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Music Downloading not Entirely to Blame
Outlyer writes "A recent article in The Economist discusses the proximate causes for the decline in music sales. Of some note is this quote in the article:
"According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy. [...] Other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself. But creativity doubtless plays an important part." The article discusses in some depth the short-term viewpoint of the majors and why that is likely to be the dominant problem, not the internet bogeyman."
I switched from buying new CDs to buying used ones. It saves money and puts dents in the RIAA statistics.
Well, at least we can be reasonably sure that the RIAA higher-ups will read it. Not that they'll listen, but they'll at least read it.
Is this article news, or merely that is covered by the Economist? Studies pointing out the drop in music sales are mostly due to a lack of stuff people want to buy are legion.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Maybe you should expand your horizons beyond the top 40 then. There's plenty of good music out there, almost always has been. You just have to do the legwork to find the stuff that'll keep you interested.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The reason I usually don't buy CDs is because 90% of the mainstream music sold out there is simply SHIT.
[alk]
Question is, will this really make any difference at all? Not likely... these companies have their minds made up that the internet(s) is(are) the cause. It's interesting that someone had the balls to write it up especially in an economical media outlet but it won't change anything.
Not a real shocker but nice to be higher profile.
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
I am not a big music buyer, mostly because I can't get the music I like to hear (classical, folk and Celtic) at local stores such as Wal-mart, and the local folkie store is off my beaten path and has little parking. I would use a service such as this eagerly. And yet, everyone seems to focus on the indie rock scene and the big rock/pop/hiphop acts, and don't think that online distribution might mean the flowering of genres with smaller fans, such as folk, bluegrass, opera, choral, or whatever!
Frankly, the best way for a business to thrive is not to have a radical change of the business model. Instead, incremental changes and continual improvement (hitting singles instead of homers) will get the job done. One incremental change can be to make sure that downloadable music isn't just for young listerners.
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy.
So, one-quarter to one-third of the sales drop is due to internet piracy? I can see why companies might be worried about this. (And everyone who votes me down because I won't subscribe to their "waaa waaa waaa! I want my music for free!" is a wanker.)
The CD boom was people format shifting to CD media, many people own legit vinyl, cassette and CD copies of the same album. I'm not in a real hurry to switch formats again and the great thing about digital music is that I can make unlimited copies without the sound quality degrading, this is the ONLY reason I re purchased on CD's, and if they want to make it hard for me to do that I'll stop buying.
The drop in sales has fuck all to do with filesharing, and everything to do with the witless commercial pop that saturates the market; everybody except the RIAA knows it!
no harm != legitimate in many people's opinions.
I have bought 2 cd's in the past 3-4 years, not because I am pirating or downloading, but because I firmly believe the RIAA are the biggest crooks in this picture and refuse to support them.
I believe the RIAA will rape their artists every which way they possibly can, and cheat them out of their royalties at every chance. Given this, I find it more than a little ironic that the RIAA campaigns against piracy by boldly proclaiming that downloaders are cheating the artists.
Here's to hoping that sales continue to decline until the RIAA crumbles entirely out of the picture.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
TFA mentioned a reason why CD sales were dropping is that CDs are competing for shelf space with other, higher-value forms of entertainment.
Which is true (that the OST CD is worth almost as much as the full DVD is puzzling at best), but missed a more important point.
Two words: Cell phones.
Here in Europe most basic plans cost EUR 40 a month. That's a sizeable share of a teenager's allowance. That's at least 3 CDs a month they won't buy.
H-H is horrid imo - endless, short, electronic loops of intensely annoying sounds, weak and/or stupid lyrics, bad singing (if they even sing at all), it's overly produced, etc. etc.
Any new CDs I buy now are established artists who've been around for a while and have a new CD out; or I'll just buy some 'classic' stuff.
Once uninventive, regurgitated hip-hop took over, the industry pretty much lost me.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
It's often beem said on Slashdot that the real reason for the decline is the decline of the quality of the music. That's possibly true, but I'd like to know how a reliable study could report on it objectively.
Music tastes are extremely subjective. If anything, the objective measures would tend to suggest that the music is getting better, in the sense that it's been focus-grouped to death. Somebody out there is saying, "Yes, we like it. We like it so much we want to copy it off the Internet or from a friend's CD."
It seems likely that in fact the focus-grouping and hit-promoting have lowered the quality of the music to a least common denominator, but I'd love to know how this industry report went about measuring that. In the end that measurement will describe how the music changes from here. The executives who make the decisions aren't artists and don't use artistic judgment to decide what to produce. They look at numbers and poll likely group members to see what will sell. They know that people will only buy what they like, so I'd love to know what measure of "like" they're using for this study that's different from the ones they're already using.
Here's a 'proximate cause' for you: Creative accounting. Note that this is based on an internal study. The industry has in fact been making more money the past five years, and lying about it.
