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CD Music Sales Down 20% In Q1 2007
prostoalex writes "Music sales are not just falling, they're plummeting — by as much as 20% when you compare January-March 2007 with the 2006 numbers. The revenue numbers are actually worse, since CD prices are under pressure. The Wall Street Journal lists many factors contributing to the rapid decline: 800 fewer retail outlets (Tower Records' demise alone closed 89); increasingly negative attitude towards CD sales from big-box retailers (Best Buy now dedicates less floor space to CDs in favor of better-selling items); and file sharing, among others. Songs are being traded at a rate about 17 times the iTunes Store's recent rate of sales. Diminishing CD sales means that you don't have to sell as many to get on the charts. The 'Dreamgirls' movie soundtrack recently hit #1 by selling 60,000 CDs in a week, a number that wouldn't have made the top 30 in 2005."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227533&cid=184 33111
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
"You're not entitled to my money" is that lesson.
I have nothing to say.
It would be nice to know that all ??AA content was moving 20% less of their volume, including the P2P stuff. How is the indie movement going? Are their numbers up? Let's hope so. Give the artist less incentive to join up with the RIAA and their types.
What?
Only recording artists will be hurt over the long run. Those who are willing to sing for their dinner will do well.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
that for the most part, purely digital formats are much easier to acquire and can be done so (almost) on demand, is this really unexpected? CD sales are (probably) going down at about the same rate that digital sales are going up.
The original generic sig.
I wonder a bit about iTunes vs. peer-to-peer metrics. On iTunes one is liable to buy a single track or two whereas on file sharing services downloading the album is usually the only choice (even if you only want one track). This alone would account for some of why file sharing is so much more voluminous.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
This may have something to do with the garbage that the record industry keeps churning out. Seriously, the Dreamgirls soundtrack was #1? What does that tell you?
It may also have something to do with a downturn in the economy, uncertainty about the future, record levels of consumer debt, and energy prices that take up an ever-increasing share of people's budgets.
But, certainly, above all these factors, it must be the file sharing!!!
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Artists have to be talented AND tour to make money, people not billboard charts determine whats popular ?
Whatever is the world coming to?
I'm having some problems with the math, however. If 60,000 cd's gets you #1, but would not have been on the charts in 2005, doesn't this indicate that the drop percentage is quite a bit higher than 20%? I know just one CD is not nearly a good enough sampling to determine this, but the math seemed odd enough to mention given the 2005 reference. TFA did mention Tower (and others) closing up which could account for that difference.
I could be wrong however, it just looks off no matter how much I chew on it.
The other day, I was in a trendy clothing store. Embarrassment aside, I could not believe all of the innovative music that they were playing. There was one particular track that I wanted to buy so I queried the sales folk as to the artist name and title. They had no idea and were not provided with any resource to fine out.
But that got me thinking: The ClearChannel monopoly on our radio stations is the source of this problem. They "pay to play" the same 40 songs all day.
I remember back in the early 90s when the FCC allowed this sort of thing (it was previously not legal for a single company to own more than a certain amount of radio stations in a given market... I don't know the exact detail but I remember the discussion). I look back on the variety of music from pre-monopolization and it really illustrates the difference.
But they can always blame the pirates.
More
The idea of buying an entire CD for one song on the radio has gone out of fashion. People now realize that one popular song can be found on iTunes, obviating the need for buying 12 to 15 other, useless tracks. If this fact alone doesn't account for 20% plummeting in CD sales, I would be surprised.
Guess what.
Asia still has a thriving music industry.
They just have to make their money differently.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Songs are being traded at a rate about 17 times the iTunes Store's recent rate of sales.
According to the article, this information is provided by BigChampagne LLC. According to their website blurb at http://www.bigchampagne.com/thedata.html ;
"Like it or not, the vast majority of online entertainment media is now acquired for free on P2P file sharing networks, and BigChampagne is there."
Cue lots of rubbish about network operation centres and live feed monitoring. Anyone want to throw out ideas about how they really monitor this stuff? Is there a way of downloading torrents with a client and finding out exact data transfers automatically?
And the fact that Q1 of 2007 has had virtually no decent new music released couldn't have anything to do with it?
This is a time when the R&B era is over and Hip-hop is on the decline. Traditional Pop music seems to have all but vanished, rock music has never recovered since the 90's and Punk for several years has been hit & miss.
Is anyone surprised people are buying less music?
Na na Na na...
Hey hey...
Goodbye!
I figured a song was in order. =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Perhaps this had an effect?
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
They cost half buying them new, and I can find out of print stuff.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
CDs are the only way to get some of the music, legally, DRM free. Not that much of it is worth buying these days.
Best Slashdot Co
Basically it boils down to kids only having a limited amount of money buying other products which are cheaper. Video games, cell phones, and consoles are becoming cheaper yet cds are remaining expensive. Add to deteriorating job market and higher fuel costs which hurt teenage consumers the most, and you will find they would rather spend money on other items.
THe music companies have their price point figures off with supply and demand and should lower their prices like the game makers and cell phone companies are doing.
http://saveie6.com/
Once you know the name of a good filesharing program (utorrent / transmission) and a good torrent site (isohunt / piratebay), downloading music is stupidly easy. Getting the discography of a moderately popular artist takes a day or two; getting an album (even at high bitrates) can take less time than it would take to listen to it. Why the hell should anyone pay for music?
I've given up on CD's. The sound quality is ho-hum. I'm only buying Vinyl these days. If I can't find it in Vinyl, I'll look for SACD or DVD-A.
Otherwise it's Rhapsody for me.
we could say it was the music buying populace engaging in a measured boycott of the industry fronted by the thugs at the RIAA, but sadly, I don't think that's it. And I can't even say that it's because popular music (you know, the kind that climbs the charts) sucks, because it has sucked for 20 years or more (I blame The Cherry Hill Gang). I know why I so rarely buy CDs anymore (there's little I like, and Pandora hasn't catalgued bands I do like yet), but I am considered a social deviant so I don't ascribe such simple and straightforward motives to the mass of the music buying populace.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Do they ever consider that the music is just crappy these days?
I have admittedly narrow tastes in music. As one of my friends pointed out I only like bands that released stuff between the years of 1994 and 2000, with a couple of exceptions.
So the part of the reason sales are down is because I haven't heard anything I wanted to buy in years.
Question everything
Lets say for second that this happens, that there is no conceivable way to SELL music anymore.
Does this mean that people will completely stop writing music, or does this mean that we might actually see some REAL music start to show up again instead of the "focus-group" marketed crap that the industry has been force feeding us.
Consumers don't want to fund your lawsuits. Here are some things that the music industry may want to consider if it is to gain its customer base back:
1. Stop suing your customers. Clearly it's not scaring people out of music piracy, but it's definitely pissing people off.
2. Get rid of the DRM. You're just punishing your legitimate customers. Oh, that's right, if you sell music without DRM, people might pirate it. Because nobody pirates music now.
3. People understand economics better than you give them credit for. Given extra middle-men and the cost of production and shelf space, the per-unit cost of a CD is probably fairly high. On the other hand, it costs very little to send a copy of a song over the internet. People know this, and they know the dollar per song price point is high. Lower it. Hell, try cutting it to 25 cents, and you may find that you sell more than four times as many songs. Call it a promotion and see how it works out for you.
Music is one of those things that you just don't need a brick-and-mortar shop to sell, or even a physical item. I'm sure the established industry will do everything it can to blame illegal file sharing for this trend, but that is only a vain attempt to prop up a dead business and keep a whole lot of useless people employed collecting big paychecks.
The simple fact: Their business model is obsolete. I would even go so far to say that the recording industry as a whole is obsolete now that the people who actually make the music have to power to self-publish and self-promote to the entire world.
=Smidge=
The kneejerk response is going to be, "OMG teh piracy!!!"
Eventually the RIAA is going to have to accept that, whether they're ready for it or not, CDs are an outdated distribution format, just like cassettes and 8-tracks, whose sales, I'm sure, have also plummeted since their respective heydays.
I got it directly from the artist's web site, and I paid them directly using PayPal. Was that counted for these statistics?
To give the artist even more credit, they put their *entire album* on their website inside a Flash player so I couldn't have downloaded it, but I suppose I could have hijacked the audio from my web browser. I bought the album because it's damn good, and I wanted to support the artist, and - of course - I wanted to be able to play the tracks in any order and on my iPod.
Kudos to the band Winterpills for showing just how to sell a damn album!
.
-- thinkyhead software and media
There are just too many reasons why the CD sales are falling. Here are some of them: .....
* Digital music sales
* Satellite radio
* Music channels on Cable TV
* CD's last forever or can be archived on computer and once the media goes bad, you can burn again. This means no more replacement sales. In olden days people used to buy same album again because the media didn't last forever.
* Lots of DVD/Computer/Games. People are spending their free times on these items instead of listening CD
* You only need one CD for the entire family. Earlier, I used to buy multiple copies of same albums (for car, house, office etc). Not anymore.
* Just a seasonal fluctuation with not too much of great music release.
tag this haha
Sophisticated Music aficionados prefer the warm sound of a vinyl record played through a tube amplifier.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Maybe its not just me, maybe music is getting worse. Maybe Im getting old.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
This I believe to be a universal truth.
Perhaps the music industry needs to learn to live with it as the rest of us do.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
I would be surprised if most of the music that is stll being bought is old music: Beetles, etc.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
This makes me really happy. It's pretty clear that the traditional record company business model is on the way out, their final whimperings and thrashings notwithstanding. I don't care what they try to do DRM-wise, because someone smarter than they are will probably break it. Most of you are worried, rightly, about their legislative influence - but this will start eroding rapidly once they are unable to afford the lobbyists. In sum, to the record companies, FUCK YOU - I don't need you.
