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."
"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?
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.
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
Guess what.
Asia still has a thriving music industry.
They just have to make their money differently.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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/
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
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=
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.
Question everything
...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.
None taken.
I think what we're hoping for though is to be able to gloat over the demise of the current recording industry, which many people feel is corrupt and not conducive to creativity.
An industry that does well should be one that creates or adds value without the need for artificial controls over supply. The bottled water industry does very well indeed without needing legislation restricting the supply of drinking water from other sources. It adds value by providing a quality controlled, conveniently packaged product. If the water in the bottle was poor quality, or you needed special controls to get the bottle open, people would probably prefer the tap in the public conveniences, after all, that water is free...
Just stick a mild compressor (3-6 dB) on your CD output, then mix in a cassette recording of your fireplace. Those old CDs will sound GREAT! You'll get the warmth, the soft rush of air^H^H^Hthe vinyl surface, and the soft popping.
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."
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.
The reason why only certain people manage to establish themselves as money makers through live performance is because RIAA members and ClearChannel are the gatekeepers to that prosperity. The Internet can permit people to market their own music and establish their own popularity without the control and oversight of the RIAA. Once the RIAA hegemony is broken down such that free Internet distribution, not radio or MTV, is the dominant form of bringing one's music to the people, then good performers will be able to make a living from their live performances.
They'll probably have to cancel MTV's Cribs due to lack of subject material, but at least talented performers will be able to make an honest living without first being "discovered" by some overpaid record exec.
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.
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."
Many of the bands we still listen to (such as the Beatles) weren't label stooges, but I'm sure they were the exception. Labels have always tried to sell bubble-gum tripe and take as few risks as possible.
You know, this is true. While overall I've never been a fan of Top 40 music, it's only in the last 7 or 8 years that I have not been interested in *anything at all* on the charts. Admittedly, I'm getting older (in my 30s now), but my disdain for what's out there now is not that I find the music necessarily "too loud and offensive for my early middle age years" or that I "don't get it" but that it is all...like product, barcoded, generic...I can't tell one band apart from the other. I can't remember the damn melodies from half the songs I hear. A minute after a song ends, if you asked me to hum it, I couldn't (there are some isolated exceptions).
I mean, it's like so many mediocre, flattened McDonalds hamburgers which have been left under heat lamps for an hour. I doubt this is the *full* reason why the industry suffers - I am pretty sure it's mainly piracy - but really, and I do think I'm being far, the stuff in top 40 now is the most generic, forgettable, all-sounds-the-same stuff I can recall in my lifetime.
I grew up in the 80s and I *hated* that. I hated most of the music but looking back, there was way more diversity even in synth-pop and crap like that, than there is in what people call emo today (I mention emo just because being white and middle class, this is supposed to appeal to me...or a younger version of me).
And let's not forget the aesthetic sewer hip hop and R&B is in. R&B was already dying in the early 80s, but rap had its golden age at the end of that decade, and has steadily declined since around 1993 or so, leaving what we have today - music so awful I am afraid to be in an elevator with a fan of it (not because I think they're bad-ass thugs, but because I think they must be barely sentient and might try to like, eat me or something, and not in the good way). And I'm not talking about underground/alternative rap - I'm talking about the top 40, "Hi I'm a big dumb idiot, I'm throwing money at the camera while a bunch of sluts dance behind me, all of which I'm going to have to pay the record company for, which will bankrupt me and launch me into obscurity back in the ghetto I came from."
There's obviously an audience for these albums and singles - really, really, really stupid teenagers. (Music execs like to say "teenagers" but what they mean are the dumbest of teenagers. Any of you reading this who are a teenager now and have to go through your teens in this culture have my utmost sympathy. And yes, it's as bad as you think it is.)
You know, what I really want is art and poetry; I want to be moved, like what I'm listening to *means something*. I want an emotional response, and if not that, then at bare minimum I want clever and quirky or even funny, but what's out there now doesn't even deliver *that*. I still pay attention to pop music because I am trying to understand why people listen to it. I understand why a bunch of posers out with their friends listen to it as a shared ritual of simian idiocy, but I don't get why I see these white boys driving around in pimped out hatchbacks listening to this shit when they don't *have* to? Do they not have a stash of like, real music to listen to when they don't have to pretend to like what everyone else likes? Are there really that many stupid, empty-eyed kids?
You know, I could chalk this up to a difference in aesthetics because clearly I probably listen to a lot of stuff other people really dislike, but in most cases I can *understand* why people would like something I'm not into (For example, I despise Nine Inch Nails, but I understand why someone would like its visceral energy). But I really don't understand why today's top 40 appeals to anyone at all. I can't abstractly understand why someone would like dickless tripe like AFI which the local Clear Channel stations just won't stop playing. This is an actual experience:
Me: "This is complete, crap, what is this, who would possibly like this, there's nothing here?"
Wife: "It's AFI. You asked me the same question about this same s
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!