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Is VHS facing its last Christmas?(DVD)
The dwindling sales of VHS music releases could lead music companies to abandon the format for most releases within the next year in favour of DVD.
The year's best-selling music DVD release, Led Zeppelin's eponymous live set, owes fewer than 4% of its 100,000 sales to VHS, and even the year's biggest-selling VHS music video--Gareth Gates' Spirit In The Sky--has sold fewer than 20,000 copies.
Warner Vision general manager Simon Heller says VHS is now selling mainly to younger consumers and suggests that the green light for the VHS version of key releases is now far from assured.
"Unless the audience for a release is particularly young, it tends to be all DVD now," he says. "Next year, we will only be likely to use it for major releases or for bands like Blazin' Squad where the fans are very young."
Even Warner's biggest Christmas releases may yet be released on one fin-mar only. "We would expect to [release titles on VHS], but looking at the Led Zep numbers, I'm beginning to doubt that. It's another bit of shelf where you could be selling a DVD," he says.
Already, best-selling ...