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Revolutionary High-Tech Music Retailing

By Bill Lehr

Music Have you ever bought an album and found out later that it wasn't what you thought it was? Well, now technology lets us sample thousands of records in the store before we purchase them.

"This is the first intelligent consumer oriented product developed for store users since the shopping cart."

"I love good music, but with so many titles on the shelf what should I buy."

"If I purchase the album at the store where I previewed it, I know that I'll really enjoy the album when I listen to it at home."

These are some of the comments we heard from consumers at a Preview Express installation in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The Preview Express installation located at the CD Superstore in Greensboro and is a new product introduced to benefit a consumers. Customers have the advantages of listening to the types of music of their choice in the privacy of the control stations.

How Does Preview Express Benefit the Consumer?

Preview Express lets the consumer listen to music before buying an album. The unique Preview Express installation in Greensboro is installed in the jazz music section and consists of four listening stations that can access over 5000 albums using a bar code system. I waited in one of the four lines to use the system. When my turn arrived I placed the earphones over my ears, followed some simple instructions and like magic, listened to the Stan Getz music that I had selected. Believe me, as a consumer, it's nicer to hear samples of the music rather than reading a sales pitch in fine print on the package. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the system was to operate. The convenience of listening to my selection makes me wonder what Zenqor will introduce to the public next.

How Does Preview Express Benefit the Music Store?

There are so many benefits coming from this new high-tech system that it will be months before they can be completely sorted out. For starters:

Consumers buy what they want to hear or might have heard more readily than something written on a sealed package. Preview Express has coined a new acronym, WYHIWYG (withy-wig) or What You Hear Is What You Get.

Yes, the consumer listens before buying. The CD Superstore lets you hear before you buy.

The system provides flexibility to the store management. A promotional message can accompany each musical segment. The listener hears the message, prerecorded prior to the requested music segment.

"Important demographic data is automatically collected by the system. This material includes gender, album preference, geographic location of the shopper and other data," noted Terry Harte, Engineering Manager for Zenqor. "In addition, the user frequency of each album more than justifies the cost of the system. The manufacturing industry is finally learning what people prefer to hear, and that translates to more album sales. Additionally, Preview Express is the first sales tool in industry to demonstrate to the consumer what the consumer wants to hear."

High-Tech Companies in Florida

Successful high-tech industries flourish in certain areas of the United States. Silicon Valley, Denver, Minneapolis, South Florida are a few of these areas. The seeds of high-tech education and experience were planted in Florida many years ago. Then, with the proper open minded thinking, buds of progress appeared and blossomed into full blown useful high-tech ideas.

People with vision in South Florida's climate recognize this type of growth and nurture it. This vision is at Zenqor. Zenqor recognizes the wants and the needs for industry and for the people. Zenqor fulfills the visions. The wants and needs are translated into useful products like Preview Express.

Preview Express Itself

Preview Express is available in several configurations. A compact system for the smaller shop consists of twelve listening stations attached to a 5,500 sample album capacity.

These twelve stations are like having twelve sales people telling twelve customers exactly what they want to hear. Each station receives the listener's preference and injects a "soft" promotional message with each segment of music.

We talked to Terry Harte, Engineering Manager at Zenqor about future expansions at Greensboro. The present plan is to place more customer control units at the Greensboro store.

Terry talked to us about another project. This installation has a system with access to 100,000 albums and provide over 100 control stations. Terry said, "The cost of this system is pennies per listening location. We are able to provide this low cost because of the company's proprietary digital data delivery technology."

Zenqor manufacturers and markets a broad range of products combining music and technology. The seeds are planted in South Florida and are flourishing.

Zenqor can be contacted at