I posted a link to this article in an IRC channel, and this short conversation resulted:
:-)
[ShadowJK] TheSHAD0W, when they say "CD", do they mean proper CD, or the crippled variant that wont play in certain playeers...
[kjetilho] at least in Europe, they've given up on copy control on CDs
[kjetilho] even EMI
[ShadowJK] I wouldn't know, the last time I purchased a music disc it was crippled CD and wouldn't play
Sounds like there are even more ways the recording industry has been shooting itself in the foot.
And until I'm offered lossless, DRM-free downloads of the music I want to buy I'll continue. If CDs vanish, vinyl would be my next choice of format.
Also downloads don't have the manufacturing, packaging or distribution costs of a CD and that means I expect to pay less, less than iTunes charge here in the UK.
Oh yeah, they don't square up. Guess some people have been making stuff up they know nothing about in order to justify their own actions.
One of the factors TFA skips over is that there are a tremendous number of high-quality songs available legally, for free. There is so much talent out there that would never be heard under the old label-production-distribution model. The average Joe can now write some great stuff in his bedroom using just his PC and get worldwide publishing overnight, for free. My favorite example of this is Amie Street, where songs start out free, and ones that get popular rise in price until they reach a maximum of 98 cents.
...let's see the real dollar figures. If you're raking in several billion to begin with, a 50% drop is still a couple billion.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
there's an effort to make an independent artist #1 on iTunes today
y Id=6645723
http://bumrushthecharts.blogspot.com/
(dunno if it's a scam or not, but it's an interesting idea)
also, there was an interesting story on NPR a while back about recording technology, including some mention of the fact that some people were upset when it came along and changed the way people experienced music (from gathering around and playing/singing to just listening). Music will always be around. The Recording Industry won't.
The Roots of Audio Recordings Turn at 78 RPM by Susan Stamberg
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=1019
Of course, that was before the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, etc.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Gee you sue your customer base, "liscense" a product that Joe Manguy can't figure out how to use due to DRM and wonder why you don't make any money. I just don't understand how pissing off and confusing your customers to the point of forcing piracy does not a good business model make.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Well I wouldn't say that. That is just Old Fogy Talk. Most people when they get over 20 years old normally have their preferred style of music fixed and the new stuff just isn't as good as the old stuff. Talk to your Parents or Grand Parents and they would say Music Topped during the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. But what I would put more faith in is the fact that people have a much wider selection of music to listen to now, and with the Internet it makes it easy for them to explore these different types and with MP3 Players like the iPod it allows them to listen to the music without people judging your music preference. This type of stuff hurts the Music Biz. First people are buying less demand music, which are sold for cheaper and less profit margins. Many of the music styles may not be American so they are buying music from non-American sources, third the internet may be the only way to get and play their music.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I haven't seen anyone mention this one yet: the music industry burns out their few talented people very quickly. Fame, drugs, parties, hip-hop shootings, paparazzi. I'm sure a lot of very talented people just don't want to deal with the problems that come with fame, and record companies really don't make any effort to protect their cash cows...any publicity is good publicity to them.
Could you imagine if Fleetwood Mac were still together? Sure, they wouldn't be cranking out "Rumours" level success every year, but it would be a solid addition to the record company's catalog. What if Jimi Hendrix were still around? Or John Lennon? I'm not saying it's always the cocaine or anything, but fame is dangerous not just to the performers, but to record company profits down the road, and that's where the record companies went wrong, in their own metric.
This is indicative of nothing. There are so many different aspects to CD/music sales and values that focusing on CD sales is somewhat ludicrous.
... ever think that maybe your market had reached its saturation point, Steve? In fact, did anyone stop to think that maybe the music market itself has reached a saturation point where the majority of people who wanted to get CDs of older albums has done so?
In my personal opinion, modern, mainstream music sucks for the most part. I've been purchasing more independent music than ever before. Are independent labels included in these numbers? I download very little in way of illicit means. I like my CDs and I have no problems buying CDs, but most of the music out there from the major labels simply doesn't interest me any more. Why is the author not taking into account the "cookie cutter" mentality that dominates a lot of the mainstream music scene?
I'm sure that there are other reasons that are not due to illegal means. It could be something like how Steve Miller was bitching about how his CD was on the top of the charts for years and years then suddenly plummeted. Uh
And with more and more people learning about (and despising) DRM-laden, digital music, I'm not shocked at all to learn that on-line stores like iTunes are not offsetting CD sales drops. I refuse to buy music with any kind of DRM out of principle (yes, I know about analog loopback to strip off the DRM), but stores like eMusic and Magnatune don't have the artists that I'd like. If iTunes dropped the DRM, I'd buy a ton of songs from them, and I think that a lot of people have the same mentality.
Oh, well. I guess it doesn't matter. If we're not following the greed-laden will of the record industry, we're automatically pirates no matter what we say or do, aren't we?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
...when the compact disc (CD) arrived.
This is no different than the other evolutions of music distribution.
GET WITH THE PROGRAM, RIAA, or die a shameful, greedy death.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It all depends on what program you use. 'torrents make it harder (but not impossible) to get just that one track, but then the whole album might even be stored in a RAR or ZIP. More likely, since it's free, why not get the whole thing to see if there's other songs you like or, hell, why not any other albums by that artist?
A common defense of piracy is: "music is terrible today, look at the Beyoncé album, etc etc so therefore its their own fault"
Well I have news for you - old classic award winning albums are pirated too. Also, there's a psychological principle from Cialdini: that in any market, people value what they worked to get. If it was free they'll take it for granted or certainly value it much less. Performances of works by Beethoven, Mozart, et al are pirated like crazy. If their music is "terrible enough to pirate", then does anybody have a chance at selling anything without mass piracy?
Another fallacious, illogical (and stupid) argument is the "I pirated X album and then went out and bought their entire back catalogue I liked it so much, therefore piracy is making them more money". Questions to ask these people are: Have you done the same with other works you pirated yet enjoyed? Do you only buy stuff you really really liked? What about stuff you pirated and listen to occassionally but are not interested in buying the authors other works? Do you honestly believe that enough people who pirated an album and enjoyed will then buy from the artist to an extent that makes up for their piracy? If so, do you have a fully functioning brain? If so, do you know how to read? If so, go read a primer on basic human psychology.
The sooner the industry fails,the sooner music is back in our hands.
Music was here before the industry,it will be here afterwards.
What will change is;musicians will have a level playing field to promote themselves.
Listeners will not have talent arbitrarily selected for them by criteria of easy bulk promotion techniques.Instead we will get to decide what is good for ourselves.
Money will likely go directly to the musician for performance rather than royalty.
Open music and GNU like licensing will likely be the order of the day.
Internet radio will thrive.
Lets all do our part and quit giving the middleman money in exchange for continued abuse.
Just let it die.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The summary trusts that the calculations are reliable.
1. Entertainment conglomerates can advance their story that piracy is out of control. Has the method they used changed recently? Did the apply the changes retroactively?
It's clear I don't trust them, so throw that one out.
2. It all depends on how you slice your stats.
Anecdote: The old "Mac's tiny market share" argument is one of those damn lies. I don't know what the numbers look like now, but a few years ago Apple was the number one laptop brand in the U.S. and consistently number 3-5 in desktop sales behind Dell and HP. So, they sold the most laptops year-by-year and did an excellent job in desktops and yet, this is spun into a "tiny" market share. Some people on Wall Street came to a similar conclusion before the iPod came along, so I'm not whistling Dixie.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
When people get over the idea that giving someone a physical object as a gift is important, then they'll really be in trouble.
Though on the other hand, if physical objects like CDs start seeming like overpriced gimcrack pieces of plastic, they're not going to seem much like "gifts" any more, either.
I guess they would be able to discern the causes from the consequences... But it's the RIAA.
Hint to the mafiaa: Stores try to push people (any/only) stuf that they belive will sell.
Rethinking email
Digital music sales are through the roof, and the used CD market is healthy. THe only big album in the last 6 mos were Cristina Aguilar and Justin Timberlake
Focusing on one type of sale does not represent the entire industry.
Somehow I don't think DJLithium's or Armin Van Buren's or Paul Van Dyk's figures are factored into those. What are they actually tracking? Unit sellthrough on CD albums? Revenue stream from CD albums? iTunes sales? Royalty payments to ASCAP/BMI? The question to ask is, "20 percent of what exactly?"
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
today's music sucks.
It has nothing to do with file sharing, nor a cannibalization of CD sales due to online MP3s.
today's music sucks.
The recording industry has lost their control of our consumption. No longer are we beholden to a few radio stations and their payola schemes. No longer do we have to buy the album with 12 crap songs to get the one good tune. No longer are we stuck with the manufactured crap that the music industry pushes.
today's music sucks.
And, if I wasn't clear enough, today's music sucks. Rap/hiphop or whatever that pukem is called hasn't died yet?
10 MD
That's what you get for extorting and suing your customers. Think they won't vote with their feet?
That is illogical. Suing is the answer. Humans must be sued. They must pay their fines.
You are mistaken. Prosecuting is the answer. Humans must be prosecuted. They must pay their fines.
Suing is the answer.
Prosecuting is the answer.
I have sued many humans.
I have prosecuted many more.
Music profits are protected.
Humans have paid their fines.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Being a reforming pirate (mainly because the music I usually listen to is usually not available locally on any media) I recently purchased a cd (Iron Maiden to be specific). I was excited to play my new, old music and I went to play it in my car and nothing came out. I tried it in 2 players at home and a computer, nothing worked. Rather than go to the trouble to figure out what the hell was wrong with my 'legit' music I decided that I owned it and I have the right to listen to it, so I downloaded it. If the recording industry wants us to buy their product they should have some QC and make their product usable by not having DRM (not that it was my issue). I know that it may have been a freak occurance of a faulty disk (I have not bought a Cd in a long time) but its not worth the effort if they do not care about my rights.
good
fucking
riddance
we don't need you anymore. gutenberg's little press meant that the poor folks could now read. the king had to make room for a middle class. the internet means that the artists can self publish, and the consumer can find them. all without little old you
doesn't sound fair? ask the aztec or incan empires if technological progress was fair. cortez and pizarro have just landed on your foreheads, bitches, and their little boats are called the nina, the pinta, and the santa obsolescence. time to die, dinosaurs
signed,
anyone who listens to music
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I haven't bought any new music in a while, simply because there's nothing out there thats caught my attention. I'm not going to buy music for the sake of buying music, I just want something that I'm going to enjoy listening to. Add that to the fact that its so hard to sample music because the RIAA is so terrified of copying. I was just online looking for samples of recent music, and finding something other than uselessly short clips was like pulling teeth. I could just download the CD to sample it, but then I might get sued. So I end up going with the status quo.
Speaking of which, I'd appreciate recommendations on good music. I'm looking to expand my musical horizons.
Digital album sales are strong
o unting-for-the-big-plunge-in-music-sales-the-digit al-singles-effect.html
"Last year the industry saw about $2 billion in revenues from online music sales, and nearly $800 million of that stemmed from single-track sales, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's report. That leads me to estimate that at least 40 percent of sales are singles, which means that this quarter we could see something in the range of 70 million "singles" sold digitally.
The question is: how often does a consumer opt to buy just one or two songs off an album rather than buy the whole thing? This phenomenon must affect the top of the music charts quite viciously. I know I'm reluctant to buy an album, especially anything approaching a "hit album," unless I know that there's more than 2 to 3 songs on it that I like. Otherwise, I don't want to take the "risk."
But to answer the question of how often, let's just estimate based on what limited information we have. Given the estimate of 70 million digital singles, we could say that the ratio between consumers buying digital songs and entire CDs is approximately 1:1.22. That's quite a leveling. If my estimates have been conservative, the balance may be tipped even more in favor of digital singles."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070321-acc
By all means refer to recent music by (predominantly) black artists as MOBO (Music Of Black Origin) or some other unique name but please DO NOT hijack the name "R&B" (Rhythm and Blues) when describing that kind of music alone. The term "Rhythm and Blues" encompasses a very wide range of music, from the likes of Atlantic Soul music from Otis Redding through blues music like John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, etc. and was in use many years before being used as a category for modern mainly-black music.
Hip-hop is on the decline
And who's loss is that? All it did was take pieces from earlier songs, tear them apart and have some bloke talking over it.
rock music has never recovered since the 90's
A true rock music fan has more than enough material to last him a lifetime anyway. But as someone traditionally into the likes of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, not only are a lot of my heroes still wheeling themselves out on stage, I also have some good newer bands like Radiohead, Oasis, Kasabian, etc. that I can give a spin. I've been a rock fan (as well as some blues, soul and classical) for 35 years now and I'm still finding new and interesting stuff all of the time, stuff I missed from the early 70s through to new music today.
The whole "rock is dead" thing is a myth - it just never needed to be particularly cool and fashionable and just got on with it...
Is anyone surprised people are buying less music?
I'm actually buying less because I'm enjoying music more. I no longer buy CDs that just turn out to have one good song on them - I read reviews and download it from Usenet or BitTorrent first. If it's good, I buy it (I genuinely have about 1000 legally bought CDs) and if it's crap I delete it.
And I definitely don't buy from rip-off high street shops any more - much rather new or used online.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...but they help us too. For instance, I am a professional pirate, and my business faces ruin. I don't mean that I have an eyepatch and cutlass and go around robbing ships. I mean I have an eyepatch and cutlass and go around robbing record stores. My trade has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I inherited the title about 12 years ago from the Dread Pirate R0b3rtz. It was one of those practices that struck without warning, carried away as many CDs as possible, then scuttled the small, independent record stores as we left. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My practice specialised in aquiring family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't steal sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have stolen one of the most extensive Christian rock catalogues that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my illegal fencing operation, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on even more cutthroat and ruthless employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable pirate fleet that I had built with my own hands. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer of my stolen songs can be played. Why can no one play them? Do their players use proprietary formats? Are they not technologically inclined? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - the RIAA is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three song files world wide is encrypted with DRM. On the Internet, you can hardly find any music that hasn't been locked down by the RIAA. It has the potential to destroy the piracy industry, from buccaneers, to swashbucklers, to Dread Pirates like myself. Before you point to the supposed "social conscience of consumers", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is getting robbed daily. Unlike music files, it's harder to apply DRM to books.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with record industry executives gave me an idea. In my favorite bordello, I overheard a slick, ponytailed record executive talking to his rockstar friend.
"Babe, I'm going to lock down your music so hard that if you play it with your windows down, you'll be able to sue the pedestrians."
"Gnarly, man. I'm going to be coked up in the VIP room for life!"
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy record piracy from right under my nose? Fat chance. I grabbed the little ponytailed, bluetooth-wearing flake by his shirt. "Arrr...you're going to lock down the piracy industry, eh?" I asked him in my best Blackbeard/Erik The Viking voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You shall bear the mark of the Black Dot. Now take yourself and your greasy toothpick of a friend out of my bordello - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - give RIAA executives the Black Dot. If somebody cannot respect the superiority of pirates, then they shall die by my cutlass. If the music industry wants to exclude pirates, then pirates should keel-haul them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - one instance of DRM, and it's off the plank with you. If you want to play tough, you should expect the big dogs to take notice. It's really no different than the ATF setting Branch Davidians on fire.
I have just written a letter to the pirates guild outlining my proposal. Impaling RIAA executives one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention record executives use the fact that they're being drawn and quartered to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of record executives would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected record
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Music sales aren't down. What's down is CD sales by the "big four". The indies are doing well; my buddies in Posamist and The Station (and Inspected By Twelve, who don't have a web presence) who sell CDs at their shows are selling quite a few CDs at each show.
I bought my latest Little Feat CD at their (alas, rained out) show at the State Fair a couple of years ago.
It's telling what the WSJ doesn't attribute their decline on: DRM, rootkits (Sony must DIE!!!!!), the attitude that their paying customers (formerly ME) are theives, the boycott that has been ongoing since 2001, the fact that there is afaik only one true major-label rock and roll band since the century started (Buckcherry), the fact that country music now has violins rather than fiddles (As Mojo Nixon put it in Let's Go Burn Old Nashville Down, "country ain't got flutes!"), the fact that Wierd Al parodies sound better than the songs they make fun of, insipid Simon Cowell-type production on every God damned song, the list is endless.
The reasons they put forth are but a tiny bit of the decline.
The article is clueless all around; for example, they attribute the reduction in CD sales at WalMart from reduced shelf space, when in fact the reduced shelf space comes from the fact they're not selling as many CDs there (partly because WalMart sells crippled, censored versions).
-mcgrew ("three eyes")
PS- support your local bands!
Yaaaaaaaay!
I am officially gone from
I've actually been buying more music. In fact, looking at my ever-growing CD collection, my music purchases (in physical CD format no less,) have been going up yearly. Of course, my purchases don't count in any of the statistics companies like to throw around. I don't purchase from any RIAA labels at all (I could stand tall and say it's a political statement - but really, it's a matter of taste, since they churn out little but shit,) and the label I do purchase the majority of my music from (Metropolis Records,) doesn't get much, if any, shelf space in stores, so virtually all of my CD orders are direct from their online shop. In fact, Front Line Assembly, :wumpscut:, VNV Nation and Assemblage 23 all have new releases coming out in the next month. Like always, I'll wind up giving them a listen to on Napster, and then hopping over to Metro's online store and purchasing the actual CDs.
How about
1. Everybody over 20 has now finished replacing their vinyl and cassettes with CDs
2. The only records you get to hear about are the handful of rubbish on the radio playlists that you're already sick of.
3. Under 20s are now pissing their money away:
PS: Kids! Get off my lawn!!!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It almost seems like the two biggest free ad networks that they had in the past 20 years have stopped working for them, MTV (which needs to drop the M for something more accurate) and P2P. Maybe the RIAA needs to start an Internet video network to advertise their artists with music videos to improve sales. When I was in college, I would watch MTV 10 hours a week, and I had a decent idea who artists were, now I have no idea. I never went to a concert, and never bought more than 3 dozen CDs, but I imagine people that do spend money on music feel a similar apathy.
;) It's crazy that A-list actors make more money making one movie than 90% of us will make in our whole life. If movie companies would spend less on actors, they would have a lot more money to spend making more movies.
Further, if they want me to pay for anything they're selling, they can start acting like the proverbial mom-and-pop running their store who are happy to have my business instead of the offended matre'd at the country club who wants to keep out the riffraff.
Of course, the real problem is copyright. Sure we don't like DRM, but if copyright limits were much more reasonable, we wouldn't be having this problem. Current artists would have to produce something better than what was being produced 20 years ago, otherwise, Google, Yahoo, AOL, or XYZ Music Distributors could offer low-cost-DRM-free media from 20 years ago as an competitor to the stuff that's available today. Media companies would then have to try to find fresher IP than Star Trek "Every clip ever aired" DVD collection (only $3000!!!), Survivor Season 99, or Yet Another Hackfest Movie, or Rehash Mashup Remade from Last Year Song by "Diva you don't want to stand within 100 feet of for fear of catching an airborne STD".
Yeah, because we all know, that all the old music (previous recorded) is just going to suddenly disappear...
Well there havent been any good cd's for me to buy. The only one that ibought was daulghtry 9i think i spelled his name wrong).
