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After Brief Respite Music Industry Slump Deepens
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Sales picked up for the record labels late last year, but 2005 has been bleak. The Wall Street Journal ticks off evidence: 'During the crucial Thanksgiving week, for instance, the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copies than the top 10 albums the same week in 2004. ... Sales of individual digital tracks on services like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store have increased -- but not nearly enough to offset the slide in CD sales. According to an estimate from SoundScan, overall sales of recorded music are down about 4.5%, if one considers 10 individual tracks the equivalent of an album.' The WSJ also lists familiar reasons for the decline -- 'online piracy, CD burning, high prices and competition for consumer dollars from videogames and DVDs' -- while adding, 'Lately, people in the music industry have said the same basic issues have been intensified by the growing popularity of pricey gadgets like Apple's iPod and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, as well as the rising prices for games that go with the new platform.'"
Get over it. Move on.
Get with the times..
I wonder if they ever thought about the Quality of the music they sell??
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Could it be that the music industry is just putting 40% less desirable music? When it comes to new CDs and artists, there hasn't been all that much growth over the past year.
Wow, there's other reasons than "online piracy" that leads to declined sales of music. Heh, it won't be long until RIAA either demands a halt in the sale of high priced gadgets such as the Ipod and the Xbox360, or demands a portion of the income from the sales. ;)
Personally, with all the issues circulating around the music industry today concerning price fixing, piracy, shady companies shipping their CD's out with crafty little pieces of spyware, and bands spending more time bitching than creating, I've turned to satellite radio to solve the problem. I pay a reasonable yearly fee (monthly if I wanted to) and then simply avoid the record stores. I've got it in my car; I can listen to it over the 'net at the office. The unit in my car detaches and can be placed into a dock at home. If I want to hear a certain song, I call the request line. There's plenty of entertainment available to keep my occupied. Sure, the on-demand aspect of owning CD's isn't there, but at least I know I'm not paying for something I don't want. Besides, it's just a matter of time before satellite radio begins to provide some form of on-demand programming...after all, it happened with satellite television.
And I can't stand the thought of deleting my "Best of Gallagher Live! '82 to '86"
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
While sales may be down to last year. itunes still provides a way for lazy people to legally download music, where if they had to go to a retail outlet would probably just resort to a P2P. So in fact itunes has increased profits regardless of amount. Don't mistake greed with reality
this timeline also explains the thanksgiving slump. funny how tfa does not mention that.
one industry that is reaping what it has sowed....care factor zero get a real job ... the world needs more tradespeople , not salespeople
...I obey the laws of physics....
I am advocating the violin overthrow of the RIAA through the Revolution of CDs made by non-label groups!
Yes, my personally boycott of the RIAA is working. Just a reminded if it's from a label that's in the RIAA, don't buy it.
Maybe they should look at the top 10 grossing tours (US) from this year. According to Billboard they are:
1. U2 ($260M)
2. The Eagles ($117M)
3. Neil Diamond ($71M)
4. Kenny Chesney ($63M)
5. Sir Paul Mccartney ($60M)
6. Rod Stewart ($49M)
7. Elton John ($45.5M)
8. Dave Matthews Band ($45M)
9. Jimmy Buffett ($41M)
10. Green Day ($36.5M)
Hmm...I'm not sure about Kenny Chesney, but all of the other acts are at least 10 years old. I hate the Eagles as much as the next guy, but the mass marketed music today is Busch League, laughable.
He hates these cans!!!
10 individual tracks sold in itunes cannot be equated to just a single CD album.
An average CD album will not contain more than two or three good tracks while the rest will be useless. When people buy individual tracks from itunes, they will only go for the better ones and the rest will just not sell. So instead of considering 10 tracks as being equivalent to a single album sale, WSJ should consider 2 or 3 tracks sold on itunes as being equivalent to a single album sale.
So either there's faulty parallelism there: ...pricey gadgets like Apple's iPod and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, as well as the rising prices for games that go with the new platform.'"
or I can get Tux Racer for my iPod Nano. Which is it?
Sony 'rootkit' Debacle.
I'm sorry, but didn't anyone else ever end up buying an album for just that one "must have" song?
I know it would have been a rare thing for me to buy an album if I had always had such easy access to purchasing the one or two songs I wanted by an artist.
But then again, when have these counts ever been fair or accurate? They will always be biased towards the recording industry (aka against the consumer). Aside from the fact that the industry doesn't want to adapt the the changing landscape of its business, there much of a problem. If the RIAA wanted to play fair and sell people what they wanted the way they wanted it, we wouldn't be in this mess at all. But now we've got companies wasting money on copy protection and DRM and crap that doesn't stop the real pirates out there.
I exhausted from all this crap.
We got terribly excited by the idea of selecting only a few tracks to put on our iPod. When the excitement died down, we noticed that the music was still shit.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Perhaps they just lost a file with part of the sales listed in it..
I think it was named $sys$Sales.txt or something like that..
Until then I will continue listening to radio and to my - all payed for - collection of 70th to 90th music.
The MI simply doesn't get that the reason for poor sales are their poor products.
oh well....
Yet no mention of people boycotting them? Surely this has dropped at least 1% or more. If you look at how it's spread, it seems like a slow rot. It started out 1-2% fall "from pirates", then got to nearish 5 and they started to sue people. Then in a year it seems to have doubled..
I suspect the boycotting may have a coule of percent in this, but they won't admit that. It's "obviously" evil pirates.
I like muppets.
Of course Internet music sales did not offset the slump. When I buy music off the net, I buy the 1 or 2 tracks that I am interested in (demos rule btw, I wonder when they will be sued out of existence?) Not the whole damned album.
Then you get into the fact that my toys (X1800XL, Xbox360, Blu-Ray DVD, HD Plasma screen, DVDs, VideoGames, 10 mbit net connection, Digital Cable, etc...) get more expensive every year, yet usually provide more bang for the buck (games usually have 10+ song soundtracks included, you can't tell me that 1/3rd of a $60 game is the music).
Bad press (Sony DRM) + Strong Competition (Everyone else) + Less spending money (thank you Oil Execs) + New, consumer friendly medium (good bye filler songs, hello convience) + major quality loss (take your pick) = less money for the Music Industry cabal.
of course, the real issue is piracy, because the solution the lawyers presented in the meeting is simple (SUE GRANDMA)
According to an estimate from SoundScan, overall sales of recorded music are down about 4.5%, if one considers 10 individual tracks the equivalent of an album.
Well that's bollocks for a start... the point of a la carte music purchasing is you don't have to buy the crap filler songs on an album along with the one or two you actually want to listen to. Perhaps the shortfall represents the fluff people never wanted in the first place.
It's a Unix system - I know this.
This is the market correcting itself. As the stranglehold the labels have over the music market wanes, the proper balance between listeners, artists and labels will be struck. As it is now, the labels wield far too much power. They definitely play a valuable role, and deserve the chance to make a profit, but their current model depends on certain inefficiencies (where they can most significatly exert control) which no longer exist.
This process of seeking a more equitable equilibrium is too slow, but it's definitely going in the right direction.
They are trying to equate CD sales to online track sales, which is total crap. I'm more likely to legally download the 1 to 5 tracks I like, instead of downloading the whole CD. So the whole 10 tracks makes up a CD sale statistic is flawed. If there where actually 10 tracks on the CD that I wanted, then I would have purchase the CD not downloaded it.
To take the analogy one step further, there are many people that don't like the yellow Starburst candy, and wouldn't buy them if they weren't already in the package. So if they suddenly offered sales of the candy in individual flavors, wouldn't it make sense that there would be a little drop off, unless they came up with another flavor to fill in the blank of a poorly selling yellow?
The music is garbage.
I don't even dl'd the new stuff for free.
The "industry" should look at the level of free dl's as a proxy for quality.
If you can't give it away, what do you expect.
Have these geniuses in the record industry stopped to consider that maybe the shit they released this year sucked even more than last year? I bought every CD I really wanted this year which, I believe, amounted to about five or six discs. Better music... If you release it, we will buy.
The WSJ also lists familiar reasons for the decline -- 'online piracy, CD burning, high prices and competition for consumer dollars from videogames and DVDs'
And of course they (deliberately?) omit the #1 reason:
shit product
They'll still blame the #1 reason on piracy though.
Disposible income is extremely low, music just isn't that high on the priority list this year.
From the article:
This year, though, there's little Christmas cheer to go around. During the crucial Thanksgiving week, for instance, the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copies than the top 10 albums the same week in 2004
All this means is the top 10 albums sold less this year than they did last year, that is not the same as a decline in CD sales or an industry slump.
If this year only 10 albums were available to buy, from anywhere, this years top 10 whould have had huge sales compared to last years top 10, but I'd be willing to bet there would definatly be less profits than last year.
Each year more and more CDs are put out and made available to the public. Surely the way to indicate a slump would be to release the total number of CDs sold in that week, or the total profits made by the music industry that week, and compare them.
For all we know, those same top 10 albums could have had record sales for every other week in the year, and now everyone in the world has a copy, the only people buying them are those that want 2 copies :o
It seems the music industry/RIAA has just employed some statistics experts to check the numbers and find anything that could be used to indicate a down turn, whether true or not.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I don't know about everybody else, but I like the fact that the huge record companies are making less. Music isn't about making money to anybody who gets into it for the right reason. If these trends continue, we can expect less-corporate-MTV like atmosphere. Look back at the 90's with its anti-corporate grunge phase; I think we could use more of that! If anything, I would love it if these trends produced a culture with more independent music. Maybe the next Ashlee Simpson or Christina Augilara will be able to actually sing???
Slash-for-Thought
The labels are throwing crap at us. How much X-factor / Pop Idol rubbish are we actually expected to purchase?
Bring back Genesis! I'd buy 'the lamb lies down on broadway' on any media format they publish it on
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Recent studies have shown >. Consumers are selecting only the tracks they want in complete disregard of the impact this might have on the income of poor struggling creative musicians. To rectify this injustice, Congress needs to legislate that sales of music online will only be permitted under the same conditions as those of music albums: with unpopular tracks bundled along with their more popular cousins. Only in this way can musical creativity be maintained and further encouraged in this great country of ours.
Keep up the good work, slashdotters.
It's been well over two years since I bought an album the RIAA had a hand in, glad it's adding up to something. I also thing the role of satelite radio in eroding music sales is udnerestimated - you can get so specifically what you want, I think many people would rather just pay their 10$ a month because they get everything they want to hear out of it, no commercials, and no format portablity issues - you just plug the unit into your home or car and the satelite brings all the music to you.
Funny, if I want to blow 20 bucks, I can go to a wide choice of bars and clubs with local acts, pay the cover and get a pair of beers and a couple of hours of entertainment with good company. I might even find a really good band that I never heard of before, and hell, I'd buy an album from them for a few bucks after their set was over.
.mp3, and maybe I'll buy something from them because I like to hear them.
If music is great, we don't need a leech-like promoter to tell us so. I'll hear them, or a friend will tell me, or a friend of a friend, they can send me an
I just hope in the music companies' death throes they don't drag down our laws with I.P. and DMCA any more than they already have.
Lately, people in the music industry have said the same basic issues have been intensified by the growing popularity of pricey gadgets like Apple's iPod and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, as well as the rising prices for games that go with the new platform.
Well, I guess we know who they're going to sue next!
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
A few notes from someone in the know:
Release schedule plays a huge role here and the Nov 2004 release schedule had some huge releases. Prior to Novemeber, YTD the industry wasn't lagging as far behind as where it will end up year end. Records are released in cycles, and just so happened that Nov 04 was a perfect storm of sorts. Taking a top 10 volume comps doesn't demonstrate the health of the business but that the release schedule was better in 2004.
As far as 10 track per albums, SoundScan is dead wrong in using this methodology. It should be weighted at 14 (FOURTEEN) tracks per album in an effort to more accurately represents CD SRP, afterall, the 10 is arbitrary and doesn't correlate to anything (not even digital SRP very well). In an addition, in terms of sales volume, 14 is more representative of actual tracks per album sold. Having said that, including tracks is a much more representative way of examining where the business is going. Those who argue about fewer tracks per album, it's irrelevant; the idea here is to simulate revenue with sales units.
Next, 2004 used the ISO weekly standards and is therefore a 53 week year. It looks like the extra week was removed to compare with '05 however, so hopefully '05 isn't too heavily penalized.
Worth noting: some record labels are doing MUCH MUCH MUCH better than others. Some accounts are doing MUCH MUCH better too... Target for instance has experienced profound growth.
The boycott argument is absurd... zero effect, and zero concern for it. It's laughable Further, as for content protection, while regarded by many labels as ineffective and short-sided (even stupid), it doesn't seem to have impacted point of sale in Sony's case. It definitely impacted their returns however.
The arguement regarding competition with video games and DVDs is absolutely true. Typical consumers have a finite amount of money to spend toward entertaiment each month. DVDs are even having trouble now. Declining retail space certainly has a role.
Despite what many think about "greedy record labels", the industry takes representing their artists very seriously. Further, they've have already undergone many levels of cost savings and will continue to do so. Artists are the #1 customer of any label, even above the retail accounts, and the consumers themselves. Maybe that's part of the problem, but nothing is going to change the desire to develop and represent artists above all else.
"Sales of horse drawn carriages have slumped. Horse drawn carriage manufacturers are worried about the increased use of horseless carriages and are hoping to pass legislation making it a requirement for everyone to have a horse infront of their carriage."
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
One observation I have made is that the number of people who buy albums is a lot smaller. A lot of people have told me that they don't buy CDs any more because they can just download the music. Young people just don't have a huge collection of CDs the way they used to in the 1990s (replacing the collection of records eveyone had in the 1970s through the 1980s).
I think there are a number of reasons for that. One of them is plain simple greed on the kid's part (Downloading instead of paying for a CD is a form of greed, just like ripping of the musicians is another form of greed). Another is that the record industry has always tried to keep the technology to copy music away from consumers. They won in the 1990s by effectively killing DAT, an early 1990s technology for putting CD-quality sound on a special audio tape that looked like a mini videotape. I still haven't forgiven the record comapnies for these actions causing me to pay $1200 instead of $300 for a DAT recorder for my home studio.
