How has the retail merchandise market expanded/contracted in the past few years?
It is suffering right along with the rest of retail. Everyone is complaining, and, while whining is par for the course in the retail trade, it seems more believable this year. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a market out there, but also keep in mind that music related products, even in good times, is still just a modest slice of the whole licensed goods’ pie. How big are Internet sales? The Internet has had the quality of appearing to be bigger than it really is. (Something I guess people in the stock market found out all about that a couple of years ago.) But “big” is relative. For example, when I set up an Eric Clapton Internet store for his last tour, I projected that we’d do about as much total business in his web store as one of our live shows. That’s what it turned out to be. Is that big? We look at it as a service to the fans, and in addition it’s turned out to be a good way to sell off some of the unsold product from the tour. It’s still ancillary to our main businesses, whic