Since when did being a musician mean that you should automatically become a bazillionare?
Perhaps the music industry should just give up on selling cd's, allow free download of music, and resort to making money from product placement. We could have lyrics such as the following: I love you baby, like Pepsi. Won't you let me take you to dinner at Micky Dee's. Then we can cruise to my crib in my car, Chevy---it is the heartbeat of America. Tonight is going to be hot cuz I took my Levitra.
And before anyone goes off to say "OMG LOOKS AT WHAT P1RACY DOEZ TO UZZ!!shiftone"
Keep in mind a lot of music sales are taking place online. Itunes and what not.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
The Arcade Fire's album "Neon Bible" was the #1 selling album on iTunes last week, so an independent artist has already been #1 on iTunes. //also, this week, "Neon Bible" is #8, and #1 is the new Modest Mouse album - they were once independent, too.
Wow! I didn't realize that iTunes was selling that much.
More seriously, these press releases always blame filesharing. It's a boilerplate complaint every time CD sales go down. In fact, it would be Man-bites-Dog news to read, CD sales rise while filesharing rates decline.
What I think is happening is that there is a more informed consumer that doesn't buy the record industry's garbage any longer. Ever bought a CD that had only one track worth listening to? I have -- more than once. Or bought a song you only cared to listen to a dozen times, but you bought it anyway? I have -- more than once. How about a song you wouldn't have bought at all if you'd listened to it first?
The record industry used to sell you a take-it-or-leave-it bundle of songs at a price of their choosing. If it wasn't on an overpriced single (relative to the cost per song when bought by the album), you bought the whole album album. Consumer cassette recorders came along and mix tapes arrived soon after that. The record industry responded with the higher quality of the never-wears-out CD. It took 15 years for affordable CD burners and blank media to arrive before you could reproduce a CD containing only songs you wanted to hear. All this time the record industry was able to bundle in a bunch of B-sides or worse on your only other choice of albums.
Now, finally, consumers are thinking in terms of single tracks. Why? iTunes store sells them that way, iTunes on your computer rips CD's on a track basis, and iPods set playlists by track. The We'll-Decide-What's-Right-For-You albums are dead. The industry just doesn't know it yet. All its contracts with its artists are at the album level. The album will be completely dead when recording contracts specify a certain number of songs, rather than albums. And that's why sales are falling. Consumers want singles to mix and match as they please, and the became easily possible to get them for free via filesharing long before the record companies started selling them that way. The record companies are blind and stupid for not seeing, and reacting, to this when Napster first surfaced, and still haven't learned this lesson. As such, they are attempting to utilize fear (we'll sue you), guilt (think of the artists), the courts (we have sued you), and lawmakers (remember our senator from Disney?) to force you go consume your music their way -- which it not our way any longer.
They will lose, but do a lot of damage on the way down.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It took me until the grand old age of about 40 to realise that we British have three things to be very proud of:
1. The BBC - Dr Who and NO BLOODY ADVERTS!!!
2. Beer - our real ale is THE BEST BEER IN THE WORLD and the Germans/Belgians may know a thing or two about sausages/chocolate respectively but they're a poor second to good old British ale.
3. Music - The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Eric Clapton and Lieutenant Pigeon, to name but a few... Oh, and while we're on the subject, can our American friends please get Christine McVie to divorce Mr McVie, leave Fleetwood Mac and come back over here where she belongs as Christine Perfect alongside Stan "The Man" Webb in Chicken Shack.
Thanks for listening.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Has anyone looked at the crap that's been released between 1/1/07 and now?
I receive two different emails each week on what's being released for music and DVD. I have to say that I can easily see why sales are down 20%. There have been no HUGE releases so far this year. All the releases have been mediocre at best. I think I've bought 1 new release CD so far this year and it was on the VH-1 Classic label.
Oh and yes...they still need to realize that for the most part their product is just plain crap now. Big media companies need to get out of the music biz and fast. Then maybe, just maybe, we can return to the days when there was such a thing as "ARTIST DEVELOPMENT"!!! Good music will return as a result of this.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
Those that write songs but are not performers - where do they fit in your utopia of IP being worth zero?
There's plenty of music I'd like to own.
But I'm not interested in lossy digital formats, especially not at $1 a pop, and even more especially not locked into a proprietary format.
What I want is CD-quality audio that I can rip myself. I've stopped buying it though, because of the threat of copy protection. Even the possibility that a CD might be crippled just isn't worth the hassle. Plus it's just too expensive.
So I don't buy, though I used to.
I don't download, though I used to.
I don't share, though I used to.
See, I've discovered I can live without new music. That's what the RIAA taught me. And I found I'm just as happy, and I have more change in my pocket as a bonus. This is not a complaint, actually I should thank them.
So long RIAA. You no longer exist in my world.
If you can remember 5 words of the lyrics, go to Google and search on: "quoted words" +lyrics. You should get pretty much only the song you want with even that few a number of words, as well as a list of various artists who have covered it.
Of course, your next step is to try-before-you-buy, to find the version you enjoy most. One of the magic things of P2P was finding covers of songs you liked by artists you'd never realized had produced them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sign some artists who know how to play their instruments and can write interesting music and I will buy stuff from you. Otherwise, quit your bitching.
This is a time when the R&B era is over and Hip-hop is on the decline. Traditional Pop music seems to have all but vanished, rock music has never recovered since the 90's and Punk for several years has been hit & miss.
Bingo - this is the first decade where I'll argue we've not had any defining music genre. The 90's were filled with Glam Rock, Grunge, R&B, Hip-Hop and Rap. Music coming out in the 90's was brilliant and creative. Even the 80's had their share of stuff too like electronic music, 80's alternative, pop, and the birth of glam rock.
Early 2000's we saw Nu-Metal but that's about it that I can think of, and it really spilled over from the late 90's...
That said there's still some great music coming out nowadays but it seems more from Indie labels than from the majour record labels.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I Mod you SNOB -1.
Tell me about your Tube Amp, and I'll make it -2.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Also, even if overall music sales are down, it could also be because of the iTunes Music Store. We finally have a legal way to get a single tune from major artists instead of having to buy their whole albums.
Message to RIAA: don't be surprised that sales are down now that we have a way to only buy the music we want instead of crap-filled CDs for a single song or two. Just because your old ways aren't working doesn't mean they were good to begin with. "Power to the people" doesn't only apply in politics.
yes, actually CD sales are down %20 but overall total sales of music are up %19.
"INDUSTRY SALES MONITOR SOUNDSCAN OFFERS 2007 UPDATE:
And another very interesting industry update, this time on the sales front (US industry figures):
Nielsen SoundScan's 2007 At A Glance
In 2007, Nielsen SoundScan has tracked more individual music purchases than ever in its history (YTD). Overall Consumer Music Purchase Decisions are up 19% (including all Album & indidivual Digital Track sales).
Consumers have made more than 46 million additional music purchase decisions this year than last year.
- 288 million individual Digital Tracks vs. 242 million at this time last year.
- 99 million Albums vs. 119 million at the same time last year.
Overall Album purchases, including Track Equivalent Albums (total # of Digital track purchases divided by 10, in order to provide a like-for-like comparison with traditional Album purchases), are down 10% this year.
2007 118 million / 2006 131 million
Sales of physical CDs have decreased 20% over last year.
2007 89 million / 2006 112 million
CD sales account for 90% of Traditional Album sales (an Album purchased in its entirety, whether physical or digital).
Sales of Digital Albums have increased 100% over last year. Digital Album sales account for 10% of Traditional Album sales.
Sales of Individual Digital Tracks have increased 54% over last year."
http://www.melodicrock.com/
Maybe someone has been bootlegging houses.
This has nothing to do with all the pre-fab music being pushed by the record companies. All the cloned group.
There s no place on the radio for artists who have rights to their own music anymore.
All it is one hit wonders force fed to the masses. I have not purchased a CD in years. Recently I purchased the Rush R30 DvD (Awsome DvD).
Maybe i'm just old.
VHS tape sales down Q1 2007! CDs are old technology. They skip. Their expensive (still). People would rather make their own. I haven't found a CD in quite some time to listen all the way through. MP3s are in now. Their portable and don't skip and are cheap to buy online. Its not file sharing that is decreasing sales, its just the fact they are easier to pay 99 cents and download online versus going to a store. Finding the CD. Hoping you like it. Etc. VHS tapes were down when DVDs came out. DVDs will start to dwindle eventually when HD-DVD/BlueRay is standardized and comes down in prices. Its just trends that the RIAA still likes to focus on as a reasoning for action when that really isnt the only cause of sales dropping. /end old information that keeps coming back as NEW
Bryan
- Alienate your customers
- ???
- Profit!
Currently, they're on step 2...http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/
did anyone release a CD that I would actually want to buy last quarter?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
With Bob the Builder "Can we Build It? Yes We Can!"
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
This is quite off topic, I realize, but Someone pointed me at Virus Magazine. They review quite a few Metropolis signed artists. I typically am a Opeth, Ministry, (older)Megadeth, etc. listener. Can you recommend some bands?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Maybe it's not so much that people are buying fewer albums, but that people are no longer buying into the mega-hype machine that's been turning nobodys into new pop royalty for a year, only to totally vanish after their pitiful-selling follow-up album two years later. (not to mention the countless tabloid-quality screwups they're bound to commit).
Put another way: The industry found a way to push our buttons, and push them HARD, for a few years there. Have we finally figured out where that button is, and have properly re-adjusted its threshold? One can only hope.
How about the cause being demographic in nature? The baby boomer generation is to old to like the crap being spewed out of the music label company's arse and have ceased purchasing it.