Why?
The purpose of pursuing piracy is to gain monopolistic control over *MEDIA* so that only 'the big six' (or is it five now?) can publish music. This will put independent artists out of business, in fact all record companies that aren't universal/warner/bmg/emi/sony. This is because they are trying to madate in law that all media must have digital protection. The protection will be crackable (it always is), but controlled by the RIAA, so they control who publishes.
With the advent of home studios and the digital revolution.. and internet promotion there is less and less need for a bloated recording industry. They know this.
People may pirate eminem but he still sells >10 million copies an album.
I think that the biggest reason that music sales are declining is that the largest demographic in this contry has finally stopped buying lots of music. The boomers have finally repurchased all the music they have owned on vinyl, eight track and cassette. They are not interested in Ashlee Simpson, Usher, Coldplay or Creed. Most of their children have grown up, so they aren't spending a lot of money there either.
The whole concept of copyrighting a recording is very recent (1910's or so.) Before then, you would copyright the sheet music, which was published like any other printed work. The whole idea of controlling the playback of music was originally laughed out of court. (The early litigation centered around the mechanical playback of music by player pianos.) What came out of those legal cases was the concept that merely transposing the musical notation into another form (in this case from sheet music to the punch cards for the piano) was considered copyright infringement.
Not because you copied the music, per se. Because you were selling a copy of the music. After a bit of wrangling congress passed laws dealing with "mechanical recordings" which paved the way later for wave-form playback devices that captured sound directly and played it back.
Then came the radio.
With radio (and recorded playback at public events), we had a dilemma. Radio wasn't technically "selling" a recording of the music. They were selling a performance of the music. After a lot of wrangling the music industry and broadcasters came up with a compromise: compulsery licensing. You purchase a license to play back music in public. The proceeds from the license are redistributed back to the artists and publishers. (The RIAA doesn't make a dime off of Radio, that's ASCAP's bailywick.)
With the Internet we have elements of both case law. On one hand we are publishing "machine recordings" of music. On the other, the mechanism to transfer the files is essentially that of a radio broadcaster.
In the end, we should have to pay for the recording. But do we make the check out to the RIAA (ala record sales) or to ASCAP (ala performance licenses). The RIAA, of course, is hoping that the money comes back to them. In the end though, it will probably be an ASCAP type of organization that deals with distributing music over the internet.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
But at a much higher cost. Not only do you have to pay for the burner machine, but you also have to deal with issues like what to do about inserts, cases, etc. Also, a listen/burn machine is a serial use item, while shelving is parallel use. Finally maintenance, content updating, etc., all raise the cost even more.
Anyway, it's non-viable when I can just sub in another rack of DVD's at a higher margin. If we end up where DVD's are the only thing available, who cares. People will generally spend their entertainment income on what's promoted and available. Which bits happen to be on the plastic doesn't matter to the retailers. Nor does it matter to the conglomerates who are just as happy (if not more so) to sell a crappy DVD as opposed to a crapy CD.
That is all.
Sure there are re-releases today still but the numbers dwarf in comparison to the beginning to 90's. This was a point brought up during PBS Frontline "The Way the Music Died" documentary on the troubles of the music industry. I seem to remember that Frontline pointed out that sales relative to new albums have actually gone up. But the overall sales have gone down because older albums sales have decline greatly. This Economist report doesn't address this point.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
" This is a study, just like the other studies made. Because this one says what you want to hear, doesn't make it 'truth.'"
It wasn't just any study. It was made by one of the major music publishers. Not by an pro-consumer group or the lobbying arm of the consumer electronics manufacturers, but by the VERY people, who have been claiming Napster killed the CD star.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
That's a good point. I know I started to lose interest in the "music scene" around my early to mid thirties, settled down, quit my band, got married, etcetera.
Has anyone charted the baby boomers' ages in regards to music purchases? Maybe there's just a lot of people getting older who just don't give a fuck about new music anymore.
Today's music ain't got the same soul
I like that old time a-rock 'n' roll
the one thing that gives them nightmares and keeps them up at nights.
it's not p2p or theft or piracy or even used CD/DVD sales.
their biggest fear is that you tune out and stop watching/listening altogether. that would mean not only no sales, but no advertising revenue either.
if this happens on any scale, i expect the mpaa/riaa to push through 1984/maxheadroom style legislation requiring a TV in every house turned on 24/7, and make it illegal to turn them off.
90% of the kids that love the music don't have the money to buy the CDs. By the time they get to be the type of wage earning adult than can afford CDs, they're already turned off by the record companies.
That's real smart marketing. Price your products to the point where your biggest market can't afford them, do anything to stop them from having them, play shi*t on the radio, do nothing for the little bands, and then complain your market share is down.
