Myingthungo Shitio
Dimapur | January 20
Store owners who depend on Compact Disks or CD to make earnings are facing challenges as CD sales continue to drop everywhere. The option of purchasing CDs has been gradually abandoned as downloading and streaming has become the platform of choice.
It is generally observed in Dimapur itself that the market of CD has declined and now that selling CD is not doing well like before and business have slowed down, some CD retailers have closed their shop.
Ryan, who owns a CD store in Thesuohie Shopping Arcade, opposite to Christian Higher secondary School in Dimapur called ‘Hok's Collection’ said, “Business has been slowing down because people these days tend to download directly from the internet.”
However, Ryan adds, “not everyone knows how to access the internet so even if things are slow; it is still okay for business.” Hok's Collection’ store has a lot of original game CDs on display. There are also a few old CD stores around Hong Kong market area in Dimapur where they sell all sorts of CDs with games, movies and music from different times and genre.
One of the CD store sales girl said, “These days, we even directly copy to pen drives that the customer brings taking a charge of Rs. 20 to 30 instead of selling them the CD.”
The result is that they find their business facing challenges owing to the digitalization while waving goodbye to the CD.
Almost all the store owners, in the course of their talk mentioned about ‘Reliance Jio network.’ They said that the free services it provides has also been a factor of causing slow business. People are no longer interested in buying CDs but prefer to download everything online.
A closer look shows that the steady sales that have sustained the CD store business for years are way down, and it is hard to see how they could ever return to where they were even a decade ago. A store owner mentioned about how they have a lot of old stock of Game CDs but due to the slow business, they are considering of closing down the store in the near future.
The writer is currently an intern at The Morung Express.