AC
Last time I read up on this the true
alternative genres (Jazz/Classical) managed
only 2-3% of albums sold. A loyal following
keeps the old ways going but to the marketplace
this music matters as much as Apple.
So has the classical/jazz idiom felt as much
pain from the modern breakdown (file trading etc)
or has the growth of the gangsta listena not
had much effect?
it came to as an unexpected shock to the industry when they realized that the cd, the dvd and the music downloads finally killed the demand for mc's! they solely blame p2p piracy and want all users not buying at least one hybrid hd/blue-ray movie a month to be electrocuted immediatly.
in other news: the RIAA fell down a cliff and broke a leg. we all send our regards... to the cliff.
Another point may be that most people willing to replace their vinyl with CD's are done. They have all their desired albums on CD. Watch the sales curve. If CD sales are not artificially manipulated, CD sales will start to mirror pre-CD album sales (adjusted for population/economic factors).
What? It's 2007. That means almost three quarters of the way through the decade, and if you look at the charts you'll note that hip-hop has been damn-near unstoppable, as much as I might prefer to lament that fact since most of it is utter garbage. Still, the truth remains: hip-hop owned the first decade of the 21st Century.
Heck, it was even taking a strong hold during the late 90s, so it was quite well set up by the time the clock ticked over into the new millenium. Again, as much as I might prefer to lament that fact since most of it is utter garbage.
All you hear about here is spurious arguments "fair use" and "it's not stealing, it's only copyright infringement," but at the end of the day it's really about explaining away illegal behavior.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Indeed.
Method of processing duck feet
...but I stopped because of those "copy-protected" discs (corrupted, malware-spreading). You can never be sure if they will work with your stereo or break your computer. So where do I get music now? I pirate it!
There are companies that do market research stats on p2p downloads, similar to Nielsen Soundscan for CD sales. BigChampagne is one of them. Pop music jumped the shark years ago, but if listeners are really getting bored and tuning out, that's one way to find out.
I really do wonder if a considerable amount of the diminishment, has to do with the focus of the moguls on single 'idols', rather than good groups. Seems to me that in the past fifty years or so the best music has come from groups, and groups just aren't being sought or promoted, for some reason.
J.E.B.
Joshua Corps
# Buying expensive games for consoles As much as folks gripe about the music industry, I do wonder if people are simply shifting their entertainment dollars elsewhere. In the last ten years, you've had a huge increase in movie sales with the introduction of affordable DVD - you can now have a version of the movie for less than it costs to see it once (especially if you include travel and food) that has extra stuff you won't see in the movie theater. This has already changed the economics of the movie industry - movies can now be bigger blockbusters in the DVD market than in theaters. In the last few years, the average 18-34 U.S. male now spends more money on video games than music. I also know many people who have satellite radio and now rarely buy CDs. Also, you have paid music programming available on countless satellite and digital cable outlets in addition to the internet.
All of these other forms of entertainment cut into both the money spent on recorded music and the time listening to music.
:)
Marantz 8b
But how much has legit digital sales increased? Roughly 20%?
With the increasing popularity of sattelite radio, I wonder how that's affecting CD sales? I'm sure that's playing a decent part in all of this.
I listen to the radio most days. I listen to the new tracks as they get released, played to oblivion on TV/radio and finally drop out of the charts into obscurity. By the time each track gets to that point, I feel no compunction to go out and buy it because I'm tired of hearing it day after day.
Much of the music I want is no longer in the charts and therefore unavailable in most music shops in the form of a CD. This only leaves me the option of music downloads. I suspect there are many others like me out there.
Result: CD sales down, Downloads up.
If the music companies had real, visionary leadership, they would have seen the Internet as the most amazing opportunity and they could have bee world leaders in downloadable music technology. Instead we have clueless dinosaurs desperately trying to drag us all back the the 80's
No sympathy here.
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
Actually... bottle water is an example of successful MARKETING... and not much else.
1 0301228131
.mp4 video file) .mp4 file requires QuickTime 7 (free) or video iPod (not free) to view.
Bottle water is 1000x more expensive than tap.
FDA regulations on bottle water are much less strict than EPA's on tap water.
Studies shows that tap water quality is actually better than many bottled water.
A lot of bottled water actually come from taps and not from srings
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-28625176
http://tinyurl.com/2jqrfb (6 MB
What I suspect is that the numbers really just include CDs from the big-name companies.
;-)
In the past few years, I've bought a fair number of CDs, but mostly from the musicians themselves. These are recordings that you simply can't find in any of the commercial outlets, not even amazon.com. I have been duly surprised to find that most of them were known (typos and all) to CDDB, though I did have to enter the data myself for a few of them. Just yesterday a single-track CD was handed to me by a Finnish friend, and I read it into iTunes on my Mac; I was a bit bemused when it came up identified as an Australian group. Not even close. So I typed in the data by hand (and for some silly reason, one of my Terminal windows now keeps switching to the "Swedish Pro" keyboard that I used to enter the data. "It Just Works" indeed.
A growing fraction of the world's musicians are realizing that it's no longer sensible to sign any paper from a recording company. That just gives all the profits to the company. If you use your local independent recording studio and CD packager, you may not sell millions of copies, but you get all the profit yourself. Even a musician can understand what that means.
But one of the things it means is that you aren't part of the recording industry's statistics. Well, who the hell cares? We want good music, not recording industry profits.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Britney get out of rehab, we need you!
I'm wondering if these figures only pertain to the RIAA. I make it a point to not buy CDs from any RIAA labels. Ever. Most artists on these labels aren't worth my time, anyway. Whenever I come across an artist I do like that's on a RIAA label, I usually say, "Oh, well!", shrug my shoulders, move on, and forget about the artist. Sometimes, artists in this situation end up changing labels, and I show support for them by buying their (RIAA-free) albums, but that ends up being a rarity.
Reward the honest labels. They're just doing their part to get good music from their artists to your ears. Ignore the predatory ones. They'll eventually just shrivel up and blow away.
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
Attack enough customers, they won't be your customers any more. Looks like it's true. You really do reap what you sow.
I wonder if they'll listen.
Nah. Never have, never will.
In a couple of years, we'll look back and say that P2P file sharing was the only thing that saved the recording industry. It is becomming increasingly obvious that they don't want to be saved.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
There are a few reasons why I don't buy CDs anymore--one of which being that I don't find much music I like anymore (a sign that I am getting older)--but the main one goes back to the days of my youth.
I remembered vacation after vacation with my mother's stack of 8-track tapes. I remember her LP collection. I remember my brothers' collections of 45s. I remember the Victrolla in the basement and the 78s I would pick up at rummage sales. I remember my first album, and my first cassette player. Most importantly, I remember when CD music first hit the scene, and I remember--as clearly as if it were yesterday--how CDs would eventually make music so much less expensive becuase they cost less to produce and ship than did tapes.
Well, here we are in 2007 and CDs are just as expensive (even more expensive) than they were back in the day. So, RIAA, kiss my keister. If I want music now (beyond the CDs I have acquired over the years--almost all of them 2nd-hand), I'll sit on my couch with my guitar and play.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The ClearChannel monopoly on our radio stations is the source of this problem. They "pay to play" the same 40 songs all day. ... they can always blame the pirates.
You are witnessing one of the biggest and dumbest misunderstandings of a market ever. The greed heads really think you will go out and buy the limited shit they dribble to you through the top 40. All that's really doing is killing radio too. This was all noticed and predicted seven years ago. People who share music are the industry's biggest promoters and customers. Recorded music has always been that way and always will be. If it's not cheap and easy it's not fun or worth having.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
last night, and the host at the time was speculating that now is the time for indie bands like The Arcade Fire to rise up on the charts. It would be fantastic to see the lesser-known groups receive the publicity that they deserve.
You might all disagree with me but really I say let them tank. The major labels put out the worst absolute low grade crappy music (look at the stars on the top 10. Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z Britney Spears, Fergie, Gym Class Heroes etc..) You can barley call it music.. Where as if you are a talented group that *IS* actually signed to a major label they pay them squat because they are too busy giving all there money to Justin Timberlake and the RIAA this is on top of the fact that they are lobbying to get laws passed to protect this trash from 'so called' pirates.
I am thrilled to death today that people decided not to buy there products.. its long overdue.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Could this be because people are switching over to music services such as Yahoo! Music Unlimited? I pay roughly $7 a month for this service and it satisfies most of my "impulse buy" urges when I go to the music store. I still buy cds by my favorite artists, but I'm much less tempted to buy a cd just for "something new to listen to" when I can just go home (or to work the next day, for that matter) and get my "something new to listen to" fix. The only real place I can't listen to online music is my car and the gym...and that's no big deal because I can just listen to a cd or talk radio.
If nothing else, I'm thankful for these services so I don't waste my money on crappy cds anymore. It seems like everytime a major label scoops up on of my favorite artists, it all goes downhill.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
..And the Techno scene is.. oh yeah the majors don't have anything to do with them anyhow and never did because they couldn't make a producer into a star (except one that sucks, Moby)... but anyhow.. the little labels they are doing fine.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
When you sue you're customers, don't be surprised when they stop buying you're product.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Most of the CD's I have purchased recently have come directly from the hands of the band members at the shows I go to see. The big players just doesn't fund the most talented acts, at least the way things are today. 'Indie' is huge, and probably way underreported. I most certainly continue to purchase music, both live and prerecorded, and I know that many others do the same.
It seems clear to me that enough money is flowing to provide at least minimal funding for the artists, but not necessarily enough to sustain a gigantic industry distribution machine.
It seems to me that we are seeing the clearest case of the "Invisible Hand" that we have ever seen. The ability to copy and distribute information for what is essentially free over great distances of land, it's unprecedented. Copyright laws are in place to protect a brand, a name or so on, the goal is to prevent other people from making money using your name in fraudulent ways. I don't see a reason that distributing music online should be illegal unless you're A) making money or B) lying about what you're distributing. If I bought a garden weasel, and had a garden weasel cloning device, there is nothing garden weasel could do to stop me from giving them to all my friends and neighbors.
