Music Biz Ails; Columbia Hires Canary As Consultant
The music business has found the answer to its mounting ails, which all the iPod world knows: album sales being replaced by singles downloads, Tower Records closing, and Borders apparently not having a clue about what music to stock.
But now there seems to be hope on the horizon. Columbia Records is trying a radical new experiment. The record giant and a principle perpetrator of musical nonsense on an overly obliging public has retained a canary, much as songbirds have been employed to detect, by passing out, the presence of poison gas.
The job of the tuneful bird is to provide the executives in the A & R department with a reality check as to what a good song is.