There's a huge change coming for the few remaining large retailers who sell compact discs. But it's almost to the point where very few people will notice it.

According to a number of trade industry reports, "big box" stores will be cutting back on CD display space by the start of 2008. Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target, which account for the majority of retail CD sales, are planning on "significant cuts" in devoted floor and shelf space.

That may not be huge news for most of you. When was the last time you bought a CD, much less bought one in a big box store?

If you're anything like me, you might thumb through discs at a Barnes & Noble or Borders, but you're most likely to go online to make a music purchase.

So what's going to go into that empty shelf space? Well, not DVDs. While not in quite the precipitous decline as the music industry, DVD sales have been dropping.

New formats are not improving sales. In fact, those new formats may be increasing returns and refunds, as people buy Blu-Ray and HD DVD discs and return the purchases upon finding them incompatible with existing home theater systems.

Forced to guess, my expectation would be that space will be taken up with more electronic gadgets - cell phones, MP3 players, video game systems, any combination of the above - or video games, which are annually a $7 billion to $8 billion industry.

Video gaming has figured out how to sell in a multi-platform format. Music and DVD manufacturing and marketing could take a few lessons from them, except they're probably too arrogant to think they could learn anything.

But it's not just arrogance on the part of music manufacturers and marketers that has led to their diminished stature in the marketplace. The retail stores must shoulder their share of the blame.

Those over 45 remember a time when music stores were essentially divided into areas you walked into and areas that you didn't. Country fans didn't cross over into the rock section, and the rockers steered clear of the jazz section. That was pretty much all you had.

(One of the most petrifying moments in my retail career came in the early 1980s, when my record-store-owner boss asked me to name 10 new jazz releases. I passed the test - barely.)

The diversification of music reached practically every retail level by the 1980s. The guessing games began. Was Michael Jackson in the soul/R&B section? Dance? Rock? Were there different releases in each section? Things hadn't been this confusing for a chart-topping pop artist since Linda Ronstadt's albums were split between country and rock in the mid-1970s.

Christian, rap, metal, folk, classical, alternative, blues, electronica, world, Celtic, gospel, Latin - things got to the point where the challenge to figure out how music was categorized was as difficult as finding the music itself.

(Which wasn't always easy in itself. My 1990 search for the album by British band The La's was met at Hickory Point Mall by no fewer than four clerks at two music stores - yep, they used to have two music stores out there - arguing that I was certainly looking for a release by L.A. Guns, a completely different band from literally the opposite side of the world.)

The same thing has happened with DVDs. You can now search a store top-to-bottom, only to have a clerk, in response to your foamed-mouth rants, nonchalantly pull the disc you're seeking off a shelf you'd never have thought to peruse.

If you can find new DVD releases at the box stores the week of their release, you're way ahead of me.

Perhaps I make it more difficult than necessary, trying too hard to apply the lesson learned when looking for the DVD set of the TV show "Greg the Bunny," a subversive little comedy that imagined puppets were real and living and interacting with us. The set was found not in the comedy section, not in the new releases, not in the TV sets section, but in the children's section.

As with the music releases, my question is: What would be so difficult about throwing all of these together in alphabetical order? Don't make us guess what category someone else would put it into.

Earlier this month, I went looking for the new DVD release of The Beatles film "Help!" Would it be in the music section? That's where The Beatles' first film, "A Hard Day's Night," was sitting. Would it be with the musicals? There's music in it. Would it be in the classics? You may not consider it a classic. Others might.

Ultimately, a clerk reacted to my frustration by pulling it off a shelf. The new-releases shelf.

Who'd have guessed?

Unfortunately, that shelf may not be there next year at this time. Stay tuned.

Tim Cain can be reached at timcain@herald-review.com or 421-6908.