Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising

The CD single is dead. At least that is what British supermarket giant Woolworths Group plc (LSE: WLW) is predicting as the company drops the format due to declining sales and with hopes of creating a download store. The chain will remove CD singles from shelves starting in August, but will retain the format for one-off releases like the British Television show X Factor, similar to American Idol in the United States.

Billboard reports that this move could end the use of CD singles across Britain altogether, but figures for CD singles sold versus digital downloaded single tracks were not made available. Woolworths stores sold 25.5% of singles in 2006, while the format has dropped from 55 million units sold in 2000 to just eight million last year.

Playing on the sentiment that “Everyone remembers buying their first record at Woolworths,” the director’s of the company hope the new download store will create the same sense and feelings of nostalgia that CD singles offered customers. But the size of the store won’t compete well with other store’s like Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store, since Woolworths will offer only 1.2 million tracks. iTunes offers more than four million, but pricing might become the battleground where Woolworths competes ideal.

CD singles in the United Says are rare products, and are often primarily used by American Idol winners (since the one-off releases seem to be their only viable products). Stores such as Virgin Megastores and the former Tower Records regularly import British CD singles, but with Tower Records gone massive cache’s of available singles are no longer available outside of direct importing from British retailers. Unfortunately, Woolworths attempt at creating a new digital store seems very late in the competition, like Tower Records store was just over two years ago. With the growth of digital downloading in the last year alone, store’s like iTunes have gained a significant foothold in the market, despite criticisms and new competition from other major on the internet stores like Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Marketing and Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.