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Gennaro Castaldo Watch: He's got a red hot twelve inches
How many times now have we seen reporters suddenly "discovering" that vinyl sales rising again? There's another piece in the Times doing pretty much that this morning. Naturally, HMV's apostle of Lazarus formats Gennaro Castaldo is waiting by a phone to sort-of explain this:
Gennaro Castaldo, of HMV, said: “It’s pretty much a niche product compared with CDs and downloads, but a reasonably healthy one that you can see carrying on into the future. It’s seen off cassettes and you get the feeling it will also be around after CDs as well, mainly because it has an emotional appeal.”
I've read about two dozen pieces like this over the last few years, and nobody - not even Gennaro - seems to have thought that the real reason vinyl sales have started to grow, slowly, over the last couple of years has been the spread of digitising turntables simply making it easier to play and capture vinyl after a decade or so where anyone trying to buy a record player would have looked like Griff Rhys-Jones in that Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch.
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That reminds me - Last week we didn't get Dixons/Currys' traditional pre-Easter press release in which they claim they're going to stop selling a line of products due to an alleged lack of demand. It's become an annual event; Taking advantage of four slow news days by announcing that a much-loved part of our childhood will be vanishing, then mysteriously continuing to sell it for years afterwards. First it was VCRs, then the next year it was 35mm cameras, I'm fairly sure last year they claimed FM radios were getting the chop. Couldn't they think of anything this year? How about Extended Warranties, now that they've been pretty much replaced altogether by the more cost-efficient system of Telling The Sales Assistant To Stick His Obscenely Expensive Extended Warranty Up His Arse?
With Best Buy about to rumble into the UK market, I'd guess Dixons and Currys are this year's products no longer needed on the High Street.
Heheh! Speaking of Best Buy, I was in France at the weekend and noticed shops which looked a lot like our Carphone Warehouses, but were called the rather less 80s-tastic 'The Phone House'. Wonder if that'll be the next Starburst/Cif/'Cushelle'-style Euro-rebrand that comes to Britain?
I'm a riot at parties, me.
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