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Record Labels Struggle With the Album's Demise
Supplying yet more evidence, if more were needed, of the dire straits the music business increasingly finds itself in — reader cphilo sends us a NYTimes article about the death of the album as the mainstay of profit, and the record labels' struggle to adopt to the new realities. The article notes the trend of the labels signing artists for a single song, maybe two, and a ring tone.
Oh wait...
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
no kidding, you can't record one good song with 45 minutes of filler and get people to throw down 15 bucks for it now that we can buy them individually at a proportional price :P it's unfortunately rare to find an LP that really follows through, but I suspect that it's always been that way and the only thing that's changed is the economics of distribution.
Most of us here knew this was eventually going to happen. I for one am glad to see that the music industry is looking at change in their business model. Now if they'd just leave ten year old girls with disabled mothers alone...
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
The reason why sales are down on albums is cause they were always inflated in the past. They used to sell CD singles at full price (lets say $10), the album that would follow later in time (also priced at $10) with a total sale of $20. Now you can buy the single for a $1 and if you want the full CD for $10, with a difference of $9, thats where alot of the profit has been lost. Those are just made up numbers but it gets the point across.
I rarely listen to one entire album. In most, there are a few good songs I like and I'll add those to my playlist, in addition to particular songs from others.
It seems to me that they went out of their way to kill the album. You can select almost any album from the Big Four[Sony BMG, EMI, Universal, Warner] these days and pick out which 2-3 songs they will release on radio and make videos for, and which 10 are utter crap just there to fill the CD.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
It's what happens when the businesses neglect their customers for too long.
Who'd pay $10 - $15 for a CD of third rate material with effects and dynamic range compression 'compensating' for lack of artist talent?
Over exposed, radio played acts are the only ones who need to sign two song contracts and make it into the top twenty. I still enjoy entire albums, from REAL artists. Of course, I'm a fan of concept albums... Maybe if more musicians made their albums one cohesive piece of art we wouldn't have these problems. Oh wait, our short attention span guarantee that we would.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Real bands still make whole albums that rock all the way through.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yeah they are in Dire Straights. They need to Rush and abandon their Cheap Tricks and keep their Doors open to a new Genesis, or get crushed under the Rolling Stones of progress. One day when you mention the RIAA, your buddy will respond, "The Who?"
With all songs costing about the same, there's no reason to buy the album.
If the "hit" costs $8 and you like 3 other songs for $1 each, you'll gladly pay $10 for the album.
If record stores want to make money, put the album out for purchase before releasing singles, and price the album and individual tracks at whatever the market will bear.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Maybe the music industry should bring back the 45 records from yesteryear? Retro tech is always cool...
I'll just start by saying that I'm a musician and a music lover and that an album that is put together as a piece of art is a beautiful thing - but just like any art that's put together for commercial purposes, an album that's designed as a vehicle for a few singles and some filler songs isn't.
Not every artist has the ability to release 50-70 minutes of truly compelling art, and most of the buying public is more than happy to listen to singles. Conversely, some artists seem to be constricted by the 78 minute limit of CDs.
It would be a good thing if the music industry was flexible enough to let artists release what they wanted (or wanted to sell) in whatever format (in terms of single/EP/album) as opposed to this 2-years = new full-length album mentality, some artists might like to release a single every few months, while some release an EP every year and others an album every few years.
"damnit, trolley I want in your signature." - Elburrito
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Large conglomerate music companies may lose here, but the small independent cannot help but win. While the RIAA and it's members keep struggling to find a way back to the good old days, the independents are already thinking out of the box; creating and using new methods of marketing.
I cannot help but think this is a win win for the majority of the musicians out there, and for the consumer, while a lose, lose for the conglomerates. I suppose I'll survive the transition......
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
I don't see how that's marketable - want to listen to a single song that isn't associated with a big-budget production such as a tour-backed album? Go get your fix at an indie music site...
Please tell me again why we *need* labels? It's reasonably straightforward for an artist to record, mix, produce, and market a song, album, ringtone, or whatever. Even I could do a reasonable job, and I'm certainly not even a "prosumer."
For movies, with the big production budgets, I can see how Big Business still needs to be involved (for a few years yet, anyway). For music, though -- I just don't see how RIAA et al benefit the artists.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
The music industry used to be BUILT on the sales of singles. It really wasn't until the mid-to-late 80s that they started focusing on trying to sell entire albums.
It was the CD that did it. The "coolness" of CDs made everyone kind-of forget about singles, and how handy they were. And they were more expensive, which the record companies obviously loved. Yeah, they did/do sell CD singles, but it's obvious that they don't want anyone to buy them. They're overpriced, and there aren't many of them available.
But at this point, CDs are NOT cool. They're old and busted, and dull. And they're STILL expensive. More expensive.
The record companies just can't give it up, though. They had this 20-year-run of making WAY more money than they had any right to (thanks to the CD revolution), but now it's over, and they're trying to freeze the clock.
Even a Republican must see how wrong using unfair taxes to suppress competition is and how the recording industry must be stopped.
Record some music and I'll at least give it a listen. Too much of the stuff nowadays is fake plastic over-hyped crap. Who needs talent anyway?
Is it any wonder nobody is buying it?
My latest musical purchase was a genuine old-fashioned CD, and the entire album (Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno) holds up just fine. My Spanish-English dictionary says "clavame" means "nail me", but after seeing the video I assume it has a metaphorical meaning not unlike what it means in English...
...laura
There is always live performances, piracy will never kill that for the artists. I wonder if record labels get a cut of that.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
What do you expect, they raised the prices when they brought out CDs with the promise that once the technology get efficient the price would come down. Then later. They kept raising the price (even for older tunes, try to buy something good form a pop band in the 80s, usually still $17).
So people are limited to choose either:
- an inflated new album price ($17+)
- a reasonable priced album if bought used ($10 or less, but no added profit to music biz)
- buying only the (good) songs people want on-line ($2 to $4 depending on artist, sometimes only $1)
- Of course this is very limited people have to have the right computer, OS, listening devices, etc.
- tape off the air ($0, low quality) digitize etc.
- piracy ($0 low karma)
The obvious would be to actually make the albums more affordable, but that seems way beyond the concept of the music industry.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I'm kind of tired of hearing these discourses on old business models, thinkoftheartists, and other old school crap. Sure, perhaps that doesn't make a lot of sense point blank, but lets face it, the CD and DVD and now other media types give artists and the **AA member businesses the method to create art that is truly worth $18. The fact that they don't get it is reason enough for them to slowly die off.
Has anyone else caught wind of the NIN viral marketing that they are doing right now for a new album? They "GET IT" with how to use the new media and Internet. If the **AA actually got it we would not be having news stories like this. The **AA is losing, they are luddites of the new age, they are consciously killing themselves. If they would simply get on with it, create content that people would want to pay for, we could all rest easier.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I would tend to agree with Morari here.
Ya, it's becoming harder and harder to rip-off people with one hit single squished in a jewel case full of dog shit. And to that I raise my pint glass.
That said, independent labels and independent acts NEED to release solid albums since they're not as well known.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Most bands that are interested in the art of music, rather than the business of music, make albums that are greater than the sum of their parts. The album has a theme and this changes from album to album - this can't be appreciated if one listens only to the singles.
So yeah, the mas-produced teeny-pop bands and their labels move towards the single de jour, but real bands will continue to make albums.
This leads to an idea I had recently. The only distinguishing value of "big" bands is the fame that fans give them - there are plenty of unsigned/indie bands that are just as good/accessible, but are unknown. The value that RIAA attributes to their songs is merely the demand that fans give it - the songs themselves are (generally) not unique or valuable. That's why their lawsuits are so bogus - they're suing fans for the value that fans give songs - not for any value that the songs have.
This is why sites like eMusic (or youtube, etc) are great - they're cheap, and their product is just as good (if not better), but just isn't as well known and hence doesn't have the same "value".
As I mentioned in another topic, I think this is insane but apparently the RIAA thinks CDs should cost $34 each due to inflation...
Ridiculous. $10 I paid gladly, $12 was ok, but when every album costs $17+, I ain't buying.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
I personally love albums. Even if it's not a "concept" record, it still displays a moderate range of ideas, if it's not a shit band, and can be fun to just put on and lie around and listen to.
But what I HATE more than anything are all these "indie" bands making epic prog-rock or quiet folk albums of boring, repetitive music as a reaction to the death of the album. Dear sweet lord, I know that the idea of singles isn't that great, but an entire album without any single songs on it is even worse.
I'm looking at you, Mars Volta. And you two, Bright Eyes. Putting people to sleep is not entertainment or art.
I think it's the advertising that stymies people.
You're right: actually producing a fairly good "album" (which, in today's world, means a few songs, sometimes related in some way, generally involving the same principal musicians) really isn't that hard, if you have talent. It's a few thousand dollar ordeal at most, and you could probably do a passable job -- equal to professional job a few decades ago -- with equipment most people have plus a few hundred bucks. (Again, assuming talent. But there are a lot of talented amateurs out there.)
But where I've seen band after band falter, is in the advertising and promotion. It's getting the songs and the name of the band out to potential listeners in the first place -- that's the one place where the labels still have an advantage over most independent efforts. They pick a few bands that they think match what people want to hear, and promote them aggressively, pushing them on the radio, on MTV, on shows like Saturday Night Live, and get the songs into advertisements and movies where they get exposure.
Online and 'viral' marketing have helped some bands, but viral marketing is tough to "do" effectively. There's no real recipe that you can run through and have it work. In contrast, as the 90's "manufactured pop" demonstrated, you can get people to listen to anything if you just promote the living hell out of it, day in and day out.
In time, I think the labels are going to fade, but it's going to take a long time and they're not going to go quietly. Technology -- cheap DAW software, CD burners, and inexpensive ADC interfaces -- have lowered the barrier to entry involved in actually recording music. But letting people know that you exist as a band, and getting your songs out to the people who might want to pay for it (or come to a concert, buy a t-shirt, etc.), is still tough, and the labels have some advantages left.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
2nd-rate movies tend to move to the cheap houses a LOT quicker than quality movies, if they don't fall off the silver screen altogether.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Man, I would kill to make it to G3 with Petrucci and Gilbert. What was the set list like?
Of course some albums are full of crappy music, but for 1 or 2 songs. Nevertheless there are great bands that actually make albums like a work of art, an opera, or a movie. I'm thinking about bands like Pink Floyd of course (ok it was on LPs, but still), or Mogwai, King Crimson, Flower Kings, The Mars Volta, Tangerine Dream, etc... You would never thing of shuffling those albums. Would you think about shuffling scenes in a good movies (ok, except for David Lynch) ?? An album is a fixed format, and something that good bands did explore and appropriate. It's much more than one song... I'm afraid that the song, or even worst the rigtone as a standard, will make music even more a meaningless product. Anyways, good musicians will still do good albums. And if the CD-74mn limit disappears, they'll find something better. Just my 2 cents, and a old's way music lover.
The real question is this: is this really a bad thing? Suppose, hypothetically, that the RIAA (and it's evil sister the MPAA) both went the way of the dinosaurs, and artists could not score obscene amounts of money for a snappy tune that happens to make fingers snap and toes tap? Suppose further that an "artist"'s income depended as it once did, on talent, or failing that, skill, or failing that, tenacity? How could anyone, let alone the
I'll hasten to point out that we do not need either of these groups to distribute music or movies anymore. I don't know about any of you, but I'm all set to skip and dance and sing to the tune of "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead!" when either of these (or indeed, any such) organzations commence daisy elevation.
~Hal
you're interested in people that record albums, not singles. Those recordings will always be around because there's a market for them. A big one.
I take it the article just means less recordings by the VH1/E!/American Idol crowd. I think we can all support that.
Let's talk about the larger picture here, viz. the death of IP as we know it. The writing is on the wall: in virtually every segment of the IP marketplace, distribution networks are springing up faster than anyone can police them. First it was software. Then came music. Movies within the last three years. Television within the last year and a half. Not only will these networks continue to grow, but the rate of their growth it set to increase as more people acquire broadband and as more people get online in general. Say what you will about the morality aspect, the fact is that information is going to become increasingly free over the next ten, twenty years, to the extreme detriment many mature, powerful industries that we became accustomed to dealing with over the course of the 20th century. No one under the age of ten today even remembers a time when a large portion of the media they consume wasn't available for free if you knew where to look--which, as we all know, 10-year olds have an uncanny knack for. A whole generation raised in that environment; man, that is really going to shake things up. It's going to be an interesting ride.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Can't say I pity the RIAA: I used to buy CDs for $11 a piece and kept thinking that the prices would surely come down (market forces, supply and demand, right?) At $17 I think not just twice, but five times about buying a disc because it's obviously been a planned rip-off all these years.
Along comes the internet and a new way of getting the word out and distributing music. Does the RIAA take advantage of lower (read: "nil") media costs? Do they dance with joy at all the chance of ridiculously low advertisement costs? Do they use P2P as a kind-of word of mouth mechanism? No, they sue us. Really f---ing bright idea, that, and then they wonder why I vote with my money and buy absofriggenlutely *nothing* anymore from any artist associated with the RIAA? Sheesh!
Not sure what the IAA stands for but I know the 'R' stands for 'Retarded'.
--Udo.
Please die already.
Yours truly,
Earth
Some people like bands that do concept albums, some people don't.
They're two entirely different styles of music. It's like the difference between a symphony written for full orchestra and something written for a four-part chamber ensemble. I don't think that many people would really argue that the orchestral piece is inherently 'superior,' in any sort of quantifiable way besides personal taste, to the chamber piece, they're just different. (And, more to the point, many composers have written for both.) It's as bizarre as saying that novelists are inherently "better" writers than essayists, because they produce longer stories. It doesn't make sense.
The three- to four-minute "song" has proved to be an incredibly popular format for popular music over the last century, and I don't think you can chalk that up entirely to the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry." Probably a lot of credit goes to radio, but if people really hated individual songs, there's no way they'd be as popular as they are.
It's a format people enjoy, and there's nothing inherently better or worse about it than a long album. To be honest, I'd argue that an artist that could communicate effectively in either format was probably better at their trade than one who's mostly restricted themselves to either 70-minute concept albums or 3-minute ditties, but it's really an academic point.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wouldn't know about that....
:P
I always download whatever album that catches my eye. If I listen to it, and I find that I like the songs, I'd go and buy the CD. It's my way of showing appreciation for the artist, and I have a CD collection. If the songs are crap - as most are - I would delete it anyway, so no problem.
I have always hated the fact that I couldn't listen to the whole album before making a decision on whether or not to buy the album. I'd buy it based on one hit single, and find that the rest of the songs suck, and end up not listening to it at all.
I would honestly say that being able to download music actually made me buy MORE cds than before, because now I get to listen to a lot more artists and find which ones I like. Before bittorrent, I would just avoid CDs, assuming most of them are crap, as they normally are.
Good, or bad? And posting anonymously for very good reason
It's not that they have to grapple with the fact that album sales will be down as some kind of weird thing that happened with digital music.
The reality is that they've been pushing singles for airplay for som many years, that they have created 'albums' that have a few singles, and the rest is just songs. For most artists, there is really no crafting of an album. The reason that CD sales for releases from the 60's and 70's have remained pretty consistent is that they are albums. I can't envision listening to a number of songs without hearing them in their sequence from good albumcraft.
But for most of the artists on the radio today, forget it. Can you imagine listening to some of the insipid crap they fill CDs with these days, again and again? They've be better off picking six good songs to string together, rather than three singles and eleven waste of time tunes.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Not a politically correct thing to ask - but has anyone else ever wondered if the labels deliberately promote genres of music that are less appealing to the majority of file sharers ie. white young men?
It's the only explanation I can think of for R&B
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
For new singers, most people don't know, or cannot be bothered to download/pirate their new songs, and the only way to listen to those songs is to buy them.
What? Are you high? That doesn't make sense.
If a particular song becomes popular, it will get pirated. There's no way to get popularity while also avoiding pirates. If you want to not be pirated, you could try to not be popular, but that's sort of the opposite of what anyone trying to sell CDs or promote concerts wants. You'll never make money if you drop an act the second it becomes popular enough to get on Bittorrent -- that's totally counterproductive.
What you're suggesting, I think, is that promoters and labels will record a few songs with an artist, and then drop them the second that the become popular and their stuff gets pirated, which is also the time when people would start buying merchandise and showing up to concerts (and when the artist could probably go out on his own and start making money on said merch and tickets). Nobody's just going to walk away from their investment of time and money at that point.
First, piracy isn't that bad: it doesn't stop people from buying CDs completely, as evidenced by the fact that I can still walk into a store and buy them. Second, even if it was, there are ways to make money off of popularity besides selling CDs. Concert tickets and merch are just the tip of the iceberg. Even the most stogy labels have to realize this (and if they don't pursue them, it's only because they're already making enough off of CDs, furthering my point that the piracy isn't as bad as you seem to think it is).
Popularity is an advantage unto itself, and if a label or promoter dumped a band that was on the cusp of becoming phenomenal, then certainly someone else would step in and pick it up. (And companies that did this repeatedly would probably end up out of business in short order.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Die scumbags, die!!!
Bingo. For a large portion of the population, and probably for a majority of the dollars being spent on music, a song's quality is a function of the frequency with which they're hearing it and the places they're hearing it from. Being a part of a niche market is no good because few people go out of their way to find good music, they wait for it to come to them.
On the other hand the blunt force trauma method of assaulting the listener via repetitive radio plays, television promos, etc, conveys to the listener that this is "the new song" from "the new band", and instantly adds a level of perceived quality to the music because certainly it is impossible that everybody would be going crazy about this new band unless they were pretty good...right? And if this unknown band was any good they'd be heard on a mainstream source by now...right?
No one gives a second thought that a musician might not want to alter their art to suit the "lowest common denominator" market that popular music must appeal to. Luckily we are quickly moving to a system where good music can find you on the Internet even if you're hardly trying, and the public will inadvertently relieve the RIAA of its stranglehold and abusive domination of not an industry, but a form of art and human expression.
audioLibre - freedom of music
Do you pay more to see 300 or Zodiac than you pay for Wild Hogs? Nope.
Well, sort of: I was willing to pay $8.50 to see 300 and Zodiac, and I might be willing to see $SOME_CRAPPY_MOVIE for a quarter (particularly if they sold beer at the same time), but the theater doesn't show movies for a quarter, so I only go to the ones that I think won't suck.
They sell them for the same price, but I'm only willing to go to a few of them for the price they charge.
Likewise, I only buy the tracks that I really like at $1 a song. (Actually, I hardly buy any, because I think $1 a song is still highway robbery for DRMed music, but theoretically I'd be willing to buy some songs for a buck.) If they were $0.05 a song (like, say, a certain Russian site I won't mention), I'd probably never buy just a single song off a CD, I'd just get the whole disc just on the off-chance that another song might be decent. Conversely, at $8 a song, I'd probably never buy it regardless of how good it was -- I'd just sit and hum to myself, or listen to music that I already own.
The problem isn't variable pricing per se, the problem is that the record labels want to implement variable pricing with $1/track as the price floor, for the crap tracks, when they should really be thinking about that as a price ceiling, for the very best ones.
But anyway, aside from that, I'm agreeing with you.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
First, if your standard for new, good albums is really that low, you have probably been listening to nothing but what the major labels try to shove down your throat. There are plenty of new concept albums out there, and even more that lack an overarching story or theme but still stand out as fantastic works when taken as a whole. You can certainly find dozens of new albums that are more than just a couple good songs and some filler. You just have to look elsewhere than the latest Justin Timberlake or Gwen Stephani disc.
But mainly I wanted to comment on your statements about marketing. It seems that bands can make a decent living without advertising, but they have to have something pretty unique. Then with a little time and some well placed live shows, they tend to develop a following with no major advertising of their own. I know the last five or six new bands I've found have all been through word of mouth. Sure, they're not as big as top 40 bands, but they have a devoted fan base that's far less fickle than the masses that like someone simply because they're the "next new thing".
Maybe it's the music snob in me, but I tend to think that the only bands that really need marketing to survive are those that aren't much good to begin with, or want to be bigger, faster than good music will get you on its own. In the first case the marketing is counterproductive (blocks air-time and brain space that could be used by better bands), and in the second it seems like all the advertisement does is turn a band with potential into a one-hit-wonder that goes on to release a couple mediocre follow-ups and then implode. Even a great band can never match the insane expectations set by a marketing-driven surge of popularity, because 3/4 of the crowd will move on to the next new face, and the label will push for a repeat instead of letting the music mature.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Bands used to get signed, for example, to a 3-album contract, spanning a few years. But now the music biz wants to/needs to be able to dump artists fast, so now they're switching to contracts for only a couple of songs and a ringtone. I.e. temp workers -- no commitment, no loyalty, no being able to call a company or label your "home". Because no one really wants you, for anything other than just a casual, short-term relationship. Forget "careers" in the recording industry.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
How do i tag this 'cry-me-a-fricken-river'?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
This might work, however, I suspect that people might just listen to the 64kbps version and never buy the high-quality version, because they don't care about (or won't pay for) quality. I've listened to some really dreadful stuff that's originated on P2P networks (compression artifacts, audible clipping, tape rumble, etc.), and a lot of people just don't seem to notice how bad it is, or care. I'm not talking about audiophile-grade differences here, I mean music that literally sounds like it was played out of a AM radio inside a 88-gallon oil drum, as recorded by a Fisher Price tape deck. And people have this on their iPod and think it's just fine.
So I think that you might find your market narrowed only to people who care about sound quality, which is small (for pop music, anyway, based on my unscientific observations).
Furthermore, if the quality of the free version was degraded enough to cause a large number of people to think that the high-quality version was a significant improvement, then the people who are going to pirate, are just going to pirate the HQ version.
So overall, I'm not sure that you've really deterred any piracy. If your "LQ" version is too good, people -- pirates and honest folks alike -- won't buy the HQ version and just stick with what's free; if it's too crappy, then it'll be ignored by people who are going to pirate, and they'll just trade the HQ version instead, as if the LQ one hadn't existed. Now, given those two scenarios, it's the latter one that's more desirable, since it really doesn't hurt you (versus not releasing a free version at all), plus maybe some people (who won't pirate) will hear the song from the LQ version and go on to purchase legit copies. But there's danger in providing a LQ version that might compete with the version you make money from, because it will cut into legitimate sales.
I think, overall, the 'solution' to the 'piracy problem' is not to view it as a problem. If you don't try to sell your music as a product, but instead view it as an advertising vehicle that gets people to come to your shows and buy your merchandise, then suddenly someone who puts your band's tracks up on Bittorrent is doing you a favor rather than harm. (And, you can even turn CDs from a simple can of easily-pirated bits, into non-duplicable merchandise, just by signing it and marketing it as an "autographed copy.")
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
About 30 years ago, Boston self produced their first album and it was a huge hit. In those days, the state of the art was still reel to reel tape recorders.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Buried in the article was an interesting idea from the record companies themselves: instead of being the channel, they'd morph into more of a fan club model.
That's a great idea, but they should go one step further.
The main problem for record companies is that the record company, for the most part, is not the brand - the artist is. The artist is what's promoted, etc. What would be better, from the record company point of view, is if they had a whole bunch of sub-labels, all of which have their own genre/style/sound/whatever.
Then, you'd know that you like the stuff coming out of a label, because all their stuff was the style you like.
It used to be like this in the old days, where a label like Blue Note would have a whole lot of good jazz, or Elektra Nonesuch had good classical. I knew people that would buy everything that EN put out.
Combine that with a subscription service (or music club, cd-by-mail thing I guess) and suddenly you not only have a business model, you have a core group of consumers that are committed to your label - not your artitst. That subscriber base is a guaranteed revenue stream that you can use to hunt down more stuff that your subscribers want.
Will it lead to the homogenization of the music industry? Who cares? It's already freaking homogenized!
It might make smaller players more viable because as a botique subscription music company you have a guaranteed revenue stream with no distribution overhead (except for the overhead you want). You can budget, plan, and not worry as much about the next payroll.
Ideally you'd have a third-party doing the fulfillment, so all you have to do is find acts that your subscribers might like.
It's interesting to think about, but finding that much talent would be difficult. No matter what people say, there isn't that much talent out there.
You'd rather they had 7 year contracts? Wasn't that a common term for indentured servitude?
Now they can get a short term contract, get popular, ditch the label, and actually get paid for their work.
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Bonus tracks that are only available on the European or Japanese "Limited Edition". Or a compilation of Greatest Hits with one or two new songs. All designed to make fans pay album prices or more (have you seen the mark-up for imports?) for two or three new tracks. Being able to purchase per track will hopefully put an end to such devious practices*.
*Many labels still do market segmentation geographically as far as I know.
Forty odd years ago, The Archies was session musicians - it wasn't actually a real 'band' until the teenieboppers started to ask who the hell they were.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Albums -- well crafted albums -- are the only thing I am interested in. What shall I do with a single song?! An album is more than just a collection of single songs. It is the arrangement of the songs, their choice, how they fit together, how the album begins, how it develops, how it ends ... and then of course all the cover, the original CD ... that makes an album an album and important for me to posses. If they would just sell them at a reasonable price (~10, 15 max).
And: in case they just would produce such albums. Nowadays the most of the albums feel like loose collections of songs, one popular one and rest rubbish. Guess why I didn't buy anything for the last 5 years? (No, I did not download since then...)
Have to disagree! The companies that make up the RIAA have been viciously screwing artists in the ass since day one, while ripping off consumers in the process.
Crucifixion is too good for them.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
"If your "LQ" version is too good, people -- pirates and honest folks alike -- won't buy the HQ version and just stick with what's free; if it's too crappy"
So turn it into advertising. Have a DJ put bumpers around it. At the beginning have a voice announce it like a DJ, talking over the record, and as the song ends, have the same voice announce the artists again, tell the listener the record label, and even spell the name of the band.
It worked in radio, why not online?
Why not at least try it for a bunch of bands to see?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
CDs came along, they released their product on CD and had a huge sales boom. But CDs can be copied onto tape, you cry! How can it be, if they release their music on CD it will be instantly stolen???? It wasn't, shock horror, people bought the CDs rather than copy it from their friends.
Now MP3 players come along and not one of those marketing genius' thinks that maybe they should be selling MP3s?
No, it might be stolen if we sell it, so we'll just sit here and moan about how badly we're doing.
There's even watermarking solution if they want them protected, but there's little point if they're not even going to TRY to sell MP3s. Selling some other format and hoping their product is so special that people will all switch is wishful thinking. They should get with the game.
...just not the manufactured pop albums they force on people.
But I can understand why people aren't buying the whole album when there is only one good song on it.
> It's a fairly limited market now, made up of DJs and insane people.
I resemble that remark because not only do I have thousands of LPs, I own and sell high end turntables, tonearms, cartridges and accessories. And hey, guess what, the market demand is steady, albeit not large.
It's kind of funