markets at Liquid Audio, the site that enables the digital delivery of music over the Internet. "But it also depends on who you talk to," Cast warned, saying there is a time difference between downloading the album with the help of a cable modem or T1 line and the slower 56k home modems. Cast said the Liquid Audio technical support line did receive a lot of calls over the past several days and were forced to increase capacity to meet the heavy demand. "Sixteen percent of people required tech support," said Jay Samit, EMI's senior VP of new media. "I consider that a low number." Still, Bowie fans chiming in on Deja.com's "David Bowie" fan club site, did not find "Modern Love" with the new digital medium. "I submit my credit details ... get the pass key, etc.... start the download - get three songs ... then get closed off from the end of the 4th track. Is this a RIP OFF or what???" asked one disgruntled fan. "It took me 8 hours," wrote another Bowie lover. "I'm still trying, for the second day in a row," complained another fan. Bowie's "Hours" launched on over 50 major online music retailers on Tuesday, including TowerRecords.com, Musicland.com, CDNow.com, and Musicmaker.com. The album will be available for download for two weeks before the album's U.S. in-store release Oct. 5. The cost of the download is $17.98. The problems do not surprise some Internet analysts."We saw the same problem with the Super Bowl and Victoria's Secret - too much volume for an infrastructure that was never built for high-volume," said Mark Hardie, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "But when it doesn't go well, they'll say, 'We planned it,'" he continued. And that's exactly what EMI claimed. "Of course there were some minor glitches," said Samit. "This thing was an experiment and an experiment is supposed to have problems. So we consider this a phenomenal success."