In the age of online music, when any 15-year-old with a modem can download the complete works of Eminem, some listeners may well have bought their last shiny silver disc. After a 10 percent plunge in CD sales last year, the record industry is desperately trying to find a way to take its business online -- and make it pay.
But a second front is developing, with a different set of weapons aimed at a different kind of target. The strategy is to keep listeners -- especially older, more affluent ones -- buying discs, and making what is on them richer in sound and appeal.
The discs in question are not in the 20-year-old CD format but in two more advanced forms: SACD (super audio compact disc) and DVD-audio. Both contain music remastered in high-resolution digital audio, often in cinematic surround sound, like DVD movies. Although the two formats have been around for several years, such discs were priced much higher than normal CDs and tucked into specialty racks found only in larger record shops. Figuring out what machines could play them has generally been confusing, or at least obscure.
But now the record industry is giving new priority to these feature-rich audio discs. Having lowered their prices to typical CD levels, the labels are ramping up re-releases of classic albums, and planning releases of new albums in those formats. On March 24, for example, EMI's Capitol label is reissuing Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" on SACD.
Hardware makers, meanwhile, are lowering prices on players and home theater systems, and are planning to put the format into cars and portable players.
The record industry is looking for the kind of silver bullet that Hollywood found in DVDs. "The movie industry has done a brilliant job in bringing real value back to movies," says John Trickett, chairman of the 5.1 Entertainment DVD-Audio production company and record labels. "Now it's time for the music industry to bring it back to music."
With that mission in mind, record companies are coming at consumers with up to three new features: high-resolution audio, multichannel capability (better known as surround-sound), and in the case of DVD-audio, TV-based multimedia content. So far much of the material has been geared toward audiophiles and baby boomers, with a range of classical music as well as classic rock titles from artists such as the Police, the Eagles, Steely Dan and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
The presumption is that before DVD-audio or SACD can entice users of tune-swapping communes such as KaZaA, it has to be sold to those who not only still pay for music but are also willing to pay to enhance their listening experience beyond that of a typical CD.
That audience is more inclined to embrace new hardware, which for both SACD and DVD-audio is typically a DVD player with an additional chipset and six outputs for surround sound, or in many cases, a specially designed "home theater in a box" system. What the industry gets in return.
Make no mistake, there is a war going on between DVD-Audio and SACD. Sony and Philips, co-inventors of the original CD, created SACD primarily as a platform for stereo and multichannel music, with a high-resolution technology geared at recreating the fluidity and frequency response of analog sound.
Most SACDs on the market have a hybrid CD layer, meaning that they play CD-quality audio in regular CD players and high-res audio in SACD players. (While the SACD platform supports multimedia content, no current SACDs carry onscreen graphics or video.)
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