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Quincy Jones predicts the future of music distribution in 1984


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Quincy Jones in 1984 predicting the future of popular-culture distribution (from a Radio & Records Magazine interview, cited in Michaelangelo Matos' new book Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year):

JONES: With computers around now, it would be very easy to get musical profiles of people's likes and dislikes... Maybe using TV to make impulse buying more accessible to more people... the screen lists whatever you're listening to... You say "I like that" and look at the information on the screen. Then you hit one or two buttons that ask for your purchase selection and credit card number... something in that direction.

R & R: That would be a great way to chart sales electronically.

JONES: Right. And it could be possible in five years for you to have no inventory in your house. No records, tapes, anything. If you had access to a satellite, a code book/catalog, and a television set, you could punch up anything you wanted anytime... And you could really target the music because you don't always want to hear a whole album. So you're programming several hours of music from this vast catalog in the sky. That would be incredible. You'd have access to anything out there that's current and have an intelligent way to catalog it.

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On 3/3/2021 at 3:38 PM, mjzee said:

And then what if your music starts disappearing from the cloud because of cancel culture...

Exactly right.  I remember when Amazon deleted its customers' eBooks of 1984 (for copyright reasons). 

Or just plain going out of print.

Fantasy was proud of keeping their CDs in print.  They bragged that they had more Contemporary albums in print than had ever occurred when Contemporary was a going concern.

This hit home to me in 1997, when I was shocked to learn that Ian Fleming's James Bond books were out of print and unavailable in the US.

Edited by GA Russell
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