Eample:
lets say you buy tracks at 99C per track, if you buy 20 tracks (any tracks) in one setting you get a "batch" discount at 70C or even as low as 50C per track. Basicly, I want full albums to be around 10 to 12..maybee 13 bucks. I, as a musician, can't see paying more than that unless its a MAJOR work. In the end though I want them to get most of that proffit. Then you can turn around and have that service press and distrubute cds. I dunno, I think its doable if they REAEEEEEAAAALY tried. If they making good music then You will make the rest in Merch and Touring like ALL bands do today but the difference is they would finally be making money on the cds too.
"By all means refer to recent music by (predominantly) black artists as MOBO (Music Of Black Origin) or some other unique name but please DO NOT hijack the name "R&B" (Rhythm and Blues) when describing that kind of music alone.
I couldn't agree more!!! But it's not me who's hijacked the name, it's the million and one artists, their publishers and the media which have hijacked the name.
I agree with most of your other points.
Well, I'm 15, and I think music has gotten way worse too, and so does most of my friends, so it can't be Just that =)
I'd say I bought 20% more CD's this past year.
:)
They were all blank of course. "Wink" "Wink", but hey they were all Sony brand, so that's got to help them out a little bit right?
There was a time when every week there were 2 or 3 cds I was interested in buying. That time passed a few years ago. Every week when I get the Sunday paper, the first thing I do is open up the best buy ad to the "new cd releases" page. There's less and less to get excited about. Less in general. Some weeks there's like 1 release, and it's by a dead rapper.
You are 100% spot on!
...now I'm off down the pub.
Everything else about Britain may suck arse, but at least we have good beer & music!
At the end of the day that is all that really matters in my opinion.
The last time CD sales went down - it was because the companies produced fewer releases. Somebody estimated then that if they'd produced the same number of releases and each release sold only eight thousand copies, sales would have been steady.
I'm sure iTunes and the like are changing the marketplace, but 20% seems like a steep drop likely to produced by factors such as the cited reduction in retail outlets more than file sharing.
But of course, reducing choice is what the music industry appears to be all about these days. Never give a primate the option to screw over his fellows - they will always take it, even it ends up cutting their own throats. That option was the DMCA and related IP law.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Britney Spears goes insane and shaves her head, and the music industry declines instantly. It wasn't piracy, it was Kevin Federline. He ruined her life. He gave her herpes. He made her miserable. In turn, she will have her revenge on all of us. I learned all this from CNN.
technical writing / development
If 17 times as many songs are pirated as sold, does that mean a ~6 cent 'value' of work to find pirated songs? (Using the $1.00 itunes\17) I thought there was some kind of micro-economic principle about this. Would that mean that a the limit of 6 cents for a dubious quality, ripping off the artist song, piracy would become too much work for the average person?
I think the idea of limited money has some truth to it. I have limited money (as a grad student I'm making about 2/3 of a full time minimum wage job). I could buy CDs for some of the bands I listen to, or just pirate and use the money to see the bands that actually come to town. Guess which I pick.
CDs are overpriced. I can copy them myself for less than a buck which is about 1/20th of what it cost me 10 years ago. Yeah, that's not exactly a fair comparison but the point is costs have been dropping. CDs cost less to produce than tapes, yet when CDs came out they were priced higher because only the wealthier people owed CD players when they first came out. That price never went down. Where did all this money go? At least the higher price was for better quality though.
Now mp3s cost a fraction of what CDs did to produce and distribute and yet the price is to remain the same. Where is all the money going? iTunes is way over priced. Why would I pay as much as I would for a physical CD for an inferior product? I get the CD which can be used anywhere and lent to friends. I can make mp3s from a CD. It isn't compressed, so there's no quality loss (not that it makes a difference with my hardware). You get cover art and liner notes, etc.
Of course there are other costs. Recording equipment costs money, but again that cost is dropping quickly. Getting word out about your band is difficult and important. Now how much harder was that before MySpace? I guess just before music sales started dropping all the creative people were making much more money. Or was that not were the savings went?
We've seen similar stupidity in other sectors of media distribution. Scientific publications tried to charge just as for back-issues distributed over the internet as they did when they had to make physical copies. If they had near the influence over the content producers that music labels do, that would definitely still be the case. Video cassettes were supposed to kill the movie business.
Just maybe we are seeing signs of badly run industry starting to falter. That is absolutely no concern. The only concern to political bodies is if the benefits of musical art to society are diminishing.
Maybe MTV is actually a signal/consequence of the times we are living in. When I was young (80s, 90s), people watched MTV and the M was for Music. The thing now a days is populated with reality shows of who dumped who, who got to screw who, and who can waste money in the dumbest way. Teens are no longer exposed to music, or at least not as much as older generations were exposed too.
My other OS is the MCP!
I think adding industrial waste to community water supplies is a bad thing.
I live in Philly, and the indie band craze has really taken storm here. The days of going to a bar and listening to recorded music is now left to just the gay dance clubs. Everything opening up here is bohemian in nature, they all are blogged and Myspaced to death, and their music videos go up on YouTube, not on MTV.
:-)
It's been going this way for the last 4 years, perhaps longer. Philadelphia lost the landmark flagship Tower Records store, which REALLY put a damper on people going out to buy CDs (it has been replaced by FYE, which is more known for its DVD selection XBOX/PS2 games).
The Tower Records location on South Street, which was the analog to the Virgin Records megastore in Chelsea (Manhattan)--the epicenter of what is "hip and cool" closed. Now it's iPods and live bands. Philly has more college kids living in it than Boston--we tend to stay way ahead of the music than most cities with plastic wrap CD stores and recycled Clear Channel/XM radio. It's one of the perks about living in the murder capital of the United States.
I happen to love it.
Sony is capturing some of this vibe with Acidplanet
Aside from the Top 40 which I rarely even bother to listen to anymore [and I haven't listened to XM/Sirius or FM radio in years... now I'm stuck on an iPod or listening to AM talk radio], the dance music/club craze that was big in the 90s, died down--is now coming back up again, at least on the East Coast.
I buy and scour Shoutcast for a DJ here in Philadelphia, and I must say... DanceRecords.com and several other Philly stores (Sound of Market, Funk-O-Mart, plus 100 other local shops) are pushing more and more fresh vynil lately (you used to have to request a press from a label or get a press made from a CD so that way you could spin it).
Now just about any title you see in a shop already has an album press available including a buttload of new singles which are available on LP-only and are only meant to go to clubs and get zero radio play.
It's nice to see local DJs finally taking back some of the music industry market from what Clear Channel had stolen in the last 13 years.
It's not hard to figure out why this is happening. Once everyone got CD burners, they saw how badly they were being gouged for their $16 CD of Lynard Skynard that they only bought for the one song Sweet Home Alabama. If any of these musicians were in it for the correct reasons none of these problems would exist because they would be selling their product for slightly above the cost of producing them rather than a 1500% increase. I have only bought 3 CDs in the past four years, and they were musicians that aren't selfish and actually care about their fans. Once again, the industry is clueless.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
I mean, that IS their goal, isn't it? They can't honestly believe that suing people will get them more sales. How 'bout a paradigm shift?
On a side-note, it means that we need better music (I sure do). How 'bout a paradigm shift?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
What I really want to share is a conversation I had with a mid-western independent record store owner last weekend. Whenever I happen to be in this little town where I was, I always try to stop in and patronize his store. He has got cool stuff you can't find anywhere else (read Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, etc) and it's organized so things are pretty easy to find. He also carries a large selection of smoking paraphenelia - try finding that at your local big box, lol.
Anyway, I asked him straight up how downloads had affected his business. "Not much really. It's Target that's killing me", he replied. "Not Wal-Mart?" I asked. He told me that, "Wal-Mart doesn't carry the explicit versions, but Target does. They can sell it for less than I can buy it. We used to have a good crowd on release Tuesdays, but now they all go to Target."
"So the downloaders aren't hurting you at all?" I asked again. "They don't have any money to buy CD's with anyway, so I really haven't seen much impact from downloading", he stated matter of factly. And you know, as he added up the total for the 6 CD's I was purchasing, I realized he was absolutely correct. The total was $105. Now I have a pretty good job and can afford to splurge on some CD's once in a while, but the average joe college, high school kid or even single mom could never afford what I just dropped on 6 CDs.
It was then that I realized what I had bought and why. I bought one of my favorite LP's, Pretenders II which has been remastered and a live disc added. So now I have the LP, the CD and the remastered CD. Chrissie deserves my money though and it sounds much better, so I don't begrudge that one. But the point is, here we go again, they are selling me the same thing over and over in a different format. Next it will be some DRMd DVD thing that I won't be able to put on my iPod. It is really getting old.
Three of the other CD's were stuff I had downloaded and wanted the CD. The other was actually the new Stooges CD. I guess the point here is that instead of prices going down, they seem to be going up (except at Target). The specialty retailer is a dying breed as price becomes a much bigger factor in the purchasing decision than selection, customer service and just having someone to talk to about music in general. Ever try to have a conversation with a Target or Best Buy salesperson about the time you saw the Scorpions and Iron Maiden on the same bill? Think they'd stand around for even a few sentences.
So what's the inconvenient truth revealed here? It's that downloads aren't killing the retail music business. The music business is killing the music business. You want to sell more product, price it competitively. $105 for 6 CD's is outrageous to me and I only bought them because I want the store to be there when I come back to that town in a few months and pay them another visit. It was the least I could do. Now, I've got to go to the library and see what's on hold for me there. Thank god for the library!
