PHILADLPHIA DAILY NEWS excerpt:
Music companies have had some success with DualDiscs that offer a 60-minute (maximum) CD on one side, and a 30-minute-or-less DVD on the other.
Warner Music Group's better-value proposition is the DVD Album, to be introduced in late October or early November. It takes advantage of the DVD format's higher capacity to provide full-length video albums with both two-channel and multi-channel sound mixes.
Equally cool, the discs will also hold "pre-ripped" versions of the music that can be burned onto a CD in PCM format for playback in conventional CD players, transferred to a PC hard drive in native form, and also moved to a portable music player with quality equal to what's available from authorized download sites.
Oh, and some DVD Album discs will include software that lets you customize a cell phone ringtone from the music.
"We're not going to discontinue CDs," shared a Warner Bros. executive with the trade magazine TWICE, "but we expect adoption of the DVD album to make the CD start to become what the cassette became to CD: a lower-price format."
