Digital sales - full-album downloads and their single-song equivalents (the industry considers 10 song downloads equal to an album) - accounted for 47 percent of albums purchased in the United States last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks the recorded-music industry.
"The CD is in turmoil," said Ed Christman, who reports on music sales for Billboard.
Hired as a maintenance mechanic in late 1982, when Michael Jackson's Thriller album was flying off the presses, Jones saw the boom and bust of the vinyl-record industry. Manpower at the plant - then owned by CBS Records, which purchased it from Columbia Records - already was half of the 2,000 it had been at its peak.
In the spring of 1988, the Pitman operation converted into CD production. It was the company's first venture in the new format. Later that year, Sony, then the world's largest CD producer, acquired the plant. In 12 years, the crew there churned out a billion CDs, according to an Inquirer report. Recent manufacturing capacity was 600,000 CDs a day, a company spokesman said.
"We had a lot of hot sellers," said Jones, 50, rattling off the names: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Judas Priest, Pat Benatar. Production was round-the-clock and overtime was plentiful, he said in an interview at his Deptford home, which is filled with Sony products and mementos.
Now there are only 350 employees in the nearly 500,000-square-foot complex off Woodbury-Glassboro Road. In a statement, the company cited the "current economic environment and challenges facing the physical-media industry."
Sony DADC (Digital Audio Disc Corp.) plans to move its CD manufacturing to Terre Haute, Ind., according to its spokeswoman.
