Tibi Puiu
Inmate
Here’s something I bet most of you would guess. Apparently a small company back in sunny LA, called Pack Central, has made an anul multi-billion business out of selling music to prison inmates all over the US.
Faced with such diminishing record sales in the whole world, how could this success be explained? Simple. Prisoners don’t have iTunes, and they most certainly don’t have an iPod. So the only solution available is listening to music on CDs. Not even those actually. 60% of the company’s sales are on good old analogue cassette. Why? Well compact discs, in the right hands, can be quite dangerous, so authorities thought it’s better to restrict them from some facilities across the country. Screws in the cassettes have to be removed for the same reason.
“I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers,” says company owner Bob Paris, a Pack Central official. “The beauty of it is that prisoners don’t have internet access and never will.”
Anyone here curious what’s the hits among the incarcerated? Well names like Lil Wayne, Mariah Carey, Usher, Rihanna, Nickelback and Leona Lewis are seemingly very popular, while Al Green’s Greatest Hits, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon are perennial favourites.
