Music Retailer Thrives Serving Captive Audience
As music retailers struggle to stay in business, a Los Angeles firm is doing nicely targeting a demographic that gets bigger every year — prisoners.
More than 2.3 million people were locked up in federal, state or local systems at midyear 2007, according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, and they want their Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd just like everyone else.
Enter North Hollywood-based Pack Central, which runs a mail-order operation for about 50,000 prisoners. It stocks about 10,000 CDs and 5,000 cassette titles.
Cassettes account for about 60% of unit sales, since CDs are contraband in many prisons because the hard plastics can be used for nefarious means. The screws that hold many cassettes together are also verboten, so owner Bob Paris must manually remove them. A bigger problem is that the music companies have largely abandoned cassettes.
Paris says he started stockpiling cassettes five years ago. “People thought I was nuts when I invested tons of money in analog prerecorded music on tape,” he says.
He plans to order small runs of his best-selling catalog titles from cassette manufacturers, although some new titles would also sell well in the format, Paris adds.
Given the harsh business climate for music retailers, Paris is thrilled that his business has sales hitting more than $1 million annually.
“I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers,” Paris says. “I don’t have to worry about downloading, legal or illegally. The beauty of it is that prisoners don’t have Internet access and never will.”
Photo by nilob.
Angela on August 1st, 2008 11:24 am
That’s an interesting niche to fill, but obviously it was a gold mine for this man. I wonder if him opening the door to this business opportunity will get music companies to consider moving back to tapes and if there is enough profit there to make it worthwhile to them.
luke on August 1st, 2008 11:34 am
My question – how do you market to prisoners? How do they know that your company exists?
cassy on August 2nd, 2008 8:20 pm
Nice idea, glad to know that he got business in cassette tapes, although many people dont use cassette tapes anymore but he really have prospect who will gonna buy his product- the Prisoners.
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