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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
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.
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 ___________________________________