How sad, poor produccers will not be able to buy another mercedes. All bands should start singing live at concert and not rely on cd sales.
And who's loss is that? All it did was take pieces from earlier songs, tear them apart and have some bloke talking over it.
Oh look, it's an elitist.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Sellaband are trying to do just that, using CrowdSourcing to allow the buyers to decide who is making good music.
Believers visit the site and listen to the tracks provided by the Artists. If they like the Artists they can buy Parts in the Artist at $10 a go. The Believers can recover any money spent until the point the Artist reaches $50000 (it is held in escrow). Once the Artist reaches 5000 Parts ($50000) the money is used to hook them up with top producers and engineers in a top studio and a quality CD is produced.
The Believers then get a Limited Edition copy of the CD for each Part purchased.
The music so recorded is offered for free download from the site, and advertising revenue generated by the visitors is split a third to the Artist, a third to Sellaband, and a third split amongst the Believers.
A non-Ltd Edition copy of the CD is available for purchase from the website too, and the CD is also available for the Artist to purchase for them to sell at gigs etc. Monies from this is split the same way.
This arrangement runs for a year after the release of the CD. Once the year is up, ownership of the Master reverts to the Artist.
More info on the Ts and Cs can be found on the Sellaband site.
Four Artists have made the $50K so far :-
Nemesea
Cubworld
Second Person
Clemence
They are all currently recording, and it is expected that the first 3 Artists will be releasing their CDs in June or July.
As you might have seen from my sig, a friend of mine is an Artist on Sellaband. Dan Ward-Murphy recently topped $10000, so is well on his way!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
... I was of prime buying age: employed with money to burn. At least once a week you'd find me cruising round the CD stores for the latest music to buy. The evidence of that remains in the large tower case of CDs that are now ignored in favour of the collection on my PC. But I still buy plastic discs - I haven't changed that much. It's just that there's more to choose from now: DVDs. Those CD shops I bought from are still there, but now as much as 50% of their floor space is now devoted to movies. I could buy a CD which has maybe 8-10 minutes of stuff I want on it, or for the same cost I could get a DVD, which contains up to 2 hours of decent content, and costs about the same. Makes a CD sound like pretty poor value! But regardless even if they were the same, people have only so much to spend, and that's now split between DVDs and CDs.
Couldn't possible be related to the dearth of decent new music to buy during that period...
naw !!!
That's interesting; Led Zeppelin is in the top 20 on this list, and incidentally I just bought a whole bunch of LZ CDs (used, however, so it won't show up on the RIAA's charts).
Good to see that people are finally turning back to good music like LZ, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, etc. Too bad Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake are pretty high on this list as well.
I'm starting to think perhaps all the extortion attempts by the RIAA are starting to take to their toll on the public reputation of large record labels. Obviously if the record labels are going to continually bite the hands that feed them, they're going to stop getting 'meals' from those hands. To many people, the RIAA might as well be a four-letter word nowadays.
Hey, you forgot Iron Maiden, which is still an extremely popular band world-wide after 30 years, and one of my favorites.
:-/ I can't believe people there actually like Haggis.
Britain definitely has a lot to be proud of as far as music goes. Unfortunately, they don't have anything at all to be proud of when it comes to food
you know, people would not be so hesitant to buy CDs if it weren't for bastards like sony who use them to unwittingly install rootkits. way to go sony, you single-handedly destroyed music. :)
I'll pay the "1000x" price tag (incidentally, I've paid as little as $3.50 for 24 .5L bottles) rather than drink dirty water or deal with diarrheal disease. I'm funny that way.
I'll pay the "1000x" price tag [...]. I'm stupid that way.
There, fixed that for ya. ;)
Seriously, I've seen all kinds of justifications for people being willing to spend more on bottled water than they do on GASOLINE - a product that mostly justifies its price as a result of the costs of the raw materials and its production and distribution costs - by around an order of magnitude.
The simple truth is, many of you have more disposable income than brains. If you couldn't afford to waste that much on a mere convenience, of dubious origin and quality in most cases, then maybe, just maybe, you'd get a filter at home and use a refillable portable water vessel.
Or not.
In Nature, stupidity is a capital offense. In human society, too many get off with less than a warning.
To the end consumer this means that those with varied 'non-popular' music tastes can get what they want from the online provider of music that they cant get from a shop.
The whole concept of selling lots of one album is changing to selling a few of many albums.
See http://www.thelongtail.com/
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
Don't worry about them... painting themselves blue and all that.
Yes, agree about Iron Maiden - and recently gave the 15 year old son of my missus's cousin a shock the other week when I went round there to set up his laptop for wireless.
He had the sleeve of their latest album (A Matter Of Life and Death) on his Windows desktop and was quite shocked when I told him I saw them in a local sports centre hall in 1981-ish with a couple of hundred other people! (It was even Paul Di'anno singing with them at the time!)
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm so tired of the 'there's no good music anymore' meme. It just means you're not paying attention any more...
So here's 20 good albums from Q1 2007 for you to check out:
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Busdriver - RoadkillOvercoat
!!! - Myth Takes
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - Some Loud Thunder
Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
Deerhunter - Cryptograms
El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead
Field Music - Tones of Town
Kings of Leon - Because of the Times
Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm
Menomena - Friend and Foe
Mika - Life in Cartoon Motion
Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer?
Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position
Pop Levi - The Return To Form Black Magick Party
The Shins - Wincing the Night Away
Studio - Yearbook 1
A song is on the order of around 4Mbytes encoded in MP3 (yes, I know about lossless and that is bigger). There is NO economics value of distributing music on CDs anymore. People stop uses horses when the automobile came about. I am sure all the stable hands were crying bloody murder about losing their jobs then, but people can't stop progress just because they are in the wrong industry. Same thing happened to typists. Same thing happened to slide rules manufacturers. Same thing happened to VHS. Same thing happened to cassette tapes. The same thing will happen to distributing music by CDs.
This is a time when the R&B era is over and Hip-hop is on the decline.
Thanks heavens, I wasn't sure I could take much more R & B.
I used to have a rule that said if they all dance in unison or wear all white in a video clip it was a bad song. It proved surprisingly accurate.
I now have a new rule. If the phrase "your body" appears in a song, it is a bad song. That eliminates 95% of all R & B.
meh
... when applied to the entertainment industries. The simple fact of the matter is that these industries are losing profit (not exclusively) to piracy, which is illegal. Since it's illegal, the government does have an obligation to uphold the law. Until the the law is changed, spouting that same quote will do absolutely nothing.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Maybe the tides are now turning for music artists too. Before anyone gets all upset because they have a basement studio at home with cakewalk and consider themselves to be an incredible artist headed for that lame event south by southwest, I'm talking about the pre-packaged commercialized artists like Timberlake, Spears, Eminem (yes Eminem is commercialized), Clay Aiken, and Kelly Clarkson.
Vote 1 Greens in the state elections tomorrow! Even if you think they're going to drive the economy under, vote for their anti-corruption policies. They are planning on making it illegal for corporations to donate to political candidates, and forcing the entire donation system transparent.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Oh, the Haggis Lovers are that lot North of Hadrian's Wall... the "Scotties" is it? Something like that...
Don't worry about them... painting themselves blue and all that.
You sure about that? My mom just came back from a trip to England and Wales and I believe she said Haggis was a normal breakfast food there, not just in Scotland.
Either way, I can't think of a single food from Britain that anyone outside of Britain eats. I can't say I've even heard of a British restaurant; here in the US and Canada, I've been to Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Greek restaurants, Indian restaurants, Japanese restaurants, Turkish restaurants, Israeli restaurants, Lebanese restaurants, Russian restaurants, German restaurants, Swedish restaurants, Thai restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants, French restaurants, Mexican restaurants, and even Irish restaurants. Oh, and American restaurants too of course. But I've never even heard of an English or British restaurant.
We do have "scones" here, but I'm told that the ones we have are nothing like the scones in Britain (just like their idea of a "biscuit" is totally different from ours).
I just got "A Matter of Life and Death" myself; it's pretty good. I'm glad to see they put that period with Blaze behind them, because their last three albums have been excellent, much like their "glory days" with Piece of Mind and Powerslave.
Something else Britain can be proud of: Lotus and Aston Martin cars (especially the new Elise).
So is Al Gore to a certain extent. But he was right on a lot more things than homey Bush was.
Actually went up this year compared to last. But then again, i refuse to buy from *AA artists, and nothing i listen to is in the stores around here anyway. If you want it, you order it from the artists themselves..
But i did buy more.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's the very fact that there is no "next" lossless format that CD will be with us for a very long time, just as vinyl is still with us. We'll probably see another 50% drop in CD sales but it will plateau and the people who want quality will do what they do now, order from speciality stores online or if they're lucky an obscure retail location in town.
the record companies are beating their consumers with a dead stick. hehe welcome to riaadot
"old classic award winning albums are pirated too"
This kind of thing must stop. I recommend we roll back copyright to 17 years and we can eliminate all the piracy on older albums overnight.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Bye Bye Miss American Pie....
...All your life, You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
There has been nothing compelling about popular music since Business School Graduates have taken over the artists and created an "industry". The mainstream music is uninspiring, I'm periodically checking new music in hopes of finding the new "Beatles", all in vain. Creativity, musicality, and originality seems to be gone. Can you still hear the music in your head when you think of "Green Eyed Lady, lovely lady..." those cool riffs and schwoooshy Hammond organ sounds?
Well, its a marvelous night for a moondance and the Record Execs just want to count money. Theres no art in the current music scene. Just the typical exploitation of shock values.
