Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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.
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?
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/
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.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
- Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
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.
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
Question everything
Some suggestions:
Their error is their arrogance to admit that time have changed. Selling just plain CDs is quite an outdated model. You can pirate music, the only way to make much more money for them is to sell even more added content and try to find a way to make money out of it.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I don't know about you, but with the exception of a few major label artists, I have been getting into local bands and bands under small independent labels a lot lately. A subscription to emusic has aided in this discovery process. There are still some major artists that appeal to me, but outside of those artists, I find my money and my ears are much happier with what I am doing currently.
I will agree with you though, to look upon the complete destruction of this industry with glee is not something I share with some others.
his point is that bands that tour make a lot of money on concerts. whichever brings in more cach -- concerts or albums -- varies, depending on how big they are, what record label they're with, and how often they play.
and, yes, i was in a (very small) band, and the only significant cash we got was from the one gig that paid ($400). compared to what we paid to produce them, we got very little for the CDs; seeing as how we didnt sell all of them, we may have actually had a net loss.
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!
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.
Actually, I think he does. Bands/musicians who can give a good and entertaining performance can easily make $600 on the very low-end for a 60-90 minute show. If they have any sort of following in the area, that could easily jump to $1-2k. If they're very well known in the area, they could get a nice $8-10k show at some venues.
As a guy who works with booking bands, we look at how well liked they are regionally, not how well their CDs sell. If a band gives away their music and has a large following in an area, they'll make more money overall than the band that sells a hundred CDs but has a smaller following. Especially when you figure out that every person they can get into the concert could potentially buy merchandise (which has a large profit margin).
I'm gloating. Here's the kicker: I don't pirate music. There's only been a single CD that's come out in the last 5 months I'm remotely interested in, and I'm not interested enough to pick it up (Muse's new one, and I'm so interested that I don't even know its title:) I used to buy 20-50 CDs a year from the early 80s on through the mid-90s, when the quality of music took a huge dive. Yes, I have somewhere between 600-1000 CDs sitting on the shelf. FYI - I averaged about $7/CD. The last "great" CD I picked up was American Idiot by Green Day. The last so-so was Samstown by the Killers (so-so because it has about 3 good songs on it and the remainder being mediocre to decent.)
I am looking forward to the new NIN disk, it may be out already, but the industry's horrible customer service to date has cut most lines of communication with at least this intended customer.
I can't wait until the industry either starts catering to its clients again (that'd be us, the consumers) or dies off and let's something better in its place. Like, perhaps, the environment that existed in the 50s and 60s, where even "great" acts like Elvis or Johnny Cash were approachable and worked hard.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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 entire music industry is set up to abuse recording artists. Exorbinant marketting fees, a advanced based signing model, shady producers and a lot of very bad accounting that affects briteney spears as much as it does from . I had friends who had record promoters run up a 17,000 charges to book them in dive bars (within our own town). They never notified them of what was owed or outstanding until my friends demanded to know where they stood financially and the promoters handed them a 17,000 invoice for work and a bit of merch(a few dozen t-shirts, a few dozen logo'd props)... Most of the industry is crooked and sleazy and I won't cry a single tear if every studio that comprises the RIAA went banrupt and all the artists had to fend for themselves. It means the wolves have died and the lambs need to figure out how to get eaten without them.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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.
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".
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."
You're absolutely correct. I run a record label in Miami that just put out our first major release this month. (Won't promote, but it's in my sig if you're curious.) We're charting fairly high on college radio, but CD sales have been VERY slow. Our album has been pirated many more times than we've sold CDs, and I know this because I've seen it go up on several trackers that I frequent. :)
:) Anybody can do this on their own now.
At the same time, I'm not upset by this. For one, we weren't planning on bringing in any profit on this album - the long term goal is getting our foot in the door and building a name. So the more people listening the better. That aside, however, even if we sell out of our initial pressing we just break even. Live shows and licensing have been the money makers thus far. Having CDs to sell at live shows (which is where probably 80% of the sales have been so far) is gravy, but one well-paying show or placing one song on a commercial or tv show is like selling hundreds of CDs.
Anyway, we're doing the work ourselves, which is the future of the music business. We made the record ourselves. We didn't go out hunting for a label, we formed one ourselves. We figured out the numbers and put our own money into it. And everything we couldn't do (manufacturing, radio/press promotion, etc), we just outsourced. We're music school graduates, not business graduates. (Well, one guy is a business grad.
The days of letting someone else do the work for you are coming to an end. Anyone who puts in the work has a shot.
p.
free music
Actually... bottle water is an example of successful MARKETING... and not much else.
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
It might depends where you live or what brand you buy, but really, the advantage of bottled water are mostly overblown compared to the price...
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!
Wrong.
I don't "steal" music. I just don't buy the major label stuff anymore. I'm not alone either. Like many others, I find the music offered by the major labels these days to be pretty crappy, and find their business practices (DRM, lawsuits, lobbying for anti-consumer legislation, etc) abhorrent.
I do buy music from independent musicians, mostly local ones at this point, but I am considering signing up with Magnatune or eMusic at some point in the near future in order to add to the variety.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
You just keep telling yourself that. This is a result of piracy, plain and simple. People like yourself keep trying to justify it by saying that if only the labels would make something you want, then everything would be hunky-dory...except for that fact that the vast majority of the files being traded out there were produced by those self-same labels, ergo, the labels are producing product that consumers want. Only a complete fool would conclude from the available evidence that rampant piracy isn't the major factor in declining music sales.
Yes, the major labels suck. We all know this already. Unfortunately, the very thing that's leading to their demise is not only going to take down the RIAA, but any kind of cultural output that can be stored and enjoyed in a digital fashion. The only thing that keeps the software industry going is the fact that corporate users of software are willing to shell out license fees to ensure they don't get prosecuted, which is only worth doing because they can be easily found and the potential value is high. Musicians and artists have no such protection, because the consumers of their goods are by and large the common people, against the predations of whom the only possible defense is morality--and you can see how well that's working.
I don't "steal" or more correctly, copyright infringe, ANY music. I buy all my music from iTunes. However, since I now can buy ONLY the songs that interest me and am NOT stuck with paying for an entire album of filler just to get the one song I care about, this has undoubted hurt the old RIAA "album" model. Even if EVERYONE bought the songs they wanted from iTunes or similar places, the RIAA companies revenue would STILL go DOWN since they no longer are forced to get the whole CD's worth of mostly useless and crappy music to get the one song they like.
THIS is definitely a change to their business model that they have failed to adapt to.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
It may be that I have a higher tolerance for this than you do, but myself I'm a fan of the Vietnamese version of this sort of thing -- it reminds me a bit of French torch-singing, but the Vietnamese language is so complex it forces the vocal melodic line to be pretty interesting, even if the backing music is a little dull.
There's an older Indonesian pop style called "dangut" that I usually think is listenable.
And maybe you've only scratched the surface of what's out there, eh?
Can't tell the difference between J-pop and Mongolian throat singing, eh?
Well, just thinking about Bali, there's the band "Superman is Dead", that does a kind of trashy, thrash rock, and there's this guy "Balawan" who does a fusion between traditional Balinese music and American jazz-rock fusion, and then there's "Yudane" who comes up with some really interesting out/avant music that's still rooted in the Balinese culture.
(And does Bollywood count as Asia? I can never figure out how people draw their boundaries...)
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.