Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
or all the large corporations will end up ruling the world and we will all be slaves serving under their tyranny listening to Nsync 24/7 with little advertising devices implanted into our eyes and ears.
Personally, I can't wait for my own personal add implant! I love Nsync, and where's my coke?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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
I'm delighted to be working with computers rather than coked up overpaid wankers pretending to be friends with musicians for no reason WHATSOEVER except that it might make them lots of money. The most evil people I've ever met, in person, were A&R. (and one of the nicest, too... but it's the Clive Gabriels of this world that stick in the memory.)( /.er could ever imagine. It almost makes me want to get back into management, just so I could steer yougn acts away from teh traditional industry, encourage them to use viral marketing, free mp3s etc etc and then sit back and grow rich. (But not quite: Perl6 is too interesting... =)
Oh and if this comment should happen to show up as a result from a search for Clive Gabriel of Chrysalis Music? He's pure scum. NEVER trust that man.)
The "biz" is actually worse than the average
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.
Being a musician the thing I find most wonderful about music is that it can cross all genre's. Every CD that is made (with the exception of spoken word in some cases) can be enjoyed by anyone anywhere in the world. With book sales there is often language barriers or even literacy barriers. You don't have to know anything to enjoy music, and that will keep the music industry alive.
That being said, I would have no problem with the "death of the rockstar." Have the musicians creating music out of passion, not out of greed. Maybe the only people to get hurt by this would be the big scary record companies.
I would say that the interesting thing that was overlooked in this article was the fundamental role that music has played during the existence of the human race.
:)
Music has an ability to reach places that words often fail. The book business of course fundamentally depends on earning it's money from a customer base that is at least educated to the point of having a base reading level. Music doesn't require this at all.
Music finds a way to tap into the inner feelings that humans have and allows us to communicate direnctly if even for only a moment. We have grown up with music as a component of our daily lives, we will continue to consume it.
What will change is the pricing for sure. Things will be more reasonable, which will allow for more and wider competition.
All I can say for sure is that those kids hanging out at MTV during TRL are buying into an image and a way of life driven by the music ( no matter how misguided that may be)
Saying that the music biz will be extinct is like saying that there will be no more kids who discover Dark Side of the Moon and imagine that they are the first people to discover this cool music.
Music is just too important to humans. If the record industry knew this and took the time to drop the prices, I think they would make even more money and people wouldn't want to "borrow" the next Eminem record off the net...
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.
Yeah, there are. About twenty or thiry of them. Everyone else sells dick.
The thing the author has missed is the trend in the publishing industry, which is moving more like the music industry, trying to aquire strangleholds on authors' works, doing deals with bookstores to charge authors for promotion and shelf space, and a whole bunch of nasty shit they've learned from EMI.
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.
... that's just not going to happen.
Music has been a part of society for litereally thousands of years. People will continue to want to purchase music (even if that means digital format). If nothing else, concerts will continue to be the true source of income for performers.
Look at how much classical music is still purchased, along with various music forms that range from decades to centuries old.
I would venture to say that music is a part of human nature as a method of creative expression. Books are as well, but they don't have the portability and the quick and powerfull effects that music can have on people. Music's portability is its greatest advantage. Being able to listen to music as you do pretty much anything helps with its pervasiveness. Hell, there are a number of activities that are more enjoyable with proper musical accompanyment.
I do believe the format in which music is aquired will continue to change and the type of music will continue to change, as it ever has. But it will always be a lucritive business.
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
Seems like the "bleak" future described was also a fairly accurate description of the music industry prior to 1950. No real pop-superstars or bazillion-dollar promotional campaigns.
That's the way things were.. and we liked it!
1. U2, $109.7 million
2. 'N Sync, $86.8 million
3. Backstreet Boys, $82.1 million
4. Dave Matthews Band, $60.5 million
5. Elton John and Billy Joel, $57.2 million
6. Madonna, $54.7 million
7. Aerosmith, $49.3 million
8. Janet Jackson, $42.1 million
9. Eric Clapton, $38.8 million
10. Neil Diamond, $35.4 million
11. Matchbox Twenty, $28.4 million
12. Rod Stewart, $27.2 million
13. Jimmy Buffett, $26.9 million
14. Andrea Bocelli, $26.8 million
15. Ozzfest 2001, $26.4 million
16. Sade, $26.2 million
17. Tim McGraw, $24.9 million
18. Britney Spears, $23.7 million
19. James Taylor, $23 million
20. Tool, $20.4 million
No more glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs...Yeah right.
Even without concert sales, people are still buying CDs anyway. After all the crap about Eminem's album being pirated before it was released he still managed to sell 1.32 million copies in his first week. I think the reports of the death of the music industry have been greatly exagerrated.
Finally, innovative musicians can parlay their fame into dollars from other means. Just look at Ozzy Osbourne who's about to pull in 20 million for his reality-sitcom.
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.
The music industry could start earning more income, perhaps, by improving the quality of the music it generates.
Sure, production value has improved, but today's music sounds much like a movie with great special effects but no plot; it lacks substance. The industry has concentrated so hard on vacuous marketing techniques aimed at various demographics, as well as absurd lobbying activities amongst politicians that it should truly come as no surprise that folks have become disgusted with today's music, by and large.
Truly, look at what they're coming up with these days; the better tunes are rehashed oldies (where they've taken advantage of improved production techniques to bring you better sounding copies of old tunes that folks are familiar with). And even some of those are downright offensive with 'corporate appeal'.
I could only think of two more possible solutions to their problems (although it may be too late).
First, recognize that the Baby Boomers are getting older. You aren't going to see that kind of explosive buying power again (at least not until the next major disaster that wipes out a third of the population, making room for another baby boom). So don't even bother. Go with a wider range of musicians and spend a little less money on production (something that's getting easier these days). Quick little hint: scarcity of resources breeds artistic endeavor. Some of the most clever bits of music ever crafted came from truly small production budgets. No need to starve their resources, though, just force your talent to grow their techniques and composition skills before exposing them to the big production dollars.
Second, instead of lobbying your congressman for these truly insulting and offensive abuses of law, put your money into the education system to improve the state of music education in our schools. If folks have no appreciation for music, what makes you think they're going to bother to listen to any of it? Branding? Today's youth barely grasps the concept of counterpoint (multiple melodies played on top of each other), can't appreciate a good groove (preferring an obnoxiously repetitive 'beat' instead), and do not have an iota of an appreciate for music without lyrics.
And so it goes.
Yes, some of these composers became well-known, but there were hundreds and thousands of other composers who never lasted. In fact until the mid 1800s even these composers were mostly forgotten; the idea of a canon of time-honored masterpieces itself doesn't go much farther back than the 1840s or 1850s.
Johannes Brahms was one of the first composers we remember that never accepted commissions for works. Even Beethoven the freelancer had to accept commissions to live. Brahms made his living teaching lessions, taking conducting posts here and there (and invariably getting frustrated and leaving), and being supported by friends and family.
All these composers came up with lots of "fill" and a few masterpieces.
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 ___________________________________
"Here are the choices:
If you're providing free entertainment, which is obviously what the music business is doing, then you have to figure out some way to sell advertising to the people who are paying attention to your free music. But nobody seems to have any idea how that might be done. Or you can provide stuff that's free, and use the free stuff to promote something else of more value that people, you hope, will buy -- now called the "legitimate alternative." (Putting video on the CD is one of those ideas -- though, of course, you can file-share video too.) Or sell the CD at a level that makes it cheap enough to compete with free (free, after all, has its own costs for the consumer)."
Here's a more realistic choice:
You're rich, powerful, influential and arrogant. Theft of your product is rampant. You buy a Senator, say Senator Hollings from SC, and you have him draft a bill that forces all hardware and operating systems to incorporate some form of anti-coping technology. It becomes impossible to copy music/video files without hacked hardware. You make it illegal to run hacked hardware and vigorously prosecute those who have the audacity not to bow to your will.
Your sales remain high. Problem solved.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Get Real!
Music is a very individualistic art form. It isolates in a crowd.
You very rarely find li'l ol' grannies rockin' with "The Cramps" and "They Might Be Giants".
You rarely find bikers gassing on the latest "Conway Twitty" or "Boxcar Willy" CD.
I'd ruin an evening trying to find Mexicans really geting into Susanne Vega. Nor will you find much salsa music in Norwegian taverns.
Music is idiocyncratic and idiomatic.
Just to help things along, most music is sold to and bought by people who don't like it and don't listen to it.
Its everywhere at every fuckin' mall the planet over, in every bazzar, every souk, every gallery, "gallerie" and galleria. The people who shell out the bucks are merely shelling out for the "least unpleasant noise" to fill in the void between commercials.
Your buying a couple of CDs every year is squat compared to what the commercial outfits shell out for canned muzak every single hour of every single day.
That's what the media companies are protecting. They don't give a shir about you or your ears.
Bruce Springstein's "Born In The USA" was not saying that you should be PROUD of being "Born In The USA."
Nobody listen's to Marylin Manson's lyrics. Nor Trent Reznor's either. If they did. There's be nobody at the fuckin' shows.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
The "industry" is, was, and always will be about making money, not music.
Making music has zero barriers to entry.
Tickets for the pop star lotto are expensive.
I've always believed that the future of music was in Live music, i.e. performers must play to get paid.
Or to phrase it an other way: In the future, the composer of music will have very little ability to get paid.
If the composer is also the performer, he will get paid, but only in his capacity as performer, not composer.
the future lies in performers doing actual work
Obviously, composing music is actual and difficult work, requiring talent, training and considerable effort.
Many /.ers have said that technology is either going to hurt current business models, make them available to more people, or make artists rely more on live performances than any tech/recording based business. But after all this talk about business models, can't technology make the actual art of music better?
Think of broadband. Right now it's used mainly for copying files and playing violent games. But imagine if it was used for music: Just as you can assemble a team of players online to go shoot up other teams, you could assemble a team of singers or instrument players. Once telephony goes CD-quality and grows from one-on-one chat to many-to-many chat, it could be used as a way of singing!
There's also surround sound. Dolby is working on surround sound through headphones. Imagine putting a tilt sensor on your headphones so you could turn your head at any angle and the sound would seem to stay in place, rather than follow your head as it does with current headphones. This would require music to be stored in a MIDI- or MOD-like format with XYZ tags rather than as a waveform recording, but it would allow a lot of flexibility and interactivity. This could soon be used in games; imagine if it was used in the creation and listening of music.
These are just two examples I can think of off the top of my head. You can probably think of much more enticing ways. But the main idea is that while everybody is talking about how technology affects the distribution process, the most important thing, in the long run, is how it'll enhance the actual art of music.
After all, what was rock and roll before the electric guitar?
The link between books and music is confusing to me, and it doesn't seem like the author follows the logic. He opens and ends the article stating that musicians will become as modern authors, then moves on to say that the music industry is facing shrinking profits with the technological changes. Huh?
I agree with both ideas. Today's titans of culture will become yesterday's classics of culture, and the music industry will surely figure out more novel and brutal ways to lose money. But how is this related?
Most famous authors were not particularly rich, to my knowledge, unless they came from money or were complete and utter superstars (Lord Byron is an example of both). Faulkner, Poe, Keats, and most other authors you can think of did not die with a lot of money in their pockets from their works, even though they are remembered as literary giants today. Then there are those who are not discovered until after their death, such as Blake and Kafka, who really did not make money off of their writings.
And then there's the idea that music replaced books as the driving force of popular culture. I would grant that only in part, but I would also say film and TV took equal parts of that massive share once held by books (and religion). Besides that, books still drive an incredible portion of culture. If you don't believe me, think about the sheer number of movies that are based off of books while you drive down to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders book superstore.
The thing that really bothered me about the article though, was that the author does not present anything to take the place of music as a dominant cultural mover. There will be some cultural form to replace music if it truly falls by the wayside, but until something actually comes forward to replace it, music isn't really going anywhere. The industry will change, as the article asserts, but musicians will not become mediocritized until something else comes forward. Given that internet distribution is making artists more popular than they likely would have ever been (watch TRL for evidence) I find it doubtful that music will lose its cultural power with the advent of the internet. If anything, it'll be strengthened.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
No, it is copyright violation. That's been discussed here many times before. If I steal the CD from a record store, I've committed theft. If I copy a CD or download an MP3, it's copyright violation. You might call it semantics, but it's a big difference.
Either you understand the basic tenants and contracts that maintain this thing we call society, or you believe that it's all some anarchy held together by the strings of technology.
You attempt to define this as a legal and social issue. It is not. It's technology and the free market.
In 1900, musicians made and played music live. That was it. Some made money, some didn't, but that's the way it was.
Technology came along and provided a way for both the artists and their distributors (recording industry) to make even more money by recording the music and selling it.
Now, in 2002, technology has come along and obsoleted the previous technology returning musicians to the legal and practical situation they had in the year 1900.
Technology giveth, technology taketh away.
Here's the problem: the entertainment industry is extremely rich, and politically powerful. They won't go down without a fight. In case anybody hasn't noticed, the U.S. political system is still dominated by big business, through various mechanisms, such as a system of legalized bribery based on political contributions to the two ruling parties. So while they entertainment corporations are postponing the inevitable, they'll fight a rear-guard action that will make the law even worse than it is now. IP law will become even more unbalanced in favor of IP owners. Hardware copy protection will continue to be written into federal law, possibly with the eventual result of making free operating systems illegal. It's not going to be pretty.
Find free books.
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?