Going, Going, (Soon to be) Gone Industries

by Smokkee G Singleton in Economics, September 15, 2009

The internet is eating up a lot of the jobs and businesses that were prominent less than 10 years ago. The scary part is it isn’t anywhere near slowing down.

And that is where the decline kicked in to high gear. You no longer had to head to your nearest record store to get your music fix so you didn’t and now show me a record store that is actually making a profit from selling music. Sure, there are people that still have cd players and such, but how many people do you see with a portable cd player now versus the iPod? Or any imitation iPod. Or any type of mp3 player. You can get a 1 gig mp3 player from Walgreens now for $10. The artist of today make most of their income now from concerts instead of actually record sales because who is actually buying records these days anyway? And how many people are actually buying the mp3’s they have on their mp3 players? Not that I approve of peer 2 peer websites but they are out there. Besides p2p sites, websites like Pandora make it so that you can hear almost anything you want without buying anything;anytime you want to hear a song just cut on your computer. If you’re on the go, just access the ‘net through your phone and listen until your heart is content. All you pay for now is your Internet access.

Record stores aren’t just good for records. Most also sell movies. Every since I was little, I always knew a bootlegger, someone with a copy of a movie that was still at the theatres. I STILL enjoy going to the movies, not for the actually movies these day but for the experience of watching on a big screen and for some reason, I still enjoy the overpriced snack bars. Have you noticed that a lot of the movie theatres are closing down these days? In Chicago on Randolph Street in the early ’80s, there was at least 5 theatres in a 3 block radius. Now, I think there is only 5 theatres that are remotely close to the Loop. As far as movies at home, if you don’t have Comcast and “On Demand”, once again there’s the internet. Websites like Hulu.com and even the Internet Movie Database let you watch movies anytime you want. And of course if you have no scruples what so ever, there is always p2p sites. Why buy another dvd if you can watch whatever you want to at your convience through cable or your internet or off your iPod these days?

The video game industry was safe untilrecently but because you can download games onto every system now, how long will it be before this industry starts to lose money? Since Sony has made the PSP Go the first system that relies solely on downloads, how many people do you think is actually going to buy their games from the Playstation Store?