Even if I can find the artist I'm looking for, all they have is their "Greatest Hits" album. Now, If I'm looking for a (c)Rap album, I can find 8 different mixes of the same album. But trying to find Devo, The Beloved, or even The Beatles and the Doors is a futile effort.
(He writes with a track from Abba that was downloaded off of iTunes playing in the background. Wait, now it's Berlin...)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The article doesn't mention satellite radio, but in the USA subscriber bases for both XM and Sirius satellite radio services are growing rapidly.
Don't know what the net effect of growth is. As a one-year XM subscriber, I listen to CDs less, but have purchased a couple a CDs from artists I never would have discovered without satellite radio.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
The "industry" has not been using facts for sometime now, as they rely on marketing spin to get their agenda ( and legislation ) pushed..
We already know the facts.. having the 'economist' restate them is nice, but of no practical value...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
one of the reasons for the decline.
Open Source Music: anotherdreamer.net
Then you get bands like Chumbawamba who, after decades of singing subversive anti-corporate rhetoric, manage to prove their point most eloquently by writing a single album designed to be a one-hit wonder -- as a JOKE.
Now it's tough to find their good old albums because the stores only stock the sucky one-hit wonder album. Seems that the older stuff just doesn't fit the band's image anymore.
Irony is lost in the free market.
We are experiencing a Renaissance of locally-produced music, from street performers to small bands. Music is no longer the exclusive domain of a handful of mega-conglomerates, but is being taken back and revitalized on the micro scale. Seattle/Portland (near me) support a thriving community of small indepenent musicans producing truly excellent music. It's like the 60's all over again. Not so much "new" sounds, but new takes on the folk/rock/celtic traditions and a resurgence of interest in vocals and acoustic instrumentation rather than synthesized, reprocessed top-40. Complex, muti-layered arrangements that depend on real musicians, not 20 year old pinups with digitally-enhanced vocals supporting their silicon-enhanced figures.
Personnally, I'm excited by the trend, and am actively building a large and varied CD collection with very little help from the RIAA.
I think the biggest reason for the decline in music sales is the "cookie cutter" quality of some of the top selling artists.
Music can either have a very broad appeal (inoffensive and acceptable to a wide audience) or have great depth (the music has a personal meaning to the artist and the audience), but very rarely does it have both qualities.
If the music has broad appeal but very little depth, the audience will drop the artist for the next "flavor of the month" because the music does not really mean anything to them.
If the music has depth, the audience will listen to the music years and years later because it speaks to them.
Many of the top selling artists today (as pushed by the major recording labels) are of the variety that have broad appeal, but no depth.
The artists that have depth in their music, are not well supported by the record labels because, well, their sales aren't very good.
But *YOU* aren't the person the article is about - it's about the public at large. In the past, when the old people stopped listening to the new music, there were younger people taking up the 'slack' and still keeping sales rising higher and higher despite the industry losing the older generation. THAT is what is different now. Not only are us old-timers buying less music, as has always happened generation after generation, but the teenyboppers that drive the industry are ALSO buying less music, and THAT is new. And that can be explained by a number of reasons, and bad music quality could very well be such a reason.
I have noticed a distinct change in the kind of music that gets radio airplay. I still listened to pop radio despite being "too old" for it, up until about the year 2000 - that's when it really got intolerably bad, and that's also about the time Clearchannel had taken over all the local stations. I don't think this is a coincidence.
When I was growing up, there were multiple genres of NEW music on the radio. Not everybody liked pop, but you could find another station playing rap, or another station playing heavy metal, or another station playing oddball new wave stuff. And these were all targetted at the SAME age group. Now it seems like there is only one new genre and it's pop. For any deviation from that genre, you have to listen to older stuff.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Personally, I think *every* generation's music sucks. Well, 90% of it, anyway.
:)
I've been listening to music since the 50s, and every decade has its crap and its treasure. There IS good new music out there today, but you won't find it on MTV. You'll have to visit small venues, seek out independent bands... put a little effort into it.
If you sit at home waiting for TV and radio to drop something great in your lap, you're going to go unfulfilled.
My daughter is a musician in a small indie band, so I get to see a lot of local talent live. Trust me, it's there. But it's not going to seek YOU out.
I wrote about this a while ago.
m l
http://www.summerblue.net/missives/copyright.ht
The major distributors are now in a situation where their product is having to compete with a free rival (P2P). It's hard to compete with free. In fact, all the major distributors have to offer are ease of access, breadth of catalogue and guaranteed quality. This is not worth 15 UKP a CD and 25 UKP a DVD! this painful adjustment is currently what the major distributors are in denial about, and have attempted to perform a minimum-effort resolution, lawsuits, and via DRM.
Our culture is accustomed to copying, because of the VCR, and it is not possible, a la prohibition, to legislate out of existance an act which is widely culturally accepted.
