2002-05-29 18:39:08+00 by TC 2 comments
Some of you might <cough> be slightly familiar with the Gracenote database and may find it interesting that a yet to be released CD is already #2 on the play list. This reminds me of the time when Id sold 300k more help manuals for Doom than they sold games.
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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2002-05-29 19:06:07+00 by: Dan Lyke
Interesting note on the journalism involved:
"Bootleggers, who declined to be identified by name, said the Eminem CDs came from the Internet, although they didn't give details about how they downloaded, burned or bought the copies."
Given that there were only a few TOCs, this implies that the downloads were full 660Mb uncompressed streams, or that they talked to one of the 5 or 6 bootleggers who sold all of the disks. If people were downloading the MP3s and decompressing them on to the CD there'd likely be more variation in TOCs. Or so I'm told, most of my knowledge of how CD TOCs are distributed is second-hand, but it's second-hand from people who should know.
More likely is that these were pressed CDs from one single plant that got to all of the street vendors. Quite a bit less internet involved.
The /. thread contains lots of people who said "oh yeah, my music store had it on sale", so I wonder how much of this was actually legit traffic.
#Comment made: 2002-05-29 23:23:48+00 by: Shawn
My wife, who runs the music/video department at a local Fred Meyer, has been telling me how irritated she's been over the last week that [whoever produces Eminem's records] has been upping the release date. First they shortened it by a week, then they sent out a notification that it was to go on sale "today". (I have no idea when "today" was - I think Mr. Mathers is quite lame.)
So I'm guessing that it's perfectly possible that the CDs where legitimately on the streets at the time.