The prediction, in brief:

I believe in electronic distribution … There’s a bandwidth problem. There’s a packaging problem. I want it to sound exactly as good as a CD we press in the plant. I want the graphics to be exactly as good as what we print in the plant. The typical home is not soon going to have such sophisticated, full-color printing capability. And perhaps never will.

Predictor: Teller, Al

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, managing editor John Battelle interviews Al Teller, former president of Columbia Records and at CBS Records before becoming chair of MCA Music Entertainment Group. Teller was a member of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. Battelle quotes Teller saying:”I believe in electronic distribution. I have been trying to persuade the industry that we should focus on the retail community first, because it’s going to take a while before you can do it at home. There’s a bandwidth problem. There’s a packaging problem. I want it to sound exactly as good as a CD we press in the plant. I want the graphics to be exactly as good as what we print in the plant. The typical home is not soon going to have such sophisticated, full-color printing capability. And perhaps never will. In the music business, the graphics are important, the words are important. That’s part of what you’re buying. So, you could invest in a kind of technology from a retail perspective that you couldn’t do from an individual home perspective. This was greeted with a great yawn because there’s no standardized way of doing it yet. There’s no need to have six or 10 different kiosk technologies in a retail store.”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information

Subtopic: Music

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: Disc Junkie: MCA Music’s Al Teller Reveals Why Hollywood is Deaf to the Sounds of the Net

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/teller_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney