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."

Comments

This is a hard lesson for the Industry.

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

"You're not entitled to my money" is that lesson.

Re:This is a hard lesson for the Industry.

[Tackhead]

> "You're not entitled to my money" is that lesson.

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

Re:This is a hard lesson for the Industry.

[nine-times]

There really seems to be a sense of entitlement here (by record companies). They made money once upon a time with their business model, and so they expect that their old business model must necessarily be enforced by law. Now, the truth is that they still do make money, and they can continue to make money, but just not as much money with the same business model.

Anyway, people seem to forget that our population wasn't born to be disposable consumers for large corporations. We do not exist to be bullied and exploited for profit. Companies and corporations are a means to an end. They are artificial constructions so that we can organize ourselves into a society that can work efficiently to provide for ourselves. Record labels, for example, aren't entitled to money for simply creating a product; they must create a product we want, but more than that they must create a product efficiently enough that they can sustain their endeavor. Their endeavor is really our endeavor. The corporation is created and empowered by our society for the good of society, and if it fails to benefit us, if it fails to succeed in our endeavor, if it is so inefficient that they cannot sustain their own endeavor, then they've failed us. They are bad businessmen and their business has failed to provide us with what we, as a society, need.

Believe it or not, I've been accused of being a "communist" for saying things like this. Listening to some people talk, reading some people's comments, you'd think "capitalism" was a moral doctrine in which companies are the true individuals and profit is the only true good. "Morals" should be outlawed from business practices, and all should be sacrificed on the alter of short-term gains and increased stock prices.

Listen people, capitalism is just an economic theory that personal economic freedom will generally result in greater efficiency than an economy that is run by the government. What we're after here is efficiency in providing for society's needs, but the idea is that if you allow the system to provide benefit to the most efficient and productive, then you will see greater efficiency and more productivity. That's it. There's no moral component. There's still no purpose to it other than to order society efficiently.

Giving unlimited artificial monopolies to large bodies and guaranteeing inefficient business models against obsolescence is *not* capitalism. Yes, it benefits large companies, but that's not what capitalism is. It's actually a form of communism in which the "government" is supplanted by a partnership between the government and the small number of large companies that run everything. I don't know what you'd call it, but if you ask me, it's not good.

Garbage in garbage out

[Ctrl-Z]

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!!!

Plus ca change

[Silver Sloth]

the garbage that the record industry keeps churning out But it has always been that way. If you're a boring old fart like me then 1967 was the great year for singles (Beatles and the Stones at their prime, the Motown glory days and the US west coast just beginning to wake up) and the top selling single in the UK in 1967 was Tears for Souvenirs by Ken Dodd, not exactly great music. Good (difficult term but I'll let it ride) music tends not to have mass appeal, the charts have always been full of mass produced pap.

Re:Plus ca change

[Gr8Apes]

Heck, the other "golden age" of popular music was from around 75-84, when Madonna and her ilk hit the airwaves. You had the punk/heavy metal revolution followed immediately by a revolution caused by MTV. MTV was so desperate for material they'd play anything anyone sent in as long as it wouldn't get them fined. Try to imagine someone like the Talking Heads coming out in today's world if you doubt it. Then again, you'd have to have a music channel on TV that actually played music.

News flash...

[Lendrick]

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.

Weird, I just bought a CD

[Slur]

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!
.

Too many reasons for the fall

[u19925]

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. .....

Re:Stage Artists will do fine, perhaps even better

[Thaelon]

You really don't know *anything* about musician's lives, do you?

Maynard James Keenan from Tool has been quoted as saying they could get by just fine without producing any albums. So, there's proof that some artists will indeed do fine.

Re:shhh... can you hear that sound?

[splodus]

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...

This is a Good Thing,Really!

[flyneye]

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.

Re:Stage Artists will do fine, perhaps even better

[king-manic]

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.

Re:shhh... can you hear that sound?

[quarrelinastraw]

Bands have been manufactured long before the 1980s. Peter, Paul, and Mary is one well-known example. I'm sure many of the nice sounding groups from the 40s and 50s were created by producers as well.

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.

Re:shhh... can you hear that sound?

[quag7]

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