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Music Biz Predicts 6% Decline in '03
jonerik writes "According to this article from Reuters, music industry executives gathering this weekend for the global music industry conference Midem in southern France are being told that a 6% industry-wide decline in sales is being predicted for 2003; not as bad as last year's 9% decline, but bad enough since '02 and '03 come on top of a five percent dip in 2001 and a 1.4 percent fall in 2000. As a result, talk of consolidation is rampant at the conference, with the most likely scenario being a buyout of EMI by BMG-Bertelsmann. Critics, however, are skeptical that the labels' problems will necessarily be solved by simply bulking up. 'The politics at the major labels hasn't changed. The guy who puts his neck out on the line could get fired. Whereas the guy who keeps his head down is safe, and he gets to keep his BMW for another year,' said Paul Myers, founder of Wippit.com, a subscription download site."
is the fact that they put out less CD's than they have in previous years..
begun, the flame war has..
is pandora's box, and their diminshing expense business model almost ensures a continuing growth/profit downturn.
QUESTION - How can you depend on a smaller subset of crappy music to support a more diverse and growing audience and still make a greater profit, with out Andersen Accounting 101....
ANSWER - you can't unless you can claim the losses due to an illegal act and get aid or a system slanted in your favor...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
> Economy slumps
> Music sucks
> Downturn...must be piracy.
Another effect is that they've lost a free bonus market that they've had for the last 20 years. During the '80s the baby boomers shelled out millions or probably billions to replace their vinly with CDs of the same recordings, and during the '90s they did it again to get the remastered versions of those same recordings.
But both of those trends have almost completely run their course, so the record companies are back to selling new music for the first time without all the free bonus re-sales of old stuff to the large and economically powerful baby boomer generation. Unless they can think of a way to get the boomers to buy all that stuff for yet a fourth time, that "free bonus" revenue is gone for ever.
I would like to see a plot of sales growth/dips for the past 25 years that counted only new releases.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So I take it you believe the studios are selling DVDs near cost, since they already milked the public at the box office and they don't feel the need to earn (much) more money off the massive DVD campaign? DVDs are selling in larger and larger quantities, and for movies that do so-so at the box office, the DVD sales boost the total revenue of the film considerably (Reign of Fire comes to mind, did horrible in the theaters and was in top-5 of rental and sales charts for a few weeks).
I actually see non-Disney (boo his) DVD ads on TV on a regular basis now, more so than I see music ads, except those damn "Wow!" albums. Someone has to pay to get all those menus scripted, all the other language tracks recorded, the commentary tracks, the featurettes, the friggin' DVD-ROM content. Plus it comes in a nicer box than a jewel case, and is a fundamentaly more expensive media to produce. So why again are they close to if not less than the cost of a CD with 45 minutes of crap music?
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
I'm sorry, but this just gets my goat. The record industry insists that they're loosing business and it's just horrid what P2P is doing to them, and it's all piracy's fault.
Find me another mutli-billiion dollar a year industry that's NOT hurting in this day and age and I'll give you a cookie. On top of that, they're a non-essential industry! They should be hurting more than anybody else out there right now!
Okay, lets assume this is horrible to the record industry. The industry is just decimated by P2P right now for arguments sake -- who the hell do you know of right now that's been laid off by them and is hurting economically because of it? Anybody?
Lets step back into the world of -real- products with value right now. They're hurting... badly. I've seen Steelcase (a fortune 500 company recently) cut back their staff by large marks because of the economy. People aren't pirating office equipemnt, it's just a bad economy. There's rumors of a automotive parts manufacturer shutting down here too -- and that's not because of piracy. People still drive cars, and beleive it or not, they usually buy them. Yet, still, they're hurting. People are getting laid of from real jobs in real industries, yet these SOBs have the gaul to say that their sales are slumping and beleive that it's somebody else's problem that it's happening.
Bull... fucking...shit. Welcome to the real world, fellas. When people who make products people actually need are out of work you can sure as hell bet people that make things that noboby really needs are going to be hurting for money.