They lost in the 2000s because the technology could not be as eaily controlled as it was in the 1990s. First of all, your average person didn't know about nor cared about the repression of DAT technology, but everyone now has an opinion on Napster and file sharing. Second of all, software didn't require the capitol investment to make the way DAT recorders did; anyone could and many people did write file sharing programs before the record companies could react.
So, what now? Well, I don't think the wholesale downloading of music is the best thing for musicians. Thomas Dolby, on his web page, pointed out that he lost money touring--he made his money selling albums. Bottom lone: When more people download music, musicians have less motivation to make music; this will result in talented musicians working in other fields, and less quality music being made.
So, what is the answer? I think making every song available via iTunes will stabilize things; a lot of people feel uneasy downloading music without permission. I think there will be losses due to piracy, but I don't think these losses will kill the music industry--the video game industry is thriving, and they have had to deal with piracy since day one.
It's a complicated issue, with no easy answer. I don't think asking musicans to make music for free is the answer. I don't think saying that concerts should be musician's sole soure of income is the answer. I think paying a fair price for a song ($1) is the answer.
I guess this means the RIAA suits will have to settle for 40% smaller mansions and 40% smaller pools.
This will eventually trickle down to the artists themselves, many of whom will have to settle for 40% less jewerly and 40% fewer Maybachs.
people use to run out and get the "NEW HIT" now you itunes or what ever they did not care about the reset of the thing just that new hit. so why do they count 10 online sales as an album?
Maybe it's just me but, have they ever considered that their music just might be shit?
More and more of my friends are listening to stuff like soundtracks from games such as Hitman, Quake 2, Freedom Fighters.
Sure you can state piracy as the first thing on the list, but it won't change the fact: If the mass wants it, the mass will buy it. I mean, the game industry loses a lot of money to piracy, but no one bitches because people are still buying a fairly good amount of games and therefore it covers up for the losses.
Maybe when something other than a black guy on a CD case with a bandana and a gun is in a music store window display, I might consider walking in.
It couldn't possibly be because "artists" are putting out tracks with backings that are direct rips from older songs (no, I'm not looking at you, Madonna, with what is definitely the backing from an Abba track; nor am I looking at other bands that have ripped backings from -- for example -- Stevie Wonder's "Superstition"; the Bee Gee's "Staying Alive"; and countless others I can think of.) Nor could it be because artists are doing horrible covers of old classics ("Summer Rain"; "Black Betty"; "Summer of '69"; "Boys of Summer" ...)
...
Where is the good quality, original music? Something with good quality lyrics, and good quality backing, that isn't a blatent rip of something I enjoy?
Off the Mark has it so right
All of this is, of course, due to piracy. It has nothing to do with the fact that the best the major labels have to offer is angsty teen pop and rap-rock. Everybody likes that shit, after all.
Game... blouses.
How can people not have flocked to purchase the CD covering Eminem's 6 year major record company career? With once talented artists throwing crap like this and his last album, no wonder sales are down.
I own 400 CDs; the vast majority I bought before my iPod which I've had for for 3 years. Post iPod I've bought 9 albums off of the iTunes music store. I'd buy more if there were some content worth buying. If I had $100 in iTunes gift certificates burning a whole in my digital pocket I honestly would have a damned hard time picking any music, even though it's free. Today's music just doesn't ring true with me. And for those who do like today's music, they now have the option of buying the one or two hit singles that otherwise compose an album of dreck.
Music sales are down because the music sucks. The songs that don't suck can be bought indvidually. Show me a great album I'll give you 9.99 for your DRM laden files. Otherwise I'll wait for it show up in the used bins. There's no way I'm paying the RIAA $16 for a new physical CD. I don't care how good it is.
The second greatest trick the Devil ever played was to convice people that music was an industry.
What's an "average CD album"?
I think the key to this is the fact that nobody actually buys singles CD's. They don't have to buy that many to get on the charts and they just distribute the re-bought CD's as promo material.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
burn baby burn
this is no apple-stuff. We need a "failing industries" category for those whiners of the riaa and the mpaa. Oh, and while you're at it, why not open an "I.P."-section. Just put it at lawyers.slashdot.org...
funny? maybe.
Insightful? nah...
What about the fact that consumers are becomming sick of being treated as criminals
or the fact that sony execs authrised computer tresspass agaisnt thousands of computer users?
In europe in some countries they already levy a "tax" on mp3 player. In Germany I think this is levied on all storage devices, including hard drives. In Finland they currently only levy a tax on CD's and tapes.
Now is it me, or does this mean that the state has given up its monopoly right to taxation? I remember something about a war taking place due to taxation without representation...
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I consider myself to be someone with a taste for a wide variety of music: from hip hop to classical music. However, I am just not seeing much enticing new music. Couple that fact with diminished availabilty of funds, and that places me in the grouping of not buying cds.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
What the music industry wont tell you is that people are getting sick of the same old manufactured artists, boy bands, girl bands and pop groups that really have no tallent and a good PR and marketing campaign. Today the kids are exposed to so many bands / groups and artists that really dont care about the music they just wanted to be famous. Where is the tallent. I know that there are some really great artists emerging but how much air time do they get? And if they do get air time how can the 14 year old girls and boys afford the CDs when the latest Xbox or game has come out. People get sick of having no tallent crap bands and artists. Most of the music when I turn on the radio is just all sooo similar it almost all turns into one big blab blab blab of noise. Its got to the point where I dont listen to the radio any more. I can listen to the music I want online and download the music that I want so that I dont have to listen to the Dj talking garbage about stuff they often know nothing about. The record industry is its own worst enemy. They want the money, they want the PR, but they dont want to premote the artists with the tallent... its all about the beautiful face on the CD cover, and the music clips that have lots of half naked girls dancing sh*t moves. Wake up Record companies are killing themselves. Anyway thats my bitch for the day.. time to move on..
Speaking only for myself, I know that I consistently rush out to buy ALL of Brittany Spears' work - the depth and majesty of the ouevre, whilst intellectually challenging, is still meritorious of risking the occasional rootkit install. Hey - no guts - no Peckinpah movies. I think that the American corporate music industry is simply putting out a FINE product! Heck - I buy all of the product "units" I can - just to show my concern and support! Who needs all that "creativity" anyways - we just want more of the same - Yessiree!
And frankly - I'm getting mighteeeee tired of all this hand-wringing over music sales - why don't we all just go out and buy the L.A."industry" folks some new Mercedes - it's the very LEAST we can do to show our support. Especially considering all of the time and hard work they put in, trying to make sure that we, the customers, get a QUALITY product.
Hey - Jack Valenti - yesterday Beethoven turned 235 years old - and people are STILL buying his music... CATCH a CLUE!!!
And the only one to blame is the market itself. With Radio dead in a swamp of payola and programming, MTV is a reality station, and live concerts based upon acts at least a decade old and charging over the top prices the joy that once was music has been squeezed out by the money grubbers. The mass market can not convey the joy of music to the masses anymore and so it simply must see the light. Its death kneel The sad thing is a generation ago the money men would have co-opted the digital scene now the current corporate heads can only see dollar signs from there own vacuous souls
Since those pirates come to our shores and started to download music instead of attacking ships at sea, our god given profit has since diminished. It has been leeched by these onerous high seas scoundrils! Since they will not stop downloading, and since we have been having a little difficulty in shutting down the internet or purchasing it from its misterious owners we must do the next best thing! Pass laws that enable us to put to sleep, or perhaps just put them to prison, for daring to encrouch upon our livelihood!
After all, it is unnatural for the profits to go down, despite better ways of transporting content (don't you just love that word). To maintain our profit margin we must further lower the average contractual wages of musicians from around 8% to around five-ish or so. Perhaps lower. After all, those people just keep making music no matter what, so it is a good thing that we take that money which otherwise would be spent on useless things, like morgages, dental insurance or something. Best to keep them on their toes, begging at our doors to sign the contracts that we make up as we go along (after all, there is no such thing as a standard contract in the music industry, but the musicians don't need to know that).
In closing, I would like to thank our esteemed supporters in the government circles who will be recieving their little purses of joy when their next election comes up.
Best regards,
Nates Reficule,
general manager, Angelic Records inc.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
They're, again, blaming "piracy" (on the high seas, Arrrr) for destroying record sales. But how many stockings are filled with "illegally" (not in Canada) downloaded MP3s? Would you consider giving a CD-R full of major record label "artist"'s music to some one as a Christmas gift? Nope, you wouldn't. Because that would be being a cheap ass, and besides, the real article is just a little bit nicer, what with a booklet and all of that marketing crap. So, blaming "piracy" on lower holiday-season sales DOES NOT COMPUTE. Really, they must get tired themselves of always blaming "piracy" (Ra-men).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Intelectual Property SUX, say NO to IP!
l /against.htm
Nice book on the subject:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectua
Nice speech (in english, despite how the page looks):
http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20051117-p2p/
but since I deleted Linux (and I've been using it, developed for it, since '95) and bought a stylish apple powerbook my life has changed. I got a better job, wear clothing with class, and my computer case matches my powerbook too. Life has turned quite easy, just like OS X. I've meet women and now I'm am about to get married. How did this happen? I just don't know. but if I may. Thank you Apple for saving my life.
Since I got my ipod, I have rediscovered a lot of music that I didn't listen to much anymore, it's a lot more accessible when it's right there at my fingertips in my car instead of having to remember to pickup CDs and cases when I'm rushing out the door.
I'm sure this is true for others and is going to make people less likely to buy new CDs when they realise the huge selection they already have available to them.
Well, my teenage son and his friends are copying my CD collection dating back to Buddy Holly (before my birth!) and are simply ignoring the current music offering. As a teen, I would not have been caught dead listening to my dad's ragtime music and I still can't stand 1920-1940s music. So it should be obvious - the current music suck baaaaadly.
It's the bands stupid...
Oh well, what the hell...
Hey - Jack Valenti - yesterday Beethoven turned 235 years old - and people are STILL buying his music... CATCH a CLUE!!!
I can appreciate the meaning of your message and it's obvious you're passionate about this subject.
But, um, Valenti was the head of the MPAA (the movie assholes) not the RIAA (the music assholes).
And in any case, he's retired.
It makes a difference, you know.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
..is that record companies have been making incredible profits from CD re-releases for over 20 years. Everyone over 35 has been busy replacing their vinyl collections, leading to record-breaking profits for the industry, but theres not much left to remaster and repackage - thus leading to the inevitable CD slump. MP3s cant be profitable in this same way, so of course the RIAA is lashing out at piracy/sharing/itunes/etc. Theyre really just bitter about 20 years of unnaturally high sales slipping away...
...before the "industry" goes bankrupt?
I hope it's not too many. Although I suppose we should be concerned about who will step into their boots once they're gone.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
"According to an estimate from SoundScan, overall sales of recorded music are down about 4.5%, if one considers 10 individual tracks the equivalent of an album.' " How many albums have you bought because it had 10 killer tracks on it? I mean seriously, have these guys considered that their expectations and equivalences are a little off base? Record sales are definately slipping, but that's becaues they decided to introduce a single track purchasing system for $0.99 How many people selectively buy three or four tracks of an album, and forget about the rest? Their music is NOT that great, and the industry paradigm has changed that people don't need to buy an entire album to hear their favorite tracks. If you asked me, they should have quit trying to price control albums in stores to exorbitant prices (Who really wants to pay $18.99 for a freaking CD?) and let the prices naturally deflate as the processes improved to get more albums into more stores at a cheaper price. Whatever, by my model, artist sales are skyrocketing, record label profits are just down.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
the real problem is the mild retardation of entertainers, such as kanye west, coupled with a business model that pre-dates current technology considerably. i don't believe any world government allows industries to protect their outmoded forms of business via lobbying/legislation. most of our silly government officials wouldn't know an iPod from an IP. let's end this nonsense via a global, grassroots effort to educate friends, family, and representatives.
Music is entertainment.. so are video games, and video games have been mass pirated FOR YEARS!! not only are they notoriosly easy to pirate cross platform but they are also available for RENT. the Video game industry has only made more and more money through the years despite of this (maybe even because of it). You try it ... you like it... YOU BUY IT! you make a better product that entertains more people for a longer period of time and the public will pay you. there are those in the game industry now that are talking about how the rental industry is hurting sales... that is based SOLELY on greed. not fact. The record labels got there double platinum,diamond encrusted panties in a bunch because of greed. They are throwing a Veronica Salt hissy fit NOW, just cuz they can. but WHEN they finally embrase the change and finally stop whining about it and maybe even(god forbid) get creative, they are going to make more money then ever. its just the way it is..
Perhaps the problem is that you keep buying average albums instead of above-average albums. I am constantly amazed when people on Slashdot point out how little they appreciate their music. I look at my own collection and I don't have a single album with a hit-rate that low. If I disliked the artist that much I wouldn't have bought the album or the single in the first place. I'll reserve my money for artists that I actually like.
This is some kind of geek news site, right? Or maybe it's pronounced Rightangledbracketdot?
--
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children and their children.
-- POSIX Programmer's Guide
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
... new music just sucks. What are people supposed to buy? Jessica Simpson? Ashley Simpson? Madonna's latest reinvention of herself?
The music industry just cannot find new and interesting and exciting music like they used to. Any musician they produce is so obviously controlled by marketers that they are just lame.
Even traditionally non-conformist ganres like punk and heavy metal have become lame creations of marketing executives. Example -- Pink.
So there is another thing the music industry could blame for their troubles -- the fact that their product sucks.
In fact modern music is so bad i am developing a growing appreciation for classical music.
I download via newsgroups and torrents (who doesn't?!?!), download via iTunes and I BUY cd's.. Perhaps I am the last of a dying breed. My "thing" is when I download any music from a shared resource it's for one purpose. To listen to the music before I buy it. I don't keep it on my hd for posterity mostly because I require my music to sound good. I don't care if the music was ripped at the highest bitrate possible (OGG, ACC, Yadayada..) It doesn't sound as good as the original CD or DVD Audio disc. I order my CD's or I go down to my favorite CD shop and buy it. I need to have a tangible item to represent the music. So, am I keeping the music industry alive? I surely think not but I do make my contribution to support all the bands that I love.
...
On another note, apart from the type of music that I listen to and have for many years, there are a lot of really sh*tty bands out there putting out laughable at best music. Very poor quality in the songwritting and musicianship. I don't blame people for not buying it. Myself, I am happy because the genre of music that I listen to changes and is almost always fresh. Perhaps we do need a new genre to sparks sales
The easy way out is to blame piracy - They do it when their video games suck, and now I guess they do it when they can't sell their crappy music.
The 'industry' is a bloated pig suckling off the teats of a (relatively) small handful of artists. I hate to see people out of work, but its just not necessary to have such a huge body of industry in something as artistic as music. That money would be much better spent in weaponry, so I'm glad it isn't going towards putting out another n'sync album.
...a medium whose contents I can only use in the most antiquated audio-playing devices in the house; which tries to prevent me from using those contents on anything else.
Offer no DRM protection AND high-quality MP3 versions on the same disc AND lyrics AND some nice packaging - and I'll be looking forward to buying CDs, instead of dropping money on them as worthless artefacts doing nothing but testifying the fulfillment of my duty towards the artist, gathering dust on the shelf.
Ir CDBaby, where we order, sometimes.
They give such good custoemr treatment. Accodring to their confirmation letter, their entire staff sings as they march MY cd to shipping, on a gold pillow. What service!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Online filesharing has dropped by 10%.
=> Music sales drop by 40%.
Can't blame that on piracy, as piracy is lower than it was last year.
In fact, it supports the claim that piracy is often used for sampling music, and thus increases sales, and in the long term piracy is a desirable thing.
The other reason is more likely though - most big-name music is shit, and the few good tracks they put out are selectively purchased on iTunes.
Also, indeed, people have a limited amount of money. If they're spending more on DVDs or games, then there is less for music. Music is the first thing that people stop buying, because there is the radio and television.
I, for one, bought plenty of CD's this year and even some concert DVD's that some artists put out. However almost all of the musicians I like are on non-RIAA labels like Metropolis Records. In fact I might not have bought an album from a label that is part of the RIAA in literally years. Am I alone on this? Anyone?
And yet I have a TON of CD's in my collection.
So maybe the RIAA just doesn't have the sales figures for these other labels. Although from the RIAA website, they claim that 90% of all legally sold music in the US is from RIAA member labels.
If I hear one more dude sing about how he's go mo' money than me and more chicks that want to shake their fat arses I think I'm gonna chunder.
They are selling less because there is less music worth buying. Current offerings have no true talent in writing real melody or music. Just stringing together a few words that rhyme is not music.
I wonder when these guys are going to wake up and realize that all this meticulously homogenized top 40 crap is death to the industry.
That being said... the indie rock scene was GREAT this year. A lot of small local labels in my area did relatively well.
Perhaps if the record industry would have the balls to highlight stuff like this, they might actually make money.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I have noticed a phenomena not mentioned. Once I ripped my collection, then weeded the collection of the songs I really didn't like, then I had a condensed collection of all my favorite music. Put it on random play and it is like my own private radio station.
On random I have enough music that I never get sick of my own collection.
The implication for me: I don't listen to music radio anymore, ever! Think about it, I don't actually hear new music anymore. I have all the music I need. This is what they really need to fear. I notice my friends doing the same as well.
I do think other factors are crap music, while others discount boycott, I have been on a 3+ year boycott of RIAA now and it will never end. I don't need any more music, so their near monopoly is now dead to me. If I encounter a new band in a small venue that I like, I could by their album straight from them, but the RIAA will never get another penny of my money.
RIAA has more to fear from the IPOD than from downloads. Big random play collections replace the need for new music once it reaches a critical mass.
Today there is less selection than ever
top 40 is about all you can get
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Seriously.
I buy probably about 3 albums a month now from iTunes, and rarely buy single songs, because the whole album is pretty good, and you get a better deal. Then again, I'm not buying the super-hit music that we are all lamenting. At most, there are one or two not-so-good (not bad, mind you) songs. That's what the previews let you figure out.
While we're talking about it, the albums I've bought on iTunes have 13.7 songs per album (excluding the videos and digital booklets, of course.) $.73 cents a track, not so bad.
I think I need a new sig here.
You know something? That's not a bad idea! We should show them our appreciation. We could chip in and buy them some really nice vehicles. But... (MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!)
First, we need to build in some special safeguards, yes we do. We need to weld the passenger doors shut, for starters. No, these cars are just for these music industry executives, no free rides for their friends. They probably already have their own cars anyway. We add in a fingerprint lock on the ignition so only one person can start it up, and that should have the angle of no unauthorized riders covered.
Next, let's look at authorized use. We wire a GPS system directly to the engine and the lock on the gas tank. That way we can make sure the car isn't used to drive on any of the wrong roads, or fill up at any of the wrong gas stations. How it's maintained and driven will have an effect on its lifespan, so we have to make sure they take appropriate cautions.
Because we're buying the cars for them, we get to pick the color. I heartily recommend turquoise, teal, periwinkle, lime green, or peach with mauve racing stripes. Music industry executives like distinctive colors, don't they?
It'll take some effort, but I'm sure we can produce (or at least buy and modify) a car for these music industry executives as satisfying to drive as their companies' music is satisfying to listen to.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
So now that the easy pickings are instead spending their money elsewhere, they have trapped themselves and are left with no market at all. All they have is a broken machine that depends on facts that are no longer true. So now they ought to reinvent the business, aiming toward a variety of quality acts that produce reasonable revenue at reasonable prices, but they can't get themselves to do it. What they had was so juicy that it's difficult to abandon. So like an addict they try to force it to continue to be, and won't stop until they hit rock bottom. At that point a new and functional model will emerge.
1865 - Locomotive Act (amended 1878) - restricted the speed of horse-less vehicles to 4mph in open country and 2 mph in towns. Act required three drivers for each vehicle - 2 to travel in the vehicle and one to walk ahead carrying a red flag... - the Red Flag Act.
1896 - Repeal of 1865 'Red Flag Act' after nearly two decades of strong support from horse interests. Horse-less vehicles now free to travel faster than walking pace! Royal Automobile Club founded. First RAC London to Brighton run held to celebrate the new era of speed. Race was won by Americans who didn't stop for lunch like the rest of the contestants...figures...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Gas prices are up, and its winter.
When you have to drive over 50 miles to get to a store with a decent variety of CD's the above is a big factor.
Face it ... you can't manufacture art. The music coming out of the pop-formula organ grinders hasn't been worth buying lately. Both my teenage daughters are telling me they prefer music from one or several decades ago, so it's not just my aging tastes.
If the music isn't any good, people won't buy it, and there will be a downturn in the music industry. Duh.
The most important component in any sound system is the human ear -- everything else is fluff. Get the content compatible with that element first, and there will be an upturn in the music industry. Whether they deserve it or not.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I don't buy much music anymore - at least the "popular - rock" music. If I am going to buy a CD, it is usually in the classical genre. Here is another thought...My dad and I bought an LP of Frank Sinatra at E.J. Korvette in the 60's for $1.57 and now the last time I saw the same recordings, from the same record on CD, was $13.95. The industry is doing it to themselves. People realize the marginal cost of utility of music. The market will pay what is perceived to be reasonable. If the price point is on the wrong side, there are very few or no sales. Apple's operation works well - $0.99/song, IIRC. The price point here really is on track with the cost of a CD full of songs. Apple got it right...the music industry, as a whole, doesn't get it and are reaping what they have sown.
People go through trends. If they keep trying to market the same style of ghetto booty rocking crap every year they will eventually have slumping sales, because it all sounds that damn same. The same goes with whiney boys that dress like girls stuff. People realise that they have their own problems, and they don't need to hear about someone else's problems. The crap they push nowadays is just marketed hype, and it's pushed as a specific brand rather than have actual content. The day the Marketing executives started telling us what we should like in the world, is the day we stopped pay them for their services, and it has nothign to do with the format of they releases.That only effects those that ares till buying from them.
Yes, I said it.
For the past 2 months, Sony/BMG record club has been offering a *lot* of good deals to their members.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The problem is that the revenues from law suits hasn't been as high as expected. Some people have been trying to defend theselves, for example. Other people were unable to pay the millions of dollars damages, and they ended up having to settle for less. Now they do not have enough money left to invest it in producing good music.
The only solution is to sue more people. Maybe they should drop the music industry completely and concentrate 100% on the court cases. It worked for SCO. Oh wait... it didn't did it? Never mind.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
The music industry must be the only industry to feel like they have a right to make money. It's almost like, "hey, why arent we making money dammit? How dare we not get this money. It's our right to have it. The reasons must be out of our control, someone else is at fault!"
Guys, sell a GOOD PRODUCT at a GOOD PRICE. Don't blame lack of income on outside forces, how about looking at yourselves for a change, and think "What is it that WE are doing wrong? Why arent OUR products selling?" Stop blaming other forces, blame yourself because ultimatly, you are to blame. You're the only industry who sues you're bloody customers!!! Comon guys, get with the times, realise that the world is changing, and move with it. Embrace MP3, don't fight it. Embrace "try before you buy". Embrace GOOD bands and stop selling derivative shit. This is a new word for you, Originality.... Try it out....
Realise that deep down, people are good. People WANT to pay for things they like. If someone downloads an album and really really likes it, they will buy it, because then more will get made. If they don't like it, they won't. I've bought 15 albums over the past 3 months, none of which i heard on the radio, tv, all were originally on mp3. I would never have even found the bands if it wasnt for downloading them. Think up some new business models, instead of sueing people for attempting progress...
I listen to lots of music these days, but "On a Podcast." :-)
The air wave is dead and Adam Curry has crawled from the belly of the beast to stand over the corpse with blood dripping from his hands and arms.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Well I guess they now know what the old saying "Don't bite that hand that feeds you" means.
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
...downloads for my own music fell 4.5 % for the 4 week period before American Thanksgiving versus last year during the same period.
I think it's staggering how many of my frioends can afford £200 plus MP3 players. So it got me thinking: Where did the money come from? Well I figure that people have a fairly fixed budget for spending on music. What has happened is that rather than buy 20 or 30 CDs this year, they will spend their "music money" on the MP3 player, and download the music free.
From an economists point of view, we are witnessing a market failure. Economists would therefore predict that more MP3 players are sold than in a market equilibrium where people act legally, and there is an underproduction of music.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy answer. Usually, the answer to market failure is some sort of intervention. For example:
1. If the above was true IN ALL CASES, then it would seem reasonable for there to be a surcharge on MP3 players that went directly to music industry. However, currently this would penalise legitimate users unfaily.
2. Some way of stopping the illegal users. But in my mind, no attempt at doing so has worked, and I don't see one ever working.
Therefore the music industry needs to maximise profits given the constraint of the market imperfection. Personlly I think that they are doing a terrible job of this at the moment. I think that an immense benefit of the MP3 revolution is that one can be exposed to new artists a lot more easily, and this has yet to be exploited by the music industry. I think that the way in which music is consumed is changing - people want to have access to hundreds, or thousands of CDs easily rather than just a collection of 20 CDs, and be able to "try out" a new artists at very little cost. I now only would by a CD after listening to it once or twice to find out whether I like it. I don't trust artists to be consistent, and so I wouldn't spend £10 in the hope an album was good. I don't mind spending £10 on an album I know I will listen to and enjoy 10 or more times. It seems to me that the solution needs to be a model whereby you are charged for how much you listen to an album or artist, rather than for simply owning their music.
You mention Sir Paul Maccartney but mantion Elton John.
He is Sir Elton John to you mister.
And God save the Queeney.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have bought maybe a handful of CDs over the last year compared with about 50/year a few years ago. Why? The CDs I have are most of the classic stuff I want anyway and they last forever. There are more entertainment options and, more importantly, there is plenty of completely free and legal music available on-line, and the free stuff is generally of higher quality than anything the music industry is releasing (new bands, etc.).
c) Are bands with better musicians and composers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm not boycotting the music industry, I've just gotten to the point where I only buy music I think is of high quality. My behaviour bearing a great resemblance to a boycott is just a side effect.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
my priorities have changed: i only listen to live music anymore, and only zydeco 4 dancin;-)
the ability 2 record sound (& pictures, 4 that matter) fundamentally changed everything: local musicians could no longer make a living, music became ubiquitous instead of being something special shared between people: we now experience it with a machine.
and we wonder why people feel aleinated...
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered RIAA community when Variety confirmed that music sales have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of its all time high, since the online piracy pandemic began. Coming on the heels of a recent BoxOffice survey which plainly states that RIAA has lost even more sales, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The RIAA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in a recent Wall Street Journal survey of stock performance.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the RIAA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the RIAA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the RIAA because the RIAA is dying. Things are looking very bad for the RIAA. As many of us are already aware, the RIAA continues to lose. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
CD sales are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of their sales. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time RIAA leader Hillary Rosen only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: the RIAA is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Polygram Records CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr. states that were about 6.5 billion music buyers on Earth. How many buyers are there now? Let's see. Before the piracy pandemic, the number of buyers versus pirates was roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 6.5 billion/5 = 1.3 billion pirates. Pirate downloads are now about half of the volume of buyers. Therefore there are about 2.6 billion pirates on the internet. A recent count revealed 2 pirate downloads for every buyer purchase. Therefore there must now be less than (2.6 billion/5 = .5 billion) buyers left
Due to the troubles in New York City, Indie successes and so on, the RIAA is going out of business and is being overtaken by other forms of distribution. Now that the RIAA is almost dead, its corpse will be turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that the RIAA has steadily declined in sales share. The RIAA is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the RIAA is to survive at all it will be among dilettante music dabblers. The RIAA continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the RIAA is dead.
Fact: the RIAA is dying
... to treat them with care?
My CDs go from their case to the player and back. It feels me with horror to think of them lying on a carpet.
I have CDs 10 or 15 years old, playing fine when needed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't know about others, but one reason I'm buying less music than I used to, is because I absolutely refuse to buy a "CD" with copy protection on it.
Given that more and more CDs are being crippled by this, I find myself putting more and more of them back on the shop shelf.
As far as I'm concerned, the music industry is cutting off its nose to spite its face.
I think this is the real issue here. Not lack of quality -- let's face it, there's always been a lot of dross -- but lack of variety. Once you've bought a hundred whiny indie albums that all sound the same, where's the incentive to buy any more? Or a hundred tinny schoolgirl pop albums, or a hundred of, well, most of the standard genres really.
Once you have a large enough music collection, an album has to be either substantially better, or substantially different to be worth buying, and both qualities seem to be lacking these days.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Mind letting us in on what some of these excellent albums are?
I havn't come across a CD with 80% good tracks in 10 years.
let's see...we've had a few national disasters, gas went through the roof, and all the music on the radio now sucks.
WHY AREN'T WE SELLING MORE RECORDS?
I don't buy music when I pay 60 bucks a week for gas to get to work.
Good thing they lowered the gas prices through x-mas (yes..expect it to rise again when the shopping season's over)
Between 2004 and 2005, 40% more people realized that Top 40 music was shit and stopped buying it.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
While the industry has held back the inventory of dvd-audio qualit music, I am surprised a lot of this kind of music (multi-channel, 96kHz/24bit) is not available from non-affliated (i.e. hobbyists, amateurs, i.e. real )artists on the web. Is there a conspiracy to withold this stuff or am I missing something?
Actually during the "Napster Era" I attended a lecture in college where a guest speaker, I forget which computing giant he was from, admitted to downloading a mix from Napster for his mother for Christmas instead of buying 10 different CDs. Some people do not care how much you spend as long as thought went into it. A hand selected mix is much more personal than grabbing a shrink wrapped CD off the shelf. Haven't you ever seen "High Fidelity?"
Sometime in the 60's, record album sales began to increase, as people realised that most of the songs on a popular group's albums were being released as singles (on the smaller 45 RPM records). I remember quite a bit of discussion in the industry about this, and the record companies began pushing the sales of whole albums on pop recordings. I believe previously, only a few types of music sold whole albums in any number. Classical music comes to mind.
Groups like the Beatles were particularly consistent in their output, and their albums sold a lot of copies, even without a lot of hits on them (many of the hits were only put on albums later on). The question I and my friends had back then was should we buy just the singles we liked, or the whole album. After a while, we learned that many of those albums were well worth the added cost.
I believe those days are now over. The CD's that are currently available just don't have enough good music on them. The available of singles through services like iTunes and others will erode what little popularity the CD has left.
The current music industry is based on a short-lived phenomenon (people buying whole albums/CD's) that peaked years ago. In a way, the industry realises this, and wants to make more money on each single, knowing the whole album will probably not sell enough copies to maintain profits. The market is going back to normal behavior, and this means the industry will be forced back into a 1950's model, when singles ruled, and radio (including now Internet) broadcasts the key tool to selling those singles. The artist as well as the customer have both changed too much in the last decade or so to maintain the old business model.
It's not about piracy, it's about the product and the customer, just like it's always been.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Your products suck.
Sincerely,
The Consumer
I always wonder how will music industry continue to spend so much moneey suing people for piracy with dwindling sales? How long before they can no longer afford to do that? How about learning something from Microsoft in this field...if you can't beat them, join them.
the main reason normal/average American consumer is not buying cds like they did 10 years ago is because the riaa are fucking scumbags. Smart, dumb, tall, or short, NorthAmerican consumers realize when the entity they are paying is a piece of shit. I HAVE NOT BOUGHT A NON BLANK CD or DVD since the RIAA sent a letter threating to sue my younger brother for using Napster. The greedy baseball strike several years ago also turned off many american consumers. OH, BTW IF RIAA FEELS NEED TO SUE ME FOR ANY OF MY ABOVE COMMENTS, GO FUCK YOURSELVES!
Why did they stop producing CD singles? Could it be because it was eating in to the sale of full-length CDs, which were mostly overpriced collections of stuff that people didn't really want? Now comes iTunes, and other services that are offering the purchase of individual songs - the very same model. Maybe it's just high time that the music industry (RIAA, mind you), made a correction to its revenue model that incorporates the very likely probability that they really aren't as good as they thought they were.
I'm sure someone else has already pointed that out, but figured I'd throw in my two cents' worth. Really. What *good* music has come out lately? Let's go back in time:
60's: so much good music, it's hard to keep track of. [And a lot of bad, drug-induced music, but the good music easily trumps that.]
70's: okay, so there was disco. But at least it "had a beat and you could dance to it." There were also bands like Heart, Yes, and others that actually did have really good music.
80's: again, a bit tepid. But some of Madonna's songs rocked, Cindy Lauper did some fun stuff. Genesis really hit stride with Phil Collins. And will anyone ever forget 99 Red Ballons?
90's: music hits a big upswing with grunge. Not to mention Red Hot Chili Peppers. Some truly amazing stuff comes out of the early 90's, and some pretty decent rap comes out from the late 90's, early 2000's. Even Justin Timberlake's solo stuff is decent.
2005: Nothin'. Jesse McCartney for the teeny boppers. But, really, what good music has come out in the past 18 months? Diddly squat. Eminem's gone into hiding or something. Same for Justin. The Backstreet Boys are even trying to make a comeback, which just shows how pathetic the competition is. There are a few decent small bands out, but certainly nobody that's going to effect big sales at retail/online stores.
In a nutshell -- kinda like the movies -- there just isn't enough good stuff out there to *warrant* people spending money. The studios are backing pathetic groups/movies, and not willing to take risks. [Obvious exception here is $200+ million on King Kong, but Jackson already had a proven track record.] The fact that _all_ the front-runners for Oscars this year (again, barring the recently released KK) were $30 million productions shows that indy work -- both in film and song -- is really the only place that good stuff is coming from.
Nutshell: studios are in trouble. And, once the indies really start to hit their stride and (*GASP*) _use_ the Internet as the incredible distribution network it could be, instead of fearing it, the studios may actually start having some writing on the wall.
It won't happen today, or even tomorrow. But I'd say that, by 2010, things will be looking pretty different than they are today.
-Slarty
Maybe we've finally hit that point when everyone gets disgusted at the old stuff and goes on to create new genres? It happened following all major periods of music, and we're about due for it again now.
I heard there is this new street where musicians can go and play for donations from passerbys..
But this new street doesn't have a crowd problem.
Problem is that I don't know the name of the street, how to get there. But I know its on the internet somewhere.
Anyone have direction to this street? I think its just off of shell beach, but nobody can remember how to get to shell beach. Something about some fantastical creation of the RIAA in the way...
Point is: This is not a dictatorship, you do not have to go thru the RIAA to be a musician and make money playing.
Perhaps record sales as noted by the RIAA are declining due to their outdated methodology and anti-PR efforts thru the courts, to sue the consumers...
As a consumer muy records purchases have come to a stop these last few years, though I was never a heavy buyer, cept during the "Record Club of America" days, the attitude of the RIAA is not one I support and today find I have enough respect for artist I like, understanding they need income to continue on with their music... consider directly purchasing from them. Only most don't offer such.
So who fault is it? The RIAA, mine, the artists?
if sales really are declining? And who really know, honestly?
The WSJ also lists familiar reasons for the decline -- 'online piracy, CD burning, high prices and competition for consumer dollars from videogames and DVDs
o liday_shopping;_ylt=Aglg.QQadCZX3GvXHlKBhm.s0NUE;_ ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--
I would say _very_ "familiar" WSJ reasons. Seems to me the music industry is a particularly sensitive canary to the overall wealth of a society. The wealthy will only buy so many CDs no matter how much tax cuts syphon a society's money in their direction. Maybe the WSJ should have noted:
David J. Contis, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Macerich Co., which operates 80 malls nationwide, estimated that luxury stores at its centers had high single to double-digit sales gains this weekend from the year-ago period. But at the rest of the stores, sales were anywhere from unchanged to slightly up.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051212/ap_on_bi_ge/h
So music sales are bad in comparison to _MOST_ sales which are "unchanged" [flat] to slightly up". Could it be because:
Although retailers are not panicking yet, there were plenty of generous deals this past weekend, most of which had been planned. Macy's flagship store in New York offered 50 percent off on jewelry and had a plentiful array of sweaters that were marked down 40 percent.
[ibid]
Hey, music industry, where are your 40-50% off Christmas sales? Then maybe you can have an "unchanged to slightly up" year!
Heh, heh. Now there's a marketing model to make the music mafia spit latte. Not even on their radar.
I'm shocked and a bit disgusted that there's no mention of the fact that we were paying $3+ a gallon for gas, healthcare costs continue to spiral, and employment is mediocre. The middle class is getting the shit squeezed out of it. This is the 'new good old days'. Who has an extra $30 to blow on a couple Black Eyed Peas CD's? Music is a luxury - you can't eat it or get to work on it. If you get it for free out the radio or by copying a friend's collection, fine. But this attitude of entitlement and head-scratching by record co's is bizarre and ridiculous.
If I were they, I'd be hard at work pricing CD's for the Chinese and Indians, and making pop music for them. They're the future.
I buy probably about 3 albums a month now from iTunes, and rarely buy single songs, because the whole album is pretty good, and you get a better deal. Then again, I'm not buying the super-hit music that we are all lamenting.
I quit listening to mainstream music, and I know drive around listening to independent radio. As I hear about new artists, I sometimes get their whole album. Of the dozen or so albums I've purchased, I would say that there's only one where I wish I would have just bought the one song I liked.
It's a gamble, and it's paid off more often than not.
"accidentally slipping on a cd on even a nice carpet with a resonable ammount of dirt (aka sand) is enough to scratch a CD into enough oblivion that at the VERY LEAST"
If you do that to an ipod it will crack and break.
What is your point?
I won't go so far as to say I'll never buy another RIAA CD but I have no current plans. Between the independent music on GarageBand.com, CDBaby, iTunes, etc. there is a lot of amazing stuff waiting for you. If you buy CD's, do so from the artists.
wherever I go, there I am.
It's like Easterbrook's law of economics: All economic news is always bad. Music critics justify their existence by slamming everyone. Even the good bands get denounced as "sellouts" as soon as the public notices how good they are and starts buying their albums.
Music critics are frequently would-be musicians themselves, but devoid of musical talent, and anybody knows it's easier to tear the other guy down than to build yourself up.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
I wonder if the aging population is a factor in slumping sales. I rarely buy CDs any more. Typically, the retail outlets don't carry much of interest to me and they usually blast noise (ostensibly music) that I find annoying, so I don't browse for long. As the population gets older, "music" by teenyboppers and (c)rap artists may lose its market. I do also wonder about cost. I was recently involved in production of a limited run recording (about 5000 CDs). Burned and printed, the CDs ran for $0.48 each (that's Canadian funds). That made me really wonder about CDs that cost nearly $20. Where's all the money going? FWIW
And what if people don't like every song on an album and thus only buy those they do? Maybe we could assume it'd average out to one song per CD per person that they just don't like and thus don't buy. This is a pretty reasonable, and probably very conservative even.
So we are saying that 1 out of 10 songs are crap (10%) and just aren't bought when the songs are bought online. Oddly enough if we assume the entire 40% drop in CD sales went to online sales, that 10% would make up for a 4% drop in sales... which is pretty damn close to the overall drop in music sales. Hmm... Something seems odd here.
If we make the very reasonable assumption (I'd like to see numbers on this, but they don't exist AFAIK) that when buying songs individually on average people decide not to buy a little more than 1 song per CD per person (1.14 to be exact) simply because they know they don't like that song, it accounts for the entire 4.5% "loss" in sales they are reporting.
In other words, the "slump" in music sales are just people not buying crap songs. Hell, I'd bet the number of songs so crappy they don't want to buy is a lot closer to 2 songs per CD per person, if not higher. If thats the case, overall CD sales would actually be up 8%, if you take into account people not buying crap they don't want.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
I find it amazing that the music industry has to blame piracy first and foremost as a cause of declining sales. It should be clear to anyone that if they are using payola to push records by J-lo and the Dixie Chicks is that these records suck.
The are facing the same problem that the American automobile industry did in the 70's. The are making a crappy product that nobody wants and are in denial. The are slow to adopt new business models that their customers want. Why release a 10-12 song CD when the artist can only write 1 or 2 good songs? They may claim file sharing as the main cause as it is the easiest to try and stop. It is very easy to have the feds and courts do the dirty work for them. It is much harder for them to stop the main cause of piracy, that of people selling knock-off products. Besides the mobs of several countries are involved in that business and it would mean getting their hands dirty in trying to stop it. It is easier to go after the consumers.
Most of the iPod owners I know, including myself, have stopped using file sharing services and now buy our music from the iTunes Music Store. I use iTunes podcasting feature more than anything else these days. It is more cutting edge than the music groups put out these days. The few tunes that I don't buy on iTunes are given away free by unsigned groups who want the airplay and have not signed a deal with the evil record companies.
As far as these artist claiming they did not know that their companies were doing the payola thing.....please, if you are that ignorant of where your money goes you should not be in the business. They knew payola was going on as spending money to get spins puts more money in their pockets in the long run.
They can't get with the times. Elvis has to be a white man playing black mans music, and the attitude still didn't change so Vanilla Ice and Eminem followed. It's not racism, it's ultra-conservatism.
Everybody knows Vanilla Ice was an artificial product. Heck, his most famous song is a resampling of Queen's music. Without permission. In comparison, Eminem is a true rapper, his success wasn't due to the record companies (he started from the bottom), and his songs are inspired by his life. And certainly Eminem isn't an icon of "ultra-conservatism", just listen to the songs dedicated to his mother.
I agree with you on the rest, but please don't talk about things which you have no F'ing idea about.
...a t-shirt with the caption: "My lawyer sued all my customers and all he got me was this chapter 11."
The point is I think this is the mantra of the music industry to obsessively pump up the flavor of the day star for which they have maxium profits and marketing. Just think when the RIAA gets all it's dreams on controling the internet, it will be virtually imposible not to see a Gwen Stephani popup (or some other star) as well not being able to find anything you would really want to listen to.
When I was in highschool, my friends and I were music snobs. We used to try to +1 each other by finding "gems": some vintage garage, punk or funk band from the 60s or 70s (or 80s later) that nobody's heard of; soon, after swapping mix tapes around to our girlfriends, friends, friends' friends, these "gems" were sold out at Big John's, our local record shop. I used to buy 5 or 6 albums a week! Those who buy the Top 10 do not tend to buy 5 or 6 albums a week -- these people aren't diehards, they're not cashcows. If the record companies diverted a fraction of their promotional efforts to their back catalogs -- and I'm not talking about the usual "Golden Hits from the 70s" shit, but a focused effort on quality product -- they wouldn't be so reliant on the new blockbuster artists.
body massage!
Piracy is down too. It's more difficult to find pirated content, laws are tougher, and the entire scene is largely associated with spyware. The complextiy in how to use something like Direct Connect is staggering compared to what Napster was.