DRM is a brittle solution, since the P2P networks provide immediate and universal distribution of material; if a DRMed product is broken *just once*, then it's gone - it goes public, and that's that. Since DRM is a major investment, and since these companies have a long habit of choosing proprietory security implimentations, I think they're on a burning plane with no parachutes.
All in all, I think the heyday of the major distributors is over.
--
Toby
Buying used is guaranteed, no-doubt-about-it legal. No copyright violation possible: you're buying the same copy as was sold originally.
In such a scenario, that copy has already benefitted the artist as much as it was designed to.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
I'm not talking about file sharing, I'm talking about internet radio stations.
I'm willing to bet that the same people that are buying satellite would listen to internet radio. I think that all the 15 mins of music with 30 mins of comercials really puts off a lot of tradional radio listeners these days. These people are turning to internet and satellite to avoid all this BS. You only need to listen to commerical radio once a month to memorize the playlist.
Turn on internet and satellite and you'll have to listen a whole month to hear the same song again, if it really does play again. Plus with internet radio you can get an artists name (not sure how this works with satellite).
My point is that if it weren't for these new technologies I probably wouldn't have found anything new.
That and AllMusic which is a great resource for researching a genre or even an artist that you like.
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
I'll tell you how, because it's painfully true. The music industry has built it's business by offering something new to each generation of kids. Honestly, what's new lately? The artist examples you give have been around since the 90's - at least. I was taling about THIS decade.
It can be argued that music is continually evolving and I agree with that except that the previous few decades have shown far more music innovation that has arguably happened for thousands of years. The presentation of recorded music, ways of recording it, and whole new instruments fueled a lot of original material - stuff you could honestly say didn't sound like anything before it. Maybe I'm old, but I'm not hearing what THIS generation's music is doing to be different.
Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean the music itself has changed much. For instance, there were similarities in New Wave to the preceeding Disco era, but there were extremely distinctive differences (mostly in instrumentation). I'm not sure mating a grunge band with a DJ is all that innovative, but for the sake of argument, I'll bite on that one.
But again, that was soooo... Last decade.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I strongly feel that new music is just awful. These new musicians are horrendous, and shoved down our throats by huge media marketing campaigns. Throw in the fact that hip-hop has become the mainstream and its driven by no-talent ass clowns (Lil' John, Birdy, Chingy, Nelly, etc), we won't see any good music for a while.
100% Insightful
The major labels have all adopted a business model which puts a heavy initial investment on an "artist" with the expectation that their popularity, while enormous to begin with, won't last more than a few years. I think people are wising up to the fact that they've bought all these albums that they don't listen to any more and have realized that it's just a waste of money to invest in music with no staying power.
With the homogenization of radio ala clearchannel, and their annoying "demographics" and pay-for-play formats, the biggest problem I have when I DO hear the rare song that catches my ear is that I have no way of finding out what it is I just listened to.
iTunes and its ilk have made purchasing new music a bit more viable for me now - the previews are good (I'd buy half the tracks on every Cake album out there, and discard the rest) and I appreciate the "people who bought X also bought Y" references - it turns me onto some tunes and bands I hadn't heard of before.
Similarly, the in-store preview audio systems like RedDot in Barnes & Noble and Borders are pretty useful also.
Corporations need to get over the whole physical media thing, plus make radio a useful method of getting new music out there (why they play the same 50 songs all day long blows my mind - no request mechanisms, no way to throw out new music to expose potential big sellers - it's music by committee)..
sloth jr
Not too long ago, there was a slashdot article of an interview with David Crosby on Frontline.
... The people who run record companies now wouldn't know a song if it flew up their nose and died."
He talked about how at some point the tone and attitude of big music changed from being supportive and developing of young talent for the long term to being adverserial and short term profit minded.
I think this economist article is the conclusion and proof of what he was talking about, his thoughts were mostly anecdotal without concrete evidence. From the interview:
"When it all started, record companies -- and there were many of them, and this was a good thing -- were run by people who loved records," he says. "Now record companies are run by lawyers and accountants.
SRC: PBS Frontline
The result of this commercialization and 'selling out' resulted in companies the likes of Sony, BMG, EMI, etc. run by lawyers and accountants. Of course, their first instinct when faced with new technology and a threat is to sue the pants of grandmas and 12 year olds. Way to go corporate America!!!
I'm gonna apologize for my attitude, for this next part but... I got karma to burn.
Evidently, having some lawyer or accountant run a business may just well run it into the ground. There is apparently no substitute, no matter how ivy or expensive your degree may be, for heart and really appreciating the business you work with or work in. Being in it for money will eventually sink the ship. It's love of music that brings out the great music, and brings it to the people, not lawsuits, not cheap thrills turned into overnight successes with the help of Payola (to radio stations -- ahem Clear Channel), over promotion and slick advertising (ahem -- MTV).
I hope Elliot Spitzer rips these companies and the lawyers who run them a new one with his Payola investigation.
M