Illustrations by John Grimes

By SCOTT ROSENBERG

A customer approaches a salesperson, two boxes in his hands. Each says "Microsoft Musical Instruments" on the cover, but they've got different cartons, covers and color schemes. They're obviously two different editions.

Or are they? The salesperson tells the customer that he's pretty sure they're identical CD-ROMs in different packaging. The customer frowns. "But how will I know which to buy?"

This Christmas, such questions are echoing on a thousand shop-floors across the land. The 1995 holiday season is widely viewed as a make-or-break crisis for the consumer multimedia industry -- and most of the smart bets are on "break."

For years, this business waited for a critical mass of CD-ROM drives and appealing "content." Now there's an "installed base" of many millions and a selection of titles in the many thousands. Yet everyone expects a shakeout. Prepare for a January barrage of headlines declaring "The CD-ROM is dead" -- RIPs from the same folks who once stoked the multimedia hype. New formats that pack in more data are looming, but they require new hardware, and the public may be getting tired of continually replacing its equipment.

The woes of the CD-ROM industry are well-chronicled: inflated prices, mediocre titles, incompatibilities and bugs. And now, just as CD-ROM makers thought they'd finally entered the consumer mainstream, the Internet has stolen their industry's high-tech thunder.

The Net's rapid ascent toward mass-medium-hood has served as a neon reminder of where the CD-ROM peddlers have flopped most spectacularly: distribution. The gross realities of the physical world have shanghaied them and their plans to conquer the media universe.

Multimedia art and entertainment doesn't need to exist in any form other than pure digital information, and the owners of "content" will no doubt thrive selling their stuff on the networks of the future. Voyager, the Knopf of multimedia companies, is already doing good business at its Web site.

But today's CD-ROM producers have instead found themselves mired in real-world retail nightmares. Stores can't stock enough variety, salespeople don't have enough expertise and floor demonstrations are frequently busted. Customers can't find what they want -- and when they do, they frequently end up returning it.

For a look into the black hole of multimedia retailing, we turned to a friend of SALON who works in the CD-ROM department of a large entertainment retailer in California -- surrounded by overflowing shelves, undereducated customers and the sounds of malfunctioning demo computers. We don't want to endanger his paycheck, so let's just call him Eep Throat.

The conditions he describes aren't universal, but they're certainly prevalent. And they go a long way toward explaining why a lot of multimedia companies won't be handing out Christmas bonuses this year.

SALON: How do you help people sort through the chaos?

EEP THROAT: The thing is, we're not paid enough to be able to afford the products. So sometimes people will ask questions, and I can say, I've read about this, but I really can't tell them if it's good or bad.

I go through the magazines. That's basically how I learn about this stuff. But I'm not supposed to read magazines on the job -- I've been reprimanded. It would help if the companies regularly sent retailers packets of reviews, and more and better demos.

There's a title called "Portrait of a Serial Killer." And instead of sending the buyer a demo of it, they sent a paperback copy of the novelization of the movie "Copy Cat," saying, our CD-ROM is just as thrilling as "Copy Cat!" That doesn't help.

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