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A comment on Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software. Parent comment

Re:Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software by chiph on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @11:04AM (#13115576)
Tower Records was so wrapped up in selling physical goods (CDs and earlier, LPs) that they were totally blindsided by the rapid change in listener preferences. They didn't react quickly enough, soon enough, as sales fell off a cliff thinking it a temporary correction instead of a fundamental change.

So the lesson is that once a company has "made it" they should diversify so that they aren't dependent on a single income stream.

You should totally watch the film, btw. I used to shop at the Watt Avenue store in Sacramento, and the breadth of titles they carried was amazing. Easily five times the product that a store like Sam Goody would carry, and in niches you'd never see anywhere else. If there were such a thing as Celtic Rap, Tower Records would have carried it.

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Re:Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software by Yhippa on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @11:10AM (#13115648)
You had me curious so I looked it up. There is in fact at least one Celtic Rap group out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manau_(group).
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Re:Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software by chiph on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @11:32AM (#13115874)
Of course there had to be one. :)
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Re:Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software by xenadu02 on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @01:31PM (#13117035)
My brother in law was a buyer for Tower. They weren't blindsided, they knew it was coming. The record labels at first refused to license music to them for digital distribution, then later insisted on onerous terms. Tower missed out on digital because of the record labels. It took Steve Jobs' force of personality to knock sense into the labels.
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Re:Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software by MaysonL on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @04:31PM (#13118508)
Steve Jobs' force of personality combined with the iPod and iTunes.
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Re:Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software by Anthony-G on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @03:59PM (#13126165)
Interestingly, I recently browsed in the Dublin Tower Records store and the LPs now outnumber the CDs. Currently, they’re the largest specialist retailer in physical media (music, films and books) in Dublin.

As I understand it, the Dublin franchise became independent of the Tower parent company some years past – or at least they advertised themselves as being “independent”.

http://www.towerrecords.ie/aboutus.asp

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