Electronics & Entertainment

Borders Group can’t find a buyer for its music and books stores, while rival Barnes & Noble received a takeover bid from Liberty Media valued 20 percent greater than Wall Street investors believed the company is worth. E-book buyers now outnumber purchasers of hard- and soft-cover books at Amazon.com. Netflix, by some estimates, accounts for 30 percent of Internet traffic when consumers go in search of action, adventure, comedy and drama, while Blockbuster stores have joined Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery on the back lot of history.

GameStop started the year off with a bang, but is hunkering down for some unimpressive year-over-year results as it carries out planned investments to achieve strategic initiatives. Best Buy is downsizing stores and otherwise abandoning its big box approach to retailing; the company has also shut down overseas operation in China and Turkey. At the other end of the spectrum, data tracker iSuppli estimates 44 million Apple iPads will be purchased this year.

Content and delivery are what electronics and entertainment power players are all about. As digital downloads expand, sales of DVDs and CDs continue to plummet. DVD sales were down 15 percent during the 2010 holiday selling season, resulting in a 3.8 percent decline in home entertainment revenues for Hollywood studios. It was also a bad year for recorded music, as the total number of albums sold — CD or digital download — was 326.2 million, the lowest since Nielsen SoundScan began compiling such statistics in 1993. That was the second consecutive year that total album sales experienced double-digit declines as sales fell in every genre but rap.

Given all this, it seems an odd time for Google to roll out its Music Beta service, which is essentially a cloud-based music locker that works with web browsers and Android devices.