In a music industry settlement dealing with album price fixing last year, the music Industry agreed to pay out $ 67 million to consumers and another estimated $ 76 million worth of CDs to schools, colleges and libraries in 50 states. While the consumers received cheques for $ 13.86 several months ago, the RIAA chose carefully the type of CDs to give away to the libraries.
105,000 CDs went to
While the librarians welcomed the free CDs for their libraries, they are confused by the amount of duplicates and less known titles in the lot. To reduce the amount of duplicates and unwanted CDs, the library plans on exchanging CDs with other libraries and selling excess and unwanted CDs at a discount and using the profits to purchase music worth adding to their libraries.
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The selections are raising a few eyebrows and unlikely to get a lot of use. Among the several hundred CDs given to the Charles M. White Public Library were many duplicates, including 29 copies of Handel's Italian Cantatas and 21 copies of Mozart's Le Nozze Di Figaro. "It will take a while to catalogue before we can release them to the public," said Bob Stack, director of Portage County Public Library. "But something is better than nothing." Among the 592 CDs shipped to the Marshfield Public Library, there are 22 copies of Ricky Martin's "Sound Loaded," 20 copies of Samantha Mumba's "Gotta Tell You," 16 copies of "The Three Tenors in Concert," 12 copies of Georg Philipp Telemann's "String Concertos/Musica Antiqua KÅ¡ln-Goebel," and 12 copies of Mandy Moore's self-titled album. Read the full story here. |
While many consumers were happy to receive a small cheque to compensate for being previously overcharged, it looks like the music industry decided there was no way they were going to give away popular or chart CDs as the other part of their price-fixing settlement. Maybe the music industry had a big backlog of unwanted CDs gathering dust on shop shelves and figured that this would be an ideal way of 'disposing' of them. :p
Source: Stevens Point Journal