I too refuse to buy Chrome Donuts for their lack of viable music and also their crappy quality. I have a few DVD-Audio discs that I bought to check out a better alternative to CDs which sound really crappy compared to the old vinyls. The CD format is older than the vinyl when it got replaced by CD, its time for something better. The DRM ridden DVD-Audio and SACD is not the answer. The mp3's sound worse then cassette tapes but they are more convenient.
The mp3-filesharing boom of a few years ago brought back some long since dead and forgotten artists from my childhood I thought I'd never hear again, but that all gone now. Most of my music money is spent on live performances. I too, boycott the Media Moguls.
I have attended tons of very expensive parties and weddings with hired bands and occasionally DJ's. The current music is never played (except at very young peoples parties). The cool tunes of years gone by are played and even the very young people get into it proving it has still not lost its sparkle.
I have no hope the commercial music scene will ever learn to be creative, responsive, innovative, and musical. I hope they all perish and go up in flames.
I'm tired of the RIAA/MPAA crying "Priracy!" every time their numbers drop. Apparently the RIAA/MPAA thinks that the rules of economics don't apply to them. Obviously when the economy slows down people will purchase less. To be more specific, people will cut out the fat from their purchasing. I don't know of anyone who will choose buying a CD or movie over paying the electric bills or putting food on the table.
Just another example of the Hollywood types being out of touch with reality.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Here in Calgary, all popular music stations are playing mostly oldies from long ago.
Every few years, one tries to play new stuff and ends up losing all their listeners - so it looks like they have learned their lesson now and just carry on playing old rock 'n roll and ignore most of the new crappy stuff.
Unfortunately the RIAA members still haven't learned that they have to find groups that play music that people actually like to listen to - gee, what a radical idea...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I don't buy CDs because I don't WANT them - one external harddrive takes up a lots less space and I can find any song instantly in iTunes by typing a few letters. No changing discs, no fumbling with jewel cases, no dust and crap and hideous custom furniture for a billion CDs.
Let's face it folks. The problem with declining CD sales is due to one reason: the retail price is too high.
With prices going for US$15 or more per album-length CD even at Best Buy and Wal-Mart, the recording industry has priced their product in a cartel-like fashion that actually encourages ways to beat the system, whether it's piracy or buying music at a lower price through legal download sites. Why do you think the iTunes Music Store has done so well? Anyway, the RIAA should seriously consider setting a much lower price for a new album-length CD, probably more like US$12 per album maximum. At these lower prices, there is vastly lower incentive to pirate music, since more people can actually afford the real product.
Just last week I took down the CD tower that I'd had for the last 5 years. I threw it straight out, took all of the CDs in it, tossed their jewel cases and booklets, and just crammed the discs into a Caselogics book. Even that feels like a fantastic waste of space -- the binder-sized volume could all fit on a cubic centimeter of a disk in my computer, probably less if I were inclined to rip them all (which I'm not).
It took awhile for it to sink in, but the idea of paying even $5 for an album on a disc strikes me as a reckless waste of money, actually worse than just burning the $5 because I'd be introducing the inconvenience of managing a baroque artifact into my life.
Music albums are worthless and it's finally penetrating the popular psyche. It's no surprise their sales are dropping like a stone.
British beer better than German/Belgian beer? That's ridiculous! Even Mexican Corona is better than English piss water. Why is this logical? Because the food is so bad British don't have working taste buds.
Personally I buy fewer than 4 new CDs a year - special releases etc. ------ I go to the used CD shops buy the used ones I want --- go home rip the songs I want --- go back trade the CDs back in. Yeah the resale trade-in isn't great -- but that $$ still can go towards another purchase ---- and $5 - $8 a CD is almost a fair price
Its not the years, its the mileage
You know, I've been thinking about this a bit and after reading a couple good articles, I think I have built a somewhat interesting theory.
While piracy, quality of recent music, more entertainment options/competition, etc all come into play regarding the music industry's decline, I think there is a larger force at work. With the creation of the iTunes store, Apple and its customers decided that songs were only worth 99 cents each, albums 9.99 each and that no premium would be placed on new releases. This is a huge shift for the industry. Suddenly you can't mark up perennial hits like the White Album or the newest teenage anthem that hit the top 40. Suddenly everything is sold for the price of a catalog title. You can't increase margin during the popular new release phase so your only hope to match previous profits is to make it up in volume. Good luck.
Additionally, in the past singles were never priced as a function of album cost/number of tracks=per track cost. But this is the general feel of the iTunes store. If a CD would cost roughly $10 and it had about 10 songs on it then its $1 a track. CD singles with 2-4 songs on them did not get priced like that - they cost 7-8 bucks. Customers at that time believed that enough went into the packaging, recording, management, etc. that the price was justified. I also think past customers believed the idea that more expensive hit singles supported the band (not that there was any price competition to test this). Modern customers do not recognize these justifications. They have seen how simple it is to make music on the computer and with basic recording supplies. Packaging and distribution costs have vanished. The labels are often seen as the robber barons of this whole thing. Nobody worries if they lose out. Due to this, it very much like an economic bubble has burst. There has been an adjustment in the market value of a song.
So the combination of these two things, no premium for new / popular products and the decrease in the perceived value of a single song has sent the industry into a new, lower revenue bracket. How do you continue to grow profits when your customers decided that your product is a commodity and worth half as much as it was ten years ago. I don't think there is any way back.
said someone who listens to porcupine tree.
most of them are also elitists, including myself.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
when compared to what happened to LPs in the 80's. Most of my record collection is vinyl. I know it is mostly a function of my age, but I picked up a couple of LPs every week back in the 80's and although I do own CD's, I'll never own as many. There is nothinig like the ritual of getting up every 20 minutes or so, flipping out the ole Discwasher (which you can still buy it and the refill fluids at high end music shops), and setting the needle in the groove. CD's just seem to get lost under my receiver, the liiner notes have text too small to read and when you do, it's not very interesting like the old stuff, the people who do the cover art aren't artists. The whole package has been cheapened but the price quadrupled. I just can't love the little plastic discs and cherish them like my favorite LP's. If CD's had good artwork and liner notes worth reading, many don't even have the lyrics, just credits for everyone and their accountant, then they'd have something I'd take pride in owning. As it it, you buy a couple of good songs and a lot of crap. I hate looking through my music and having to search for the good stuff. Nowadays,it's as much work to play straight from CD as playing 45's (singles), you have to choose each song individually, because playing an entire CD is so painful, amost as bad as listening to the radio. When I listen to music, I don't want to hear one or two good songs embedded in a bunch of crap.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Ten years ago, I bought at least one CD every weekend. True, I was re-buying lots of LPs I had previously owned, but there was also some excellent new music. Last year I bought two CDs, Neil Young and Dixie Chicks, both of which were purchases to support musicians who had come out against the War in Iraq.
Frankly, the new music really is not that great. When I heard the Beatles and Rolling Stones in 1964, and then Led Zeppelin in 1969, that music like nothing I had ever heard before, and the loader it was played, the better it sounded. In the past few years, bands and artists I really like are few and far between. I liked Green Day, White Stripes, Mark Knopfler, and Rob Zombie, to name some of what I listened to and enjoyed. Some time ago, I ripped all of my CDs into 320kps MP3 files, and mostly listen to Zappa and Laurie Anderson these days.
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
Now you're just stereotyping. ;)
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
radio listenership wouldn't have gone down as well.
What's the difference between a 128K MP3 delivered by P2P and an audio CD track?
SOUND QUALITY.
Not so important if it's background music, but if it's worth consciously listening to, it's worth listening to in a format that will take full advantage of the decent sound quality even relatively inexpensive audio hardware can deliver these days. That's why people buy CDs of the stuff they already downloaded via P2P. Or did.
The declining sales and radio listener numbers reflect the fact that the potential buyers of music can't find anything worth listening to, let alone paying for.
The underlying problem is business model. Record label business models are platinum driven in the face of a reality that says that the music market is fractionating into mini-niches and micro-niches, surviving labels will be the ones who can make money off artists that can consistently sell 10K SKUs/year by taking advantage of people who can sell their music into these niches.
Tech Public Policy stuff
stop pressing CDs a million at a time.
I suspect that the quality of music will improve when the RIAA business model crashes and the bands who are selling CDs are the ones who take responsibility for their own marketing... and get their CDs pressed 1K at a time... or simply burn them when people order them.
I completely agree with you on sound quality of CD-audio vs 128K (or below) MP3. But for most major label crap, improving the sound quality doesn't help.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Remember the difference in profit margin for a band per unit between selling a CD through a label (say, 20 cents, AFTER the money's gone through Hollywood accounting procedures... delivered whenever) and selling one's own CDs (say, at least $5 per unit) ... somebody selling 10K records a year probably won't earn out the advance with a label, but someone selling 10K records direct to the public will be making $50K/year off record sales alone. Plus, if one sells on the Net through someone like CDbaby can sell digital tracks through iTunes and MusicPlay as well.
Going through a label is the musical equivalent of playing the lottery... if your record sells multiplatinum, you will make more than you probably could through your own efforts. If it doesn't, you owe the record label money, you STILL have to deliver the records contracted for even if the label isn't going to market them.
I think the successful pop-rock musicians of the future are going to tour and sell recorded music direct to the public into niche markets they do a good job of selling into, and in a few years, the idea of anyone selling a million-plus CDs (or whatever replaces the format) or even a million of the same track is going to be looked at with blank incomprehension by everyone other than music historians.
Tech Public Policy stuff
And there was me thinking that all Porcupine Tree fans (myself included) are intelligent, discerning people.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Could we say that the entertainment "industry" in the US has jumped the shark?
(The funny thing about Japan is that entertainers here regularly jump the shark and remain popular. At least, that's the way it looks to me. I'm an outsider, I know. Sharks here, are, like, different. We eat them here, for instance.)