Best Buy Chain Slashing Music Department

It’s good news for book lovers, but bad news for music buyers.

Best Buy, the Minneapolis-based music and electronics chain, is cutting its music department nearly in half. The company, an aggressive price leader when it comes to compact disc recordings, is whittling the number of CD titles it carries to 35,000 to 40,000 per store, from 60,000.

The chain is eliminating “a lot of inventory that wasn’t selling,” said spokeswoman Laurie Bauer. The company has five stores in Orange County.

In place of music, Best Buy is expanding into a category that may be even more competitive: books and magazines. The chain will stock as many as 1,500 titles on the New York Times best-seller list, and about 500 different magazines.

“We view our stores as offering the total entertainment experience--entertainment and leisure products,” Bauer said. The book and magazine lineup “is a very tight assortment. We’re not trying to compete with big booksellers.”

To appease music fans, Best Buy is offering 160,000 titles through its Web site, at www.bestbuy.com

Russ Stanton covers retail businesses and restaurants for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5609 and at russ.stanton@latimes.com