It's the semi-annual return of the CD-burning booth story

In the same way that you could seldom get through six weeks of John Craven-era Newsround without the bejumpered one predicting that schools were on the point of offering School Breakfasts, without it ever happening to anyone you ever met, music and technology journalists love to announce every so often that the coming thing is booths - yes, booths - where you can burn your own mix to a CD.

The booths are once again being touted, this time as a result of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers meeting in Chicago, where (not for the first time) the booth has been proposed as the saviour of record shops:

New machines, available from at least five different companies and now in operation in more than 150 record stores, Starbucks, book stores and big-box electronics stores across the country, allow consumers to pick 15 or so singles from various artists and burn them onto a CD.

George Daniels, who has run George’s Music Room in Chicago for 38 years, installed one such machine, the Disc-Go Digital Studio, at his store.

“I love the idea of this machine because it puts me back in the singles business,” said Daniels, who started his store with $100 and 100 45-rpm singles. “It will add something new to our store. A lot of people are willing to pay $1 or $2 for a song, but not $15 for a CD.”

It was hard to accept these record-it-yourself boxes were a good idea in the late 90s, but at least they made some sort of sense: imagine, you could just choose a mix of tracks you like, and then burn them onto a compact disc to take away. But in 2007, we're befuddled as to who would actually quit iTunes, close down their computer, take a bus into town, go into a shop, stand in a booth for ten minutes working up a playlist, hang around another five minutes for the CD to burn, then take a bus back home to achieve the same result they could have managed in front of their computer anyway?

We can just about see the novelty value of sticking a booth like this in a coffee shop, where it might keep people busy while they're sipping a latte - but as an answer to people buying digitally for record shops? It's not just a dead horse, it's like a zombie horse which has had its head cut off.

Where would they find a market of people who distrust technology enough not to download and burn at home, but are comfortable enough to do it in a store?

To be fair, we did once get to make our own butter and toast some bread one morning at school. But it hardly counted as a school breakfasts programme.