For the most part my non-tech-savy friends arn't doing it anymore, and guess what? They arn't exactly flocking to music retail stores to spend their cash. The only ones buying more music than they used to are the ones using iTunes.
There is also an increase in sales of these systems, where people can listen commercial free music of their favorite genre. Why buy a CD when you can just listen to a radio compilation of tunes you like, and some you've even forgetten about? Some impact is likely due here, as well.
...or the music released this year absolutely sucks. Yep.
All of these acts are over 10 years old. Hell, most of these acts over 30 years old!
U2 1978 Band formed
The Eagles 1971 * Band formed
Neil Diamond 1966 * Composed "Solitary Man"
Kenny Chesney 1994 First album
Sir Paul McCartney 1970 * First solo album
Rod Stewart 1969 * First solo album
Sir Elton John 1970 * First sucessful album
Dave Matthews Band 1991 Band formed
Jimmy Buffett 1970 * First album
Green Day 1988 First EP as "Green Day"
* = Act is over 30 years old
What they ought to do is take each individual account and then for each account merge all the songs that are from the same album and count that as 1 album sale. That is a more realistic and pragmatic way of comparing album sales. On the otherhand, this is math done by the likes of RIAA and BSA so the statistics have no basis in reality or common sense.
When I was a child, I had a "record collection" of maybe 20 albums or so, at least half of which turned out to be crap or filler, the rest (the good ones!) being sratched and fuzzy from months of overplaying. A new album was worth my week's allowance because it represented a tremendous growth in my opportunity to own something of value. Suddenly my collection grew by five percent, in one swoop.
Now, the average young music fan probably easily has a few thousand mp3s at easy access, and not crap mp3's, but the cream of the crop, the best hits from the past 20 to 40 years, and in pristine digital quality to boot. So a new CD might add 3/10ths of 1 percent to the kid's collection. Not only does it contribute much less of value on a strictly numerical basis, but also the kid has a much wider range of past work to choose from. A new purchase is likely to sound approximately just like any number of old works already in the child's posession.
Also, there was value in the ownership of the music itself. After you tired of a record, if it was in good condition you might be able to sell it to a friend at half-price. Even a blank cassette tape, if used to bootleg would cost approximately a nickel a song (maybe 15 cents in today's money). But a the cost of a bootleg song now is 1 cent. So with that in mind, it makes it increasingly hard to justify spending fifteen dollars for a CD. Even if you are honest and don't illegally download, you still know that what you just paid for is barely "worth" anything in the sense of having an intrisic (resale) value.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Perhaps it never occured to them that we don'ts want new music precious...
The Billboard 200 Album Chart shows us the current top 10 consists of:
1. Eminem: Curtain Call--The Hits
2. Lil' Wayne: Carter II
3. Korn: See You on the Other Side
4. Various Artists: Now 20
5. Carrie Underwood: Some Hearts
6. Kenny Chesney: The Road and the Radio
7. Nickelback: All the Right Reasons
8. Mariah Carey: The Emancipation of Mimi
9. Black Eyed Peas: Monkey Business
10. Enya: Amarantine
Who did what now?
Mediocre music that you can't dance to is fatuous.
If dance music sells, then why hasn't Wal-Mart added a trance section yet?
But I think it's worse than that. I think that young audiences just don't care about concerts like the last generation did. The list in the parent post is pretty telling: It's not young people who are lining up to see Neil Diamond and Elton John. It's old fogies who are well past their CD-experimenting prime (the time when you do the most CD buying).
Band managers just don't put much effort into getting the kiddies to go to shows, and I wouldn't be surprised if their little manufactured primadonna acts don't really have much of a taste for the smelly grind on the road. It's much easier to buy off MTV/ClearChannel and brainwash the kids remotely, then hit em up at the record store. Those sorts of overheads are minimal.
I wonder if the music industry considers the quality of music they are selling.
Meaning - the current artists and albums out there in radio land I hear are crap so it would stand to reason that sales would be down.
Just because they have a catalog of 10,000 (not a real statistic) new albums this year, it doesn't mean that people want them.
To me, the past few years of music have each been getting worse with nothing new or cool out there. SUre there are a few worth buying, and they are the ones that probably are selling well, but just beacuse Madonna decided to sell yet another album, doesn't mean that the people will like the music enough to buy it.
I think too much emphasis is placed on delivery formats rather than Quality of product.
They need to consider they are selling recycled, redone crap in genres that are stale and over-hyped.
The music industry didn't initially kill off singles to boost album sales, because singles were actually pretty good profit-makers. They ended up overreaching though---singles prices kept going up. This was partly supposed to be justified by adding more tracks---a 7" single had 2 tracks on it, while "maxi-singles" on CD could have like 12 remixes of the song. The problem is that nobody wanted to pay $10 for a maxi-single with 12 remixes of the same song, so singles stopped selling enough copies to really be worthwhile.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hard to say it without a tragic sigh -- but the WSJ converging on USAToday as a limit. These statistics are laughable.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Don't forget that some of the distrubtion costs are borne by the buyer (paying for bandwidth).
While I haven't got an active boycott going against the music industry I just realized that I do have a passive one going in that I haven't bought a CD in a couple of years. I also have not downloaded any of the music in a couple of years becuase I just don't care for any of it. It's not worth my time to bother even if it were legally free.
This is the same damn song and dance they ran when Casette became available. Then the member labels
figured out that this "Casette" thing actually meant better sales (I mean, 8-track in a car? C'mon!)
for them and that they'd make more money because it actually cost less to make than a vinyl LP and
was intrinsically easier to make. In this case, they need to re-evaulate the business model they're
operating under and adapt or die. They have the potential to make as much money with newer business
models adapted to the current tech situation, but NOOO... Well, that's fine; in the end, the ones that
get this will survive, the ones that don't make the transition will go the way of the dodo, just like
all the labels that aren't around from when they didn't make the casette or CD transitions.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I mean, if I can't sell my house for 400K, then I drop the price until it sells. Do these guys think $20. is some natural price point?
-- I speak only for myself
I own a record store and run a site devoted to independent record stores. The iPod is the single biggest reason for the shift in the way people use music. By allowing you to hear only the songs you like and not having to sit through 3/4 of an album that sucks it gives so much more value to what you have. People feel less of a need to buy another album to try to move on from the previous album they got tired of. People NEVER really liked looking for new music but it was a lesser sin than having to listen to only a few crappy albums for years. Now that they don't have to they're content to just stick with the good stuff they've got, sometimes only 200 songs on an iPod shuffle. This is all about psychology.
The other half of it is what the article talks about, poor quality new music, idiotic pricing and orwellian companies.
But, I can tell you from my experience, it's ALL true. There isn't going to be physical media for the masses in 2 years.
I've never really seen 5-6 singles from an album in a long time. Pretty much since 45's went away, I've seen fewer and fewer singles. And even in it's heyday, the best I've ever seen was about four singles on the store shelves.
Which artists are you referring to, because even if I don't like the music, I'd love to see someone doing this (and putting 5-6 singles on a single disc doesn't count, that's just a mini-album).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I will no longer buy their "TOP TEN" I do not listen to AM or FM radio. I am more likely to listen to PRI, CBC or BBC. I own all my albums not one is pirated!
I like to listen to Bruce Cockburn which is only available as a hard CD used. Although last year he released a brilliant CD it certainly was not even in the shops. However go look on iTunes on Folk 101 there he is first entry.
Hastings and many more outlets are going mostly Used CD's.
So what use do we all have for the music industry any more? They have not adjusted to the new Paradymn so they will be replaced.
Vista, the single biggest argument for Desktop Linux! It doesn't "Just Work"(TM).
E-book readers are hard, run out of power, are either to bright in the dark or to dark in the sun. In short they are a hassle.
None of this applies to cd's. To a certain extent I do not even use cd's, they are the paperbag around my book. It is a container, and I empty the container into my pc from wich I then play the content.
Book more closely resemebles a portable media player. And just like a book is great because I can easily take it with me a pmp is great because I can take it with me.
I agree with the rest you say. But comparing book sales with music sales just doesn't fly.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Perhaps the problem is that you keep buying average albums instead of above-average albums.
One of the reasons I *don't* buy from iTunes (among the many like lower quality for higher price, DRM, etc) is that I went a couple times to see if I could an album that I wanted, and they didn't include all the tracks that were on the CD! Usually it was a couple of missing tracks that I thought the album was incomplete without.
After doing that a few times I got totally turned off to iTunes.
I certainly have albums that have low-hit rates, but I also have albums where I've gotten more attached to some of the songs that weren't the ones I bought them for. It ends up being a wash.
I did finally get an iPod and I'm ripping my CD collection to it, which is taking a bit of time. I'm too lazy to dig around for free downloads, and being old I like to have the physical media in my hands.
I'm willing to bet money that after the news of the Sony fiasco hit the airwaves, CD buying decreased overall. Think about it, the average consumer probably doesn't pay attention to which musician is on which label and following Sony's Rootkit Extravaganza probably stopped buying all CDs.
And, of course, the Wall Street Journal blames piracy. Right....
The technology market has shifted because the CD sucks as a portable music medium. Let's face it, the first "portable" CD players were heavier than some laptops today, they can thin them down all they like, and add "skip protection" all they like, but in the end, it still needs to be a very un-portable CD-sized device. Companies like SONY tried to address the issue of portability with things like the memory stick, minidisc, and shrunken CD's called pocket CD's that hold a third of the music as a CD.
The fact is that today we live in a very mobile world. Very few people have large expensive sound systems in their home compared to the number of people who use portable players. People want to be able to take their music with them, and not invest in racks of CD's and bulky home systems that will only result in upsetting the neighbors who don't like your music.
The trend of the walkman seemed to get very big in the 90's, but when the industry made the shift from cassette tape to CD they attributed the lack of CD sales to the still high price point. They didn't realize that the way people listen to music was changing, and that their new medium was destined for failure in the portable market.
Today, more and more people are learning that small, portable, players capable of holding not just one album, or one artist, but a large portion, if not all, of your personal music library are the way to go. No more messing around with disks. How does this affect CD sales though? Well, because the record industry is so concerned about piracy, it turns out that they make it difficult for the lay person to get music from their CD to their portable device. It also turns out that the easiest, and most popular, way of ripping CD's is to use iTunes. Great, but iTunes has a music store right there, which is usually faster than going out to a CD store, looking for a CD, buying an entire album for one song you like, bringing it back home, ripping it to your iTunes library, and loading it on to your portable device. What do you do with all the CD's? I know people who have racks of CD's collecting dust and they take up more space than you'd think, not to mention keeping them organized can be a chore.
Napster showed people how easy it could be to get music digitally, they did it by violating copyright, but it caught the attention of a few companies, mainly Apple. With the iTunes Music Store people could now get music digitally, faster, and more easily, than pirating it. People are willing to pay for this added level of convenience, but not much, otherwise they'll resort back to piracy. The trick is finding the right price that will get the record industry the most money before they loose sales to piracy. It turns out that price is 99 cents per song. This is predictable psychologically; 99 cents for one song seems cheep, while adding 50 cents to that price makes it seem completely unreasonable to most consumers.
Regardless of weather it's iPod+iTunes, or another digital music player, the fact is that the CD as a portable player never worked and is now dieing. With a majority market shift from people playing music in their homes, to people playing music using portables, it's obvious that CD sales would inevitably be doomed to failure.
Record Labels, odd that we still call them that, can easily improve their "bottom line" by simply ending the production and distribution of physical media. The overhead in distributing music digitally is far, far, less than the overhead of printing CD's, packaging them, shipping them, and replacing defective copies.
The record companies continue to complain about profits and CD sales while digital music sales go up. "Even though digital music sales are rising they don't match the profit returned from CD sales they replace". Of course they don't, if you're still paying to manufacture and distribute CD's. The market has decided that digital content distribution is the way they want music, they've decided that 99 cents a song is what they will pay, and the
"the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copies than the top 10 albums the same week in 2004"
If the industry did not sell crap for music, perhaps the sales would be higher?
Remember at the end of the 80's, when the hair bands really started to suck? Bands like Winger, singing the gayest love songs you can possibly endure? It was worse then listening to Vogon poetry.
Then came bands like Nirvana, and all those stupid hair band songs were gone. It was almost like a revolution in music.
Kinda like today, or maybe what should happen today.
These bastards run the radio stations, they run MTV, they choose what you listen to. I mean come on, how many times can we listen to Stairway To Heaven? How many rappers that tell everyone how great they are do we need to hear?
Wake up recording industry!
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
So I'm a big reader of gapingvoid.com and www.thelongtail.com. I see a few major problems the "music industry" have. (Do they realize they're just RIAA? Music has always and will always do just fine.)
First, basic identity problem. They don't do anything people can get really thrilled about. Sure it's nice to be able to have your music actually arrive, but it's not like most of us care which studio or trucking company actually got hired in the process, or how it was done. On top of that, they make a lot of customers and good musicians really, really dislike them. For all kinds of reasons you can follow in any number of posts here. It's not helping that an increasing number of people on both ends of the supply and demand chain realize that they can just as easily do without 'em. (Not to mention how distastetful it is to be thought of as part of a "supply and demand chain.")
On top of being largely unnecessary and disliked on average, their entire top ten hits model isn't the best way to deal with art. (And face it, good music is art, not industrial product.) I don't care what's on their top ten hit list - their top ten hit list includes the opinions of thousands of middle school girls, probably several hundred skinheads, a bunch of washed out hippies, and any number of other people who's taste I have absolutely no repsect for. That one song by Inverse Cinematics which can't be found in any store is worth far more to me than a dozen of their top ten lists, and 99.9% of the rest of you wouldn't give that song 10 seconds of your time.
And, to top the whole thing off: Their vision for the future means they stay in control of what gets out there based on mass market research, tight control over distribution, and locking things up with DRM and lawsuits against fans and musicians alike. What they're fighting against is a future in which musicians have a direct relationship with their fans (to the point where some could reasonably do shows in people's living rooms) and both actively seek ways to support eachother having a really good time.
Given those choices, I think it's high time they crawled back under the $sys$ they came from.
Guidryp, you're right about random shuffle and large collections. I don't think it's I-pods specifically, however, it's just the "big random play collections" that are the real threat to the music industry.
While my wife owns an IPod, I do not. But I do maintain our music collection, which has become -- by my standards when I was a teenager -- immense. I've spent 2-3 years digitizing every piece of vinyl and cassette tape I can lay my hands on, including my old not inconsiderable record and CD collections and hundreds of used records, cassettes, and found/garage-sale CDs. It's all in a database of about 2300 hours of MP3 files on our home stereo server, and it's all legally acquired since (to my knowledge) we own the original copies and use the collection only for ourselves. I might occasionally order a CD from a particular artist I like -- but most of the time we just listen to our own customized "radio" station. We went walking through Best Buy the other night and I realized that we have more albums in our online collection than their entire store music section - about 2,000 albums.
Why should we pay full price for hit-and-miss on new albums when we have so much stuff we like already? It would take a full year, 40 hours a week, to listen to the whole collection. Unlike the source material, it will never wear out with additional play or abuse (and we keep an offsite backup).
The same thing is happening with children's records. Although we have a child on the way, we are not part of the market for children's recordings and music, because we have over 100 albums of children's instructional songs, stories, and folk tales left over from our own childhood. We digitize 'em, pull out the pops, and remove the background hum -- and the 30-year-old records sounds better than when they were new. Why fork out $15 for a copy of Peter, Paul, and Mommy when I've got one right here? Why buy some crappy abridged version of Grimm's Fairy Tales when we have records of unabridged readings - with music -- that were cut in the 1960s? Why buy the soundtrack of our Disney DVD when we can get the music directly off the disk at the same quality as the CD in the store?
Big, accessible collections are displacing event DJs too. For our wedding we didn't hire a DJ, we hooked up a subset of our music collection and (after the first few songs) let the guests themselves choose the songs from a small web client right there on the dance floor. It was a big hit. I've been to several events since then that used the same idea. It's a natural thing to do once big hard drives became available.
Exactly! With the increased exposure to different music genres and the availability to pre-screen the additional songs on an album, I haven't bought a CD in nearly 2 years. When I listen to music it's normally in the car between my preferred talk radio or news shows. Because I know that if I listen to 99.5 for an hour, I'll hear Golddigger 3 times. So until I find another album where I like more than 1 or two songs, I'll buy the ones I like off Itunes. My total Itunes purchases in the last 2 years is about 10 songs by 10 different artists. So really, in some cases a song = a CD, it's just that their gross revenue is less when I buy 1 song. And we have to have the obligatory -> It's the pirates! The pirates are destroying their business. My company is going out of business in the next month, we should tell the stockholders that it was Pirates! Not mismanagement or the changes in the economy that caused our cost of goods to skyrocket, it was pirates! And we should be allowed to hunt the pirates! Someone issue me a letter of marque, I'm hunting pirates!
Why are women so complicated? Find out how little I know here.
First, I have issues with your "subtract all the filler songs" argument. Do you know why the filler songs are there? Because people wouldn't pay that same price for a cd that only contains the 2 hit songs. Obviously, they have value. Personally, I'd prefer that the band in question wait to release an album until they have enough *good* songs to fill the album. At least with the buy one song at a time model, the fillers start becoming unnecessary again.
Second, I have issues with your candy bag arguments. If the 10 piece bag cost $10, you're not suddenly buying a candy bar for $1...because the candy bar *was* in the mix bag of candy. I mean, the hit song is in the cd, right?
Third, you're not considering the money the industry is saving by not having to press the cd's, print the covers, and ship them to stores everywhere.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
It's bad enough hearing the stuff they're selling in record stores and Walmart piped into your office from a radio station at work. If it's crap, then more exposure isn't going to help sales. Need a new genre? What about perfect silence?
Dead industry, ignore them, they'll just go away.
A lot of people are saying that too much crap was released this year, but look at the top selling albums of 2004:
Rank Title, Artist Units sold
1. Confessions, Usher 7,978,594
2. Feels Like Home, Norah Jones 3,842,920
3. Encore, Eminem 3,517,097
4. When the Sun Goes, Kenny Chesney 3,072,224
5. Here for the Party, Gretchen Wilson 2,931,097
6. Live Like You Were Dying, Tim McGraw 2,786,840
7. Songs About Jane, Maroon 5 2,708,415
8. Fallen, Evanescence 2,614,226
9. Autobiography, Ashlee Simpson 2,576,945
10. Now That's What I Call Music 16, Various Artists 2,560,316
Man, I just lost my breakfast. Can it really get much worse?
The problem for the traditional record industry is that it's more and more difficult to maintain the best return on investment the traditional ways.
The recording industry used to work how the movie industry is still working: create a handful of stars, deploy them in a small number of releases.
This way you put big money, big efforts into a menegable small number of products hoping for big profit. Imagine if suddenly the number of movies multiplied, due to some technological break-through which would allow to create good quality movies on very low budget in your basement: that's what happened with music creation.
The movie industry would face quite a headache: the whole business model would shake to the core, starting from star creation and promotion to movie distribution. Right now, somehow just about as many movies are released by the big studios, which can be played in the number of existing theatres.
Can you imagine if suddenly the number of "studio quality" movies multiplied?
How would they compete for theatres? Would you see a sudden surge in the number of new theatres to be able to absorb the sudden flood of new titles?
Probably not: what we would see is that only the largest movie studios could put their films into the movie theatres, the other movies would be forced to DVD, download, etc.
Exactly the same situation what is happening with big label music: only those songs have a chance to get on radio and tv, independent music has to put up with web sites, etc.
It automatically creates a false sense, that if it's played on radio or on tv, it's a "better music". In reality big labels access to radio, tv, large web portals, mainstream press is what big label can provide for a selected act - and no indie can ever match this.
This exclusive, purchased access is able to create, maintain stars both in music and movie industry. Stars are the best marketing tools for cultural products, it's branding a mindset, an attitude, a type of beauty and sexsepile.
Stars can sell even whole CDs. Probably stardom is the key to sell a whole CD, not the number of hit songs. A star's shitty song is still interesting, it may be crap, but it's unlike any other crap, it's the star's crap...
That's why you keep seeing certain performers, bands with very strong record sales - even when sales generally declines.
For big labels it's more difficult to create, maintain stars - since the number of well focused venues have dramatically increased, together with the number of competing products.
"the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copies than the top 10 albums the same week in 2004."
This statistic taken alone is meaningless. Depending what's happening along the rest of the curve it can mean that sales have slowed, or it can mean that people are buying a more diverse set of music.
Most of the problems listeners cite IRT the music industry center around labels hyperpromoting a few bands at the expense of thousands of others who get no airplay or in-store marketing. When the top 10 account for a smaller proportion of sales it means that the power curve is flattening a little and people are thinking a bit more for themselves instead of buying what big media tells them to.
And this is bad how?
Kevin Fox
Recently came across a site that sells albums from artists who are not signed to labels. The deal is the artist provides the product and the site (CDBaby.com) sells it online, albeit at a much higher price than youd pay for a major label distribution. Thay take a slight percentage of the sale for themselves and then pay the artists the rest on a weekly basis. I think alot of artists are becoming more and more aware of the fact that the record companies are in it for themselves and nothing else. I'm willing to pay a premium if it means we can weed out bands like Linkin Park, The Killers, and Franz Ferdinand. Does anyone else think this is also beginning to take a bite out of the record companies?
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
That was the digital version of a short lived service called Personics back in the late 80s. You could go into a store and make a compilation tape by choosing from a menu of songs and it would spit out a cassette tape for you at the cost of around $1 per song.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
...and say: Is it entirely possible that the there is a slump in the top song purchases from last year because this year's music just sucks?! I mean seariously, I think that piracy is too convenient an excuse to blame for declining sales. But even if it were true, why would people pay for trash if they could just as easily get it for free? I suggest an experiment, lower the price of tracks by half, (ie an iTunes $0.99 track to $0.49) and see what happens (oh and none of the crap about 'allowing the market to decide the price of each song'--charge a uniform price for all of them). I know that I myself would buy tracks more often.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
to buy a root kit.
But they were sold out.......
Rick B.
Everyone seems to be going on and on about why music sucks, etc... or RIAA or whatever... but here's the real reason:
Gift Certificates. People buy music as gifts during this period of time right? With the availability of Amazon GCs and iTunes GCs don't you think that maybe just maybe people are getting those instead of trying to guess what music their gift recipients really want???
Let's take a look at music sales just after Christmas... say the week after, and see how much it is up compared with 2004.
I'm betting it will be higher... probably high enough to overcome any 'slump' seen during november and december.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I think that the decline in music sales is down to a number of small effects that on their own seem harmless but combined have led to this massive fall in sales.
This is going to be a long ramble so bear with me.
A number of factors have combined to make us listen to music in a different way and thus reduce the attractivness of buying cd's in your average limited selection store.
People used to play records (for the kids REALLY big black cd's like objects) and because of hardware limitations the music was usually played from the beginning of the album to the end. You needed an advanced record player if you wanted to play albums back to back (playing A and then B side without getting up was extremely difficult).
If you just wanted to listen to a wide selection of music you either had to record your favorite music to tape and then play the tape (wich until quit recently still forced you to listen in the same order over and over) so the radio was the only way to get a wide selection of music without you after a while being able to predict wich song comes next.
Now with CD-changers or worse mp3 players people can listen to a large selection of their own choosing with still enough randomness in it that it doesn't get to repetetive. My own collection of mp3's is big enough to last a week without repeating. You can now play your entire collection at random or any order you desire without being limited by hardware.
MTV doesn't play music anymore. Neither does the radio. Oh they get the occasional "promotional sound clip of the week we repeat every hour" in and when the D.J. needs to take bathroom break but mostly it is commercials. Dutch tv has no music program anymore like Countdown or Top of the Pops. Simply put, the programs that used to introduce us to a selection of new music have disappeared. There are alternatives available but they are often to alternative to be accepted on the workfloor. You need something middle of the road, not to extreem not to mundane to play during the 9 hours you are at work.
With the decline in radio a lot of people seem to have decided that an mp3 player is a better way to get a bit of background music. Hookup an mp3 player to the company soundsystem is lot easier then everyone bringing tapes to work. We listen to less and less radio. But if you listen to your own music you will not hear a new artist you might want to buy.
The walkman still suffered from giving you a very limited music selection in a pre-arranged format. A decent Mp3 player can easily hold a day worth of music. I am sometimes shocked to find that I haven't added a new album in months. This is different from my minidisc player where I would buy new minidiscs now and then or at least regurly record a new collection. I got 20gb of mp3's on my player and frankly I so far don't get bored with it.
Finanlly regonized by the music bizz the simple fact that the money that used to buy L.P.'s (other word for the big black cd like things kids) now goes to games and dvd's and my mobile phone etc etc.
Of course some people will like the "new" music and some young people have a violent reaction to oldy music BUT the simple fact remains that the newer bands do not have the selling power of the oldies. Just google for top album sales and you will find that the top hasn't changed in years. Worse the newbies that do make an appearance lower down are all of the oldie sort (Shania Twain is hardly pushing the envelope). Or simply put Gan
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think it has more to do with folks realizing that you don't have to pay 14.99 for a CD that maybe has 2-3 good songs (for a good CD) on it, when you can get those say 3 songs for 2.98 from iTunes.
It doesn't take a rocket scientists to realize that CDs have too much filler music, for most releases. Why pay for crap, when you can get what you like.
Even if said album has 10 songs on it, and you love all 10, that's 9.90 for 10 songs, as oppossed to 14.99.
Do the math.
I am pleased to see my lack of CD purchases is killing you. But i have done far worse than kill you, I have hurt you; and I want to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, with nothing but compulsary, proportionate licensing fees and miniscule iPod profits... buried alive. BURIED ALIVE.
(Okay, I couldn't think of a better ending)
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I think overall, top 10 format radio is down from prior years. as people decide to listen to the music on their iPods, or satellite radio, which offers a lot more variety than can be found in the Top 10. Also witness the populatiry of stations like "Jack FM" which play a varied playlist instead of the same 20-30 songs over and over again. People are listening to more music, and for the most part, better music than what can be found on the charts.
I've also noticed that the back catalog has become cheaper, you can get some decent albums from the last 10 years for the price of $9.99 (Canadian) or thorough 2 for $20 deals at most CD shops, which works out to about 8 and a half bucks U.S, cheaper even than used CD's sometimes. This has cannibalized from marginal releases - I'd rather wait until it goes in the bargain bin in a few months, and get the chance to become more familiar with other songs on the CD before buying.
It typically costs more for the soundtrack to a movie than the DVD of the movie itself. Particularly after both have been on shelves for six months or so. The music industry continues to overcharge for their product and then sue it's own customers when they bypass those costs.
There are a bunch of bad bands, but I would also challenge the idea that there are not good ones. If you want to hear some good music, check out (Some of them are more new than others):
* Mae
* Anberlin
* Motion City Soundtrack
* The Get Up Kids
* Norah Jones
* Vertical Horizon
* Robert Randolph and the Family Band
* The Format
* The Forecast
* Acceptance
These are all some great bands that are out there, and I will admit that my knowledge is even still very limited. Just because the stuff you hear on the radio is crap does not mean that there is not good stuff to be had.
Your dad's music was mainstream and you being a pathetic herd animal had to do what everyone else does and that is rebel. So you went "alternative" (do what everyone else in your peer group does) by listening to the music that was not openly supported by the MAN. Of course the fact that you could buy your "alternative" music in the shops should have tipped you off that 'the man' was behind it all along but you were/are stupid.
The music industry has however recently made a mistake. They advanced to fast where 'the man' is now trying to push the 'alternative' music too directly. So your kid who has of course inherited your instinct to herd is forced to look in a different direction to be alternative. Cue an intrest in oldie music as that is now the real alternative when alternative has accidently become the mainstream.
It is not the bands, it is that the current "new and happening stuff" is to mainstream and worse, actually BOUGHT by your PARENTS who still want to appear cool or whatever. Nothing kills gangsta rapper music faster then having 40yr old baldies pumping it out of their volvos. It ruins the whole rebelling against your parents thing when your mom says about eminem that she likes his rap. YIKES.
I just can't stand people that judge music by when it was produced or by how many other people like it. Who gives a shit. Do you not eat chocolate because it is mainstream dude? Coffee is out because it is so last century man?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The blame is more with the artists/industry, again, and not the online retailers. The fact is there ARE artists out there who put out albums that flow from track to track, and the listening experience is more enjoyable because of it. A lot of popular artists simply don't do that, and hence you find the average 14-year-old-itunes-using-pop-listener downloading only the song on the radio.. and i don't blame them. Most pop music is about the latest hot track, and not enjoying an artist and their work.. maybe the music industry should think of marketing albums and bands instead of one track being played 20 times a day on MTV/MuchMusic?
Up yours, twice.
Just keep suing people. Whatever in Allah's Name you do, just keep suing people. Because everybody knows that's the best way to make money in the music business. And the movie business.
By Allah, you oughta petition for the death penality in "intellectual property theft" cases. That'll REALLY show them you mean business. Your business. You really mean you business.
I am not exposed to new songs anymore. Not by new artists or old artists. It was in one of the other replies that I read about Genesis being back but without Phil it seems. And I liked their music (well the later stuff) and even have a number of their cd's.
But yeah, like you I just don't listen to the radio anymore (well the BBC world service but that don't count) and on dutch tv pop programs like countdown and top of the pops have gone. MTV of course is a running joke about not actually having anything to do with music anymore.
I don't even download that much music anymore. Many of my songs are still from the napster days with bittorrent occasionally making an album complete. Or updating the bitrate.
I think somewhere at Sony BGM there is a market researcher who hates his job and just generates some random stats as to what is liked by whom as what sells is not what is being sold. Just check the best selling album charts. The only recent entry is at number 7. That radical new artist pushing the boundries of music, shania twain. Oh sure there was a time when say Pink Floyd was "new" and "alternative" but that is long gone. The "new" music of today just doesn't seem to sell.
Perhaps it is time to just open the back catalog and let the kids of today discover the oldies. As the article said if Dean Martin still sells then by golly, sell him?
What I think is needed is a service where I can easily find new music sorta like my taste where ZERO value is attached as to how hip the D.J. thinks it is.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The only thing I hear people talking about what they listen to is right wing hate radio: Limbuagh, Hanity, etc etc. Maybe the record companies can get a piece of that pressing monthly 'best of' CD's. Here are the advantages:
Low low production costs
Constant stream of new material
Limitless demand of people who will pay
Honestly, when is the last time you were turned onto a new band from radio?
Radio stations are all just cookie cutter branding and recycled playlists. There are no good venues for discovering new music. Clearchannel and like companies that have created the boring radio landscape we have now share much of the blame for a downturn in sales.
Combine that with the fact that a new CD costs $18, who the hell is going to buy a new CD?
The problem is that popular music has been in a terrible case of the doldrums since about 2000. Eminem has been the only true larger-than-life figure in the 2000s, testing both the creative and moral limits of what his music can do.
In an era where our true artistes and trailblazers are limited to indie labels and likely will never see their videos played on MTV, of course there's a major drought, the same kind of drought television was facing before they realized -- oh crap! -- people don't want to watch variations on the same theme all the time, and love surprises. We got "Arrested Development," "My Name is Earl," "Desperate Housewives," and "Lost" out of that revelation.
As long as there's corporate mindthink around thinking about numbers rather than quality, music is going to suck.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
They knew very little about how to play their instruments, but all of them provided some essential moments in rock history, and music history. Why, you ask? The passion showed. It showed in the three minutes they were performing a hit song; it showed in the classic albums they produced. They didn't know the rules, and they put a middle finger up to them.
Not every band is like King Crimson. Not ever guitarist is like Steve Vai. Thank God, because music would be soulless and lifeless.
The best music of the last couple of years has been passionate stuff like the Arcade Fire and Iron & Wine. Your criticisms are just completely closed-minded and ignorant about what makes good music work.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
I simply stopped buying music a few years back. I won't put up with the price gouging, nor with the bulk of the profits going to the studios and not the artists, nor with any of the nonsense now going on with CDs that infect computers and lawsuits against 12-year-olds. I don't pirate music, I just make do with what I have.
Something Like: "because of damn music pirates, Britney Spears won't be able to buy a third Caribbean island"
I listen to classic rock- even 80's rock and you hear all kinds of wierd opening bars, strange instruments, real experimentation trying for a new sound.
...
Today's songs I can listen to for 30 seconds before I can tell which particular song I'm listening to.
How do i put this
They are not even good enough to download for free. The only time I hear them is in the car driving to work.
The most recent music I am -buying- is coming out of new places like Magnatune.
But, if I -was- buying CD's, I'd never ever buy another SONY CD again. As it is, they are one of two companies out of the entire universe which I boycott (The other is Domino's for political/religious reasons- their pizza's and service were great- I heartily recommend Domino's to folks who are against any form of abortion and who are right wing religious types- just not my thing).
Microsoft, who I think of as a fairly scammy company with touches of outright evil, doesn't make the boycott bar in part because of absolutely -steller- customer service they gave me in 1999. Yea, I like linux and java, but I've also got a winxp and win2k box here.
Sony, tho, they just keep pushing my buttons - the biggest was an absolutely horrid customer service incident in 2002- you havn't lived til customer service insults you instead of helping you and their supervisor doesn't care. But now with the CD thing they crossed the line from merely being irritating to being actively dangerous to my welfare since I earn my money using computers. The thought that I could -legally- purchase their product and it could destroy my computer and they did it all on the sly means that I will never purchase another sony product again. Period. I hope they get nailed to the wall and have to pay for any clean reinstalls that folks have to pay pc techs to do for them. Hundred million pc's at 70 bucks a piece would be more than fair.
But as far as today's music goes- I'm open to new good music- there just isnt any on the radio, or mtv, or any of that crap. The words change but the basic chords stay the same. It's so bad that a couple summers ago at the beach, a friend and I were humming the songs (and in some cases the words) to songs that we had never heard before. It was freaking our friend out- but we were not some kind of super brains- the music and lyrics were just that cliche'd/trite/predictable.
Finally... on a philosophical basis, I don't think
a) I should pay $16 for a CD that my competitor in india/china/etc. is sold for $2.49 and then she/he gets to take my job working for a fraction of the salary.
b) I don't think any copyright over 28 years is valid- everything older than 28 years is an immoral law that the corporations bought from corrupt politicians.
c) I don't think anyone particularly deserves to get rich off a 3 minute song when I don't get paid royalties for my software after I leave a company.
d) Given my irritation with the above facts, I just find alternative ways.
d.1 listen to new music that's free.
d.2 record music off the radio into mp3's (legal!)
d.3 buy used cd's
d.4 do other things
d.5 call "BULLSHIT" and download old stuff if I can't get it conveniently and legally.
---
But back on topic, the songs are crap, and we are much busier than even 15 years ago. Since music is too expensive, it gets crowded out by cheaper entertainment. Since there are thousands of bands instead of hundreds, I have a lot more to choose from- and price is a factor in what I choose.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
...and yet I can still only wonder... did they ever stop to think that maybe it's because they haven't released anything worth buying? I haven't even bothered to download anything in the last year. They just keep putting out absolute crap. I get a laugh everytime I read these articles. IT ISNT BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE PIRATING, IT'S BECAUSE NOTHING YOU HAVE RELEASED IS WORTH LISTENING TO. Bah, it will only fall on deaf ears.
Over-marketed, over-hyped acts. The collapse of radio as a hit-making machine. Bloated prices, which seem to result from the thought, "Hmm, sales are down -- time to raise the profit margin, so we won't have to sell so many to make a buck." What's next, Kenny Loggins CDs in the discount bin for $20? Oh, and then there's the Sony rootkit, which just about ruined that proud company's reputation, and the RIAA suing its best customers. (Yes, pirate music is the new Top 40, dummies. And you don't even have to spend payola bucks to get up the charts!) Now all they have to do is ENHANCE the CD -- not cripple it -- and their sales will improve. Oh, and they could ask Apple and MS to undo their copy protection and lower their prices for that crappy-sounding 128 kbps music to about 25 cents.
Are you an asshole, or just ignorant? Or perhaps astoundingly elitist? Here's a tip: your attitude is very middle-of-the-road . . . actually, that is probably going too easy on it. Yeah, it's actually down in the sewer. Someone needs to get acquainted with the ideas of "Multiple points of view," and "I am not the center of the universe," stat.
RIAA plans to sue the several hundred people who were lucky enough to find an X-Box 360 to purchase.
A spokesman for the organization stated that the reason for the suit was that "the money spent on the X-Box could have gone towards the purchase of 20 to 25 CD."
My first post was marked Troll by a thoughtless mod. Instant Bad Karma.
This is exactly the problem the record companies are pointing at. The most important group (for them) does not buy music anymore: young people.
No, that's not the problem at all. I'm 21. I am the younger generation, but I haven't purchased a CD from a new group since I was 11 because the new music sucks.
I tend to listen to stuff from the 70s and 80s more, and any music that I pirated durring the naptster days when we first got broadband was from that era. I've since purchased that music, but will not purchase any of this pop crap they're marketing at me and my younger siblings right now.
It all sucks.
I've seen albums that I was looking for on iTunes listed as "partial." What was missing were bonus tracks. They had all the songs included on the original release, which is all I really wanted. But I wouldn't swear that this is the case for all their partial albums.
group offered, in the spirit of the season, to purchase a clue for the RIAA. The offer was summarily rejected by the RIAA and the matter referred to their legal department. Apparantly the RIAA feels that the offer violates the copyright of one of their artists.
Upon hearing of the rejection the consumer group made the statement "what a grinch", and was immediately sued by the MPAA for violating their copyright on the term.
Upon hearing of the MPAA lawsuit in the matter, the RIAA released the following statement:
"Ho, Ho, Ho"
Well, at any rate *I* haven't been buying any new music. Granted, I wouldn't likely buy popular music anyway, as I prefer classical or folk, and my wife is strictly classical, but we're now in our second decade of observing the boycott against the RIAA. (Now if only I could convince her to also boycott movies... but that's proving more difficult. So I just donate to the EFF whenever she goes to see one.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Folks - all I saw were percentages like 40%, 4.5% and the like... What was the SAMPLE SIZE that the percentages were referring to?
What were the actual #'s in 2004 as compared to now?
Remember: 66% of the people polled stated that you can prove anything with statistics!
Mentioning Vanilla Ice at the same time as Eminem and Elvis does not mean all three are equal, just what I said that all three were easier to pitch to ultra-conservative record companies. I'll agree that Vanilla Ice was a marketing exercise from the start, which is why no-one bothers to listen to the music under his name - the other two were a bit more palatable than the alternatives to the execs at the start and then went on from there (and had trouble when they did stuff that scared the execs).
I really threw in Vanilla Ice to show how record companies are not about music but about "product" and the short term sell. Eminem, as everyone noticed, is not a one hit wonder.
Damn! I googled Tori Amos Assholes Are Free Today thinking it was a joke name. But here are the lyrics!
So beautifully written. It's poetry.
''Assholes are cheap today (assholes are cheap today).
Cheaper than yesterday (cheaper than yesterday).
Small ones are a half a crown (small ones are a half a crown).
Sitting up or lying down (sitting up or lying down).''
With talent like that I can't understand why the music industry is in a slump.
One of the big problems with the music industry is that it is held in a stranglehold by massive media companies. These companies attempt to manipulate demand, but these days are simply failing. There are other ways music can work though. I live in Louisiana, where we have our own unique vibrant musical culture. Although a few acts have deals with big labels, many record their own CDs and sell than at their gigs. This way all the money goes to the artists. Whereas in the rest of the country music is manipulated by lawyers and suits, here music is in the hands of the musicians and the audience. It is a much better way to do business! The only problem we face is that the small independent record shops keep being put out of business by the chains like Best Buy. This is a shame. The system still works pretty well though. Also, it makes for a much freer musical culture -- musicians frequently sit in on each others CDs and even at each others gigs. Everybody knows who is good, who is hot, and who is not. We don't need music reviews. This is the way things SHOULD be done. The RIAA have totally the wrong idea. As an example, some time ago I was overseas and I played a CD of a local artist for a friend of mine. She liked it so much that I burnt her a copy of the CD. The next time the artist played in town, I gave him the money for the CD. With this kind of approach everyone wins. With the antics of the RIAA and Sony, only the lawyers win.
Record companies are basically organized crime:
* they price fixed for years in the past and occasionally they get their hands slapped with a small fine (never criminal action). This price fixing business model is illegal.
* They install root kits on customers computers which open the customers computers up to installation of additional software and viruses without their consent. This software also destabilizes the customers PC, and it consumes memory and CPU time forever, even if they are no longer using the product.
* They buy legislators and pay them to pass bills trying to legalize their illegal business plans.
* They sue their own customers, without even knowing or caring if the person they sue has broken a law. Who is going to continue patronizing companies that sue their customers???
* Their overpriced products are not governed by the laws of supply and demand. Hence, sales go down but the product does not go down in price to increase sales. What other private, non-utility industry can have a legislatively supported business plan that does not respond to the laws of supply and demand? Still, they make huge profits even when sales go down. They think that by buying more legislators, eventually they will win. They fail to learn from Microsoft's mistakes. Just because you are a monopoly it doesn't mean you can shove an inferior, overpriced product down peoples throats and not lose market share to the inevitable backlash. When the record companies get a backlash they buy new legislation to pay them for their losses, i.e. tariffs on blank CD's, IPODs and computers.
I feel morally ashamed when I buy a CD now and support organized crime. I buy only a few CD's a year now and avoid DVD's entirely. I used to buy a couple dozen CD's a year. I'd rather listen to old music than support criminal monopolies.
I also hold major music bands partly to blame, you don't have to go though dishonest labels (the majority - all RIAA members) or distribute by traditional channels (use direct downloads instead).
I hope my fellow Slashdot'rs will consider boycotting any paid music or video DVD's whenever possible. Even though I don't illegally download music (I've bought enough stuff already), I think illegal downloading is morally justifiable when you are up against a corrupt government (I'm refering only to the US here, I don't know about overseas), and your media companies are also totally corrupt. Only a boycott can resolve this issue. Even then, we will face taxes on PC's, blank media and possibly the air we breath, to replace the lost profits of record companies.
Are you up to the challenge?
Has anyone thought that declining sales of CDs might be tied to a general trend in wealth distribution? Specifically that as wealth becomes more concentrated in the US (not sure what the trends are in EU, Japan and other traditional CD consumers), there is less disposable income for most of the populace to throw away on CDs?
Just a thought, not even a theory.
The labels just don't get it, do they.
/rant over
* Better music might be a good place to start.
* CDs that adhere to the red book standard would be a good follow-up.
* Treating your customers with respect would complete the trifecta.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
What you mean the "boycott" of downloading all their stuff and not paying for it works?
Darn, and I thought I was just downloading so I can amass grate amounts of their stuff for free. Why pay for music, movies, and games when I can get them all for free? Why should I pay those greedy bastards; I will just rationalize this stuff by claiming I am boycotting them and their business model should involve giving their stuff for free because I can get it for free....
I want to talk about the argument that this is not due to piracy, but to the fact that the music is getting worse. You can see it being claimed in post all around this one.
I find it hard to believe. It means that just at the same time as piracy in different forms became convenient and commonly accessible, popular music culture hit an unprecedented quality slump. What are the odds for that coincidence? It reminds me of global warming-deniers who think that the climate just happened to grow warmer from other causes, right when we started pumping out CO2 by the megagigaton.
Also, while the piracy opportunities are easily verifiable, I don't know how to measure the average music output quality in any rational way. Individual people over 20 will almost without exception feel that music is not as interesting as when they were 15. It's just how the human music taste works, for whatever reason. To someone going through those ages while the music industry slump is going on, I can well understand that it must feel like their taste is universally correct, but I doubt the kids turing 15 today share that view.
I'm babbling, but in short, until I see some objective proof that music quality is actually going down, I will believe in the simple explanation of this.
Mostly in the spread between country and rock. I live in New Jersey now, so getting most of this on CD locally is right out of the question.
Here's a sample of what's in my "purchased" playlist on iTunes: Robbie Fulks (a few bombs, but many jems), Old 97's, Old Crow Medicine Show, Bela Fleck, Johnny Cash, More Johnny Cash ("My Mother's Hymn Book" and "Unchained" are particularly good), Loretta Lynn's "Van Lear Rose" (produced by Jack White), the White Stripes, Moby, Dishwalla's later albums, The Reverend Horton Heat (don't go in expecting musicality, just a rockin' time), Son Volt, Wilco, VAST, and Elvis (30 #1 hits for $9.99? no brainer there).
I admit that I like the 'album' concept, despite the single-serve nature of iTMS. Being able to put on 30-60 min of music with a similar feel is nice. If I'm not willing to listen to multiple songs, I usually don't buy it. The ability to string together 10-15 songs with minimal filler is a good sign of an album being a musical venture by an artist, rather than a business venture by a label.
I think I need a new sig here.
I would have bought more CDs,
but Sony Ate My Windows.
The only thing their CDs lack is talent.
The pap they vomit and call music - well, it all sucks.
The Root Kit Virus Infection (aka LSP - Lawsuit Spawing Process) - well, that Boycotts all Sony and BMG products for eternity. (As well as any electronics, games, HDTVs, or anything else carrying the Sony name).
Apple iTunes sides with Sony, still selling their songs.
Well, guess what - the Eternal Sony Boycott just got extended to Apple iTunes.
The Eternal Sony Boycott group is adding new members every day!
No user fees!
No registration required!
To Join, just make a promise to yourself to forever and ever boycott
any organization that launches global attacks against computer users.
It's bad enough when someone makes a new virus, but when an international corporation does what Sony did, they must be held accountable.
If California can keep ramping up the death penalty against poor people in prison, well - Sony needs to get the free market equivalent of the death penalty too.
Big Corporations need Big Punishment.
...and realized that once I had ruled out DRM-laden content and equipment, there was really very little there that I would consider giving as a gift. I think the music industry has really lead the charge in killing sales through alienating their customers. It'll be interesting to see how the movie industry responds to these "success stories". In the meantime, it looks like coal for Sony and the RIAA this year.
I don't buy from mainstream records companies much anymore. They're assholes and there are plenty of talented artists who's music is available from other outlets. CD-Baby and Magnatune are just two examples.
I've been buying more music lately than any other time in my life. In the last twos weeks I've purchased: 2 CDs from CD Baby, three used CDs and 2 new albums that happen to come from Columbia Records (I hope Sony doesn't own them nowadays). I'm planning on purchasing two more from Magnatune tonight. My friends have more of their purchases going this way as well and I can tell you that plenty of my friends are buying lots of music.
Lets see, that means that only 22% of my music dollar is going to a major label and the rest of my Music dollar is probably not tracked by these statistics. I think the music industry is healthier than ever and by that I mean that the big companies are losing. I really hope the process accelerates.
My new-years wish is that in ten years we will regard the current music industry and their lobby with the same reaction as we currently have for McCarthyism.
Ok, so I bought more than 200 cd's from 95-98, then I was out of the country for 2 years, and ever since I've been back (5 years now) there hasn't been a single new group that has made me even think twice about purchasing their album. I remember in the 90's every other week there was a new group at number 1, and they actually made decent music... Now it seems like the latest winner on american idol stays at the top of the charts for 20 weeks, and its just horrid pop music, totally written and designed by music execs...
It's the same problem the movie industry had this year... Horrid content, no real suprise blockbusters, nothing to get excited about. Seems to me the *CONTENT* industries need to produce some *CONTENT* if they want to stay in business.
What is happening isn't new, when I was at college one kid would get a copy of a tape and we would use it as a master and by the end of the week everyone had a copy of the tape .
The same thing is happening now just with a different media format.
Personally I usually dont buy brand name CD's I prefer to go to watch some unknown artist and buy a CD of them. In many cases I get the CD signed and they are just home brew coppies in many cases with a printed cover, that one of there mates chucked together, some even dont have a printed cover.
Also you have to throw Podcasting into the mix, there is a finite time people have to listen to things and that incudes music, makes me wonder if the dropping sales isnt due to piracy but that people are listening to podcasts (like me) not music as much so they dont buy as many cd's or even mp3's in the case of iTunes.
1 Find gulible teenage band make them sign dodgy contract
2 Put music on 2c CD's
3 call everyone a theif before you sell the product for $20+
4 profit!!
Today's. 'Music'. Sucks.
The more the music industry/Hollywood(/any corporation really) loses money the more I rejoice. I hope they don't wake up to the fact that their insipid marketing and products are just that. Because I want to see them die.
I fully support independent artists who don't kow-tow, and will continue to do so. Rock on.
And you think the industry is going to provide this? Which one? The industry that locks performers into slave contracts early in their careers and exploits them for top profits which they would lose if they dump these lackluster bend over sammies for freshers faces? Or the industry that sues old grandmothers and 8 years old girls for sharing copies of parts of CDs that they bought with their allowances with close friends?
The best thing to happen to music is for the total public to totally boycot the present monopoly industry totally into chapter seven bankruptcy. Be like the Iranians....death to monopoly! Not buying is one decision we CAN make. Its even reasonable! WHY BUY JUNK FOR EXHORBITANT PRICES IN MONEY AND FREEDOM?
Nah, just lame that lobbyists for the music industry got the law changed in 1997 to make such an action a criminal one. People who download music on P2P are more closely related to people who listen to music on the radio than they are to shoplifters. Try telling that to lawmakers who steal regularly from the public domain on behalf of the music cartels though.
I'd like to think that the internet has increased people's awareness of indie label groups through word of mouth and a more visible presense. The net helps level the playing field for artists and blogs (at least at first) tended to be written by more "hip", "cutting edge" and other social fringe type people.
Where would DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" be without the internet? Probably no where close to as big as it got. Look at what he's doing now, he released "Dangerdoom" with MF Doom, sponsored by Adult Swim... that music was considered "backpacker hiphop" before... music for music nerds. The DIY ethic that was so prevailant in the punk rock community of the 80s hsa converged with the "hustle" ethic of the hiphop world and is only growing and spreading with the tools technology.
Hell, I taught my friend to mix w/ a cheap audio mixer, record to his celeron 333mhz and mixdown/master. I moved away and two years later he showed up at my house with copies of his new vinyl pressing which he got into local records werever he went and onto internet distro. (A great site full of indie artists is http://www.truehiphop.com/
I'm sure the rise of the superstar DJ has helped non-major label sales as well... a lot of DJ tracks are on small labels (a lot of the remixes are vinyl only). Labels like Naked Music, K7, Om Records, Thermal Recordings, Siesta, Panhandle, Saddle Creek, Zen, Ninja Tune & Anticon have blown up. The whole electroclash fad of the last few years is totally off the radar of the majors. There are many successful nightclubs DJs out there that only dip into pop chart tunes if the music is actually good. If the RIAA wants to maintain control of the industry they better start taking over nightclubs and dictating playlists there.
It appears to me that taste is broadening and while sugar coated formulas might still make you rich, but people are noticing other choices. Even the youngsters are harder to brainwash.
OMFG! I think the music lovers are winning!
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Contemporary music is in the middle of tumultuous upheaval. Not only have distribution techniques changed (radically), the model of how music is produced has been changing over the past decade.
If you throw the technical changes and the generational turnover of the listeners into a mix with cyclical music quality, you get fairly distasteful soup. Throughout my life, music has had cycles of "good music" and "bad music." We're in a down cycle right now... originality and freshness is not the norm in today's music. One must be very selective if one wants to find "good music" at this point in time.
I believe that the music industry will eventually adapt and evolve to match the needs of current and future listeners. I also believe that the quality and freshness of contemporary music will take a large upswing in the very near future.
I think it is very important to remain focused on the difference between the music industry and musicians and their music . They are not synonymous in any way. The first one is a distribution and promotion model, the latter is the creative and the creative product.
A Passionate Independent Musician
pretty accurately in their attempts to kill it. This latest faux paux of Sony/BMG is just the icing on the cake.
I mean, has no one made note that the decline in sales is partially the result of the dissappearance of the CD logo from the label, a logo that Phillips owns? You see, savvy buyers often look at the packaging, and if that logo isn't on it, its got some sort of copy protection on it that may not be good and healthy for your hardware with the Mac cd drive being one of the more famous oopses.
And have you noticed that despite the claims to the contrary, as in "we're replacing all those disks", the exact same infected disks are still for sale at WallyWorld this instant, and the sales clerks aka shoplifter observers on the floor in the music dept have no knowledge of the controversy surrounding Sony/BMG stuff. None, nada, zip, and haven't got 50 cents to call somebody who might care. Its all a big shrug to them.
So the standard mantra is still being chanted for all the legal people that pass our laws to absorb as gospel "Sales are in the toilet so it must be piracy, please pass even more restrictive laws to protect our jurassic business model."
I looked at quite a few Christmas music cd's at Krogers today, and not one of them had the CD logo. They all went back neatly into the cardboard display as I wasn't about to take a chance that one of them might re-program the flash in my player and make a 90 dollar dvd burner into a brick to be thrown out.
It all boils down to the sales loss being a direct result of enough folks looking for that logo, guaranteeing its a fully standard stereo audio cd with no fancy hidden programs on it, to make a visible difference in the sales volume. IMO, piracy has so little to do with it that its not a measurable statistic, its been going on for 65 years that I know of, back when someone would buy the record, and carefully transcribe the words and music and make copies on the school mimeo for all their friends. Once my older cousin even called the radio station and asked them to play it about hourly so she could write down what she heard. She didn't tell them that though of course. That is how piracy was done then, todays duping of the cd for your friends may be easier, but I have serious doubts the actual count of copies passed around in terms of the % of sales lost is a hell of a lot different now than it was then.
To Sony/BMG et all: Give us back the CD logo, and watch sales climb back out of the sewer. Provided the music itself can get out of the sewer that is, we aren't buying excrementy music, and there is plenty of that on the shelves today.
--
Cheers, Gene
If you want to get in on the ground floor with some inventive new music makers, I'd highly recommend going to www.icompositions.com or even www.garageband.com for free music that is frankly, much more interesting than the current charts. I prefer iCompositions because it is a bit more experimental and collaborative in nature.
---- I have nothing more to add.
That may be what you do, but I prefer to not possess materials from the RIAA. Granted, I consider it less evil to illegally copy RIAA supporting material than to give them money, I still consider that violating the law in this manner:
a) gives aid and comfort to the enemy, and
b) exposes one to a level of risk that the quality of the merchandise doesn't warrant.
OTOH, I've still got the collection of CDs I bought several years ago. I just find that now I rarely choose to listen to them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I wasn't even trolling you; I may have criticized your taste in music, but believe me, you would get eaten alive in the wrong scene. Grow some thicker skin and take a chance with something other than the Hot AC you currently favor; believe me, and since you read my recent posts, you know what I'm talking about, there are much weighter things in the world to cry about.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
I've deliberately decreased my purchases of CD's for a couple of reassons:
1. Copy protection. I will not buy a copy-protected CD. If they all become copy protected, then I will never buy another one.
2. The highway robber attitude espoused by most representatives of the major recording labels. The more I hear them natter on, the angrier I get and the more tighly closed I keep my wallet.
I used to spend upwards of $1200 a year on music. That had nose-dived to about $400 this past year, mostly because of the two reasons stated above.
Also, I look at who the label is: if I see Warner, Sony, Columbia, or any of the other Big Labels, I boycott them. I don't need their products to make my life more bearable. I either buy directly from the artist, or from small labels that don't treat their customers like thieves.
gave me cirrhosis of the eye. If people were buying Kool Keith instead of Young Wizzle Pizzle and actually enjoying their music for a longer period that the gap between album releases by a given artist CD sales would skyrocket. As it is now, people are only buying what is popular and (hopefully) becoming disillusioned as you said. Fuck it he's dead.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Thank you, I appreciate it. I'll be sure to check some of these artists out.
I got email from apple pointing me to a survey about where the music on my computer came from.
A *huge* part of that was from individual artists websites, and none of the categories they listed covered that option.
booh-fscking-hooh?
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
I don't know about anybody else, but right now there's not much out there I want to buy. Traditionally, I buy CDs, as I'm too lazy to download. But since the Sony debacle, I haven't purchased anything from anybody, including downloads. Poor products + invasive DRM = poor sales. I've taken to listening to FM again. If they are going to be that protective, and if I can't own the music I play, then I'm not going to buy it, period. They can't blame this slump on piracy, as that has gone down, at the same time as sales. -Dixon (Bite me, Sony, you owe me a new PC)
CadWizard
Talk about your garbage! No Earth Wind and Fire, no Dire Straits, no Stevie Wonder, no Yes--no wonder they're not selling...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
These were non-bonus tracks that were missing-- tracks from the middle that were even on the vinyl version (yes, I still own vinyl records and a turntable, too).