It’s a good thing, certainly. To my mind, the bigger change is that downloads are starting to appear at substantial discounts to CDs – I bought a new-release big-name album as an MP3 download from Amazon last month for only three pounds – the first time it’s been cheaper for me to download than to buy the disc. Of course, competition from Amazon is one of the main reasons for this new development from Apple.
So ends the music shop. I suspect that retailing will never recover from the current downturn. The proportion of economic activity devoted to retailing seems vastly excessive.