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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 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!
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.
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