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The Music Biz Is the New Book Industry
jonerik writes "The new issue of New York Magazine includes this intriguing article by Michael Wolff which makes the case that the music biz will soon be going the way of the book industry. Arguing that larger-than-life characters such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dorothy Parker were the rock stars of their time, Wolff points out that 'where before you'd be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone. Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.' Wolff also relates a recent lunch he had at Sony Music in which a sort of paralyzed acceptance had set in; 'The recent past was very bad; the future was likely to be worse. All money earned from here on in would be harder to earn. This felt like acceptance to me: We simply don't know what to do.'"
I've always wondered about the power of copyright to collect per-cd revenue.
In Germany, where I've spent some time, local bands are more influential than US/International stars. Although there is some influence, it's "in" to know someone who plays in a band, and bands are hired for gigs often.
I've always believed that the future of music was in Live music, i.e. performers must play to get paid. I think with internet distribution of music, this and the tone of the article, the future lies in performers doing actual work.
Torsten
We used to have parents deploring their children's taste in books, or that they didn't read at all, something I've always found distressing: many of my friends at university never seem to read anything; I don't know what they fill that gap in their lives with. We are already well on the way to parents deploring their children's taste in music and children who, as with books now, listen only to the sensational mega-selling singles, with no real loyalty or continuing interest in any one author/musician. And eventually, we will have people who don't listen to music at all, and don't miss it either.
I find that heartbreaking, but sadly plausible.
a) Screwing their customers by overcharging for stuff which doesn't hold up to the advertised quality in the first place. Think boy bands and CD's with 2 good songs and 18 filler tracks here...
b) Labeling their customers criminals by introducing copy-protected formats which do more harm than good. The DMCA. The SSSCA.
c) Failing to adapt to worldwide changes, such as the arrival of the Internet, home broadband, P2P technology. Attempts to fight the future rather than embrace it.
d) Pathetically holding on to their old business model, despite telltale signs that it's already outdated.
The list can go on for pages, and the four main points above can be split into several sub-points for those slow understanding the magnitude of this...
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Exactly. Most artists would be be better off selling 30,000 records and making a buck or two per record. The problem is that doesn't leave the outrageous profit margins that the music industry has been used to for so long.
The music industry is facing an increasingly consolidated radio business and the rise of a new distribution method that is in many ways superior to the current distribution channel that they control. In the end the artists, the radio stations, and the Internet are going to squeeze the fat right out of the record label middlemen.
Music is Free. For better or for worse, legally or illegally, music is now free. Period. I would submit it should be free, think of it as an advertisement for the tours. But whether or not people (including RIAA) think it should be free, it is. Improving technology and an archaeic business model based on control and scarcity has guaranteed that.
Famous musicians will earn less. Yes, Phil Collins and Celine Dion will probably earn much less than they do now. Instead of millions per year they might have to get used to earning incomes closer to what the rest of society does. Perhaps old Phil will have to scrape by on $200k a year... Then again, he sells out concerts which is where he make big bucks, anyway, so his income may be proportional to his desire to work (perform). I don't see a problem with that.
There will be more musicians. Although the most famous musicians will earn less, there will be more musicians because the barrier to entry will be greatly reduced. Eventually it will be eliminated. Some say that we'll be "flooded" with a bunch of untalented musicians and we won't be able to find anything good, but I'd submit that's the case now anyway.
The recording industry is obsolete. You used to need expensive recording equipment and studios to record quality music. A good studio is certainly still useful, but an amateur group can do a decent job at recording decent quality music that's definitely within their budget. They can burn CDs and sell them for $5/pop at concerts (pocketing $4.50 per CD), throw the music online (attracting more people to concerts). The recording industry is obsolete. Their legal attacks are, as the article mentions, a matter of squeezing the last dollar possible out of their business plan.
I live in Mexico right now. My sister-in-law is a 20-year-old Mexican young lady. She used to use Napster. That got nuked and now she has like 3 different P2P programs on her home PC connected to DSL. She has P2P programs that *I* have never heard of.
Last time I asked her she had downloaded 3200+ MP3s. That's more than 8 times what I, a techno-nerd, have downloaded. She doesn't listen to most of the music more than once, she just downloads everything she can because she likes to collect MP3s. She tells me her friends do too. She wants a larger hard drive for her birthday.
Believe me, the "music industry" is history.
In 1996 Paul Krugman, MIT economics professor and wirter of the Dismal Scientist column in Slate, wrote this column about a look back at what happened to content providers from 2096. Krugman's overriding point is that in a digital environment content ends up being free, and people that actually make tangible non-digital things (blue-collar-type jobs) will get the benefits of the future.
His model for music in a post-Napster environment is that music is delivered free to promote attendance at live concerts.
I particularly enjoyed the part where he predicts the demise of economists' perk jobs and he's writing part-time from a vet clinic.
I weep not for the end of Madonna and her ilk's excess. It's far more important what happens to the average plumber then it does for these pampered poodles.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
A while back I saw an interview with Lars wots-'is-name from Metallica stating that he didn't expect a plumber to come round to his place to fix his toilet for free, so why should people be able to download his music for free. And I thought that the day a plumber was able to give an interview, sitting beside his swimming pool, outside his huge mansion would the day that I'd give a toss about Lars's royalties.
The music industry has been a cash cow for years. And in an effort to make even more money they've stopped listening to what we want and tried feeding us over-priced pre-digested pap. And now, thanks to the Internet and the ubiquitous MP3 we have the ability to bypass the latest creation of the marketing department, and listen to what we want. And the music industry is desperately trying to stop us. They've used the law; and lately they've started mucking around with the CD format too.
The greed of the giant corporations has killed the goose which laid the golden egg. And I'm not at all sorry. So perhaps one-day rock-stars like Lars won't have huge mansions with swimming pools and they'll earn what I earn, and live like I live. And that will be the day that I will say copying music is morally wrong.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
"very little ability to get paid" my ass. That is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. Most business is not B2C (Business to Consumer) -- a ton of business is B2B (Business to Business). A simple thing will happen, the "preformer" will be unable to "make money" with crappy material, he will barter a deal with the "composer" (probably for a percentage of the take) and they will both be happy. Remember, if either one is crap it doesn't work. The idea that because someone can't sell something directly to the consumer, they can't make money. Hell, I would bet the "composer" would actually be better off, because he can sell his work to multiple artists and better he chances, and can simply choose to "ride the highest wave" once it gets to decision making time.
Alright, what the heck, I'll feed the troll.
You'll note that I wrote obnoxiously repetitive.
As such, 'Trance' music, African rhythmic drumming, and such are not included. They aren't obnoxious. Although, to you, it seems it is (you did, after all, quote 'obnoxiously').
And if you think today's youth would appreciate a Bali singer's peculiar intonation system (when compared to Western ideas of intonation), you would be deluded. Hell, most folks today have become so used to hearing music in even-temperment they couldn't imagine the purity of sound available to them if some decent musicians would go to the trouble to use just-intonation. Listening to Eastern music, for today's youth, is inconceivable, with its unique tonal system.
My musical education, since you're trolling, includes some ethomusicology, and damn near a BA in music, with an emphasis on composition. I take music quite seriously, and would like to see the art form grow in this country.
As for dancing to music, I have never been moved enough by so-called 'house' music to feel the desire to dance to it. I have danced (privately, where no-one else could see me <grin>) to music that moves me. I'm probably not a great dancer anyway, and I doubt I could find crowds of people interested in dancing to a 5/4 beat (for example).
As for being 'an aged man clawing at the past', if the present cannot provide music worth listening to, perhaps this is indeed true. However, occasionally, I have managed to find a modern gem or two out there (however, never in the mainstream). Toby Twining has recently released an album that promises to be good (complete with just-intonation, vocal techniques that are non-western, and tone-rows, to name a few interesting techniques), and sometimes I manage to find some really cool stuff amongst the rabble (Chrystal Belle Scrodd comes to mind). None of these artists I've mentioned will be popularized by the mainstream media, although you might find Toby Twining's work in the stores (maybe, if you're lucky.. I was). I do not consider them part of the music 'industry', hence, not a focus of my previous comment.
As for defining 'good' music, admittedly, it's in the ear of the beholder. However, when different artists are all doing damn near exactly the same thing, when the innovation is lost, the music ceases to be 'good' anymore. And without some training in music appreciation, kids will continue to grow up thinking that this drek is wonderful, when there's a wide world of wonderful music waiting for them out of the mainstream.
And so it goes.
So, the music industry is succumbing to the inevitable. It's not really a big deal - music will still be made, and musicians will still be able to make money by performing live.
The bigger issue is that the same things that made the music industry unprofitable are already starting to make the TV and Video industries unprofitable. Ad-skipping PVRs are gutting television's revenue stream as fast as they are sold, and file-sharing is slowly making inroads on any recorded video. But unlike music, there is no "live performance" option, local content is largely irrelevant, and real costs are much higher.
The situation for the withered book and publishing industry is even more dire. The inavailability of a screen comfortable to read off of is all that stands between it and its total collapse.
The point is this - the notoriously rotten music industry may be down for now, but they are not alone in their troubles. Their ultimate fate will not be sealed until the greater "content" industry either gains control over the distribution of their works once and for all, or loses it entirely and is reduced to patronage and selling their content at costs comparable to copying it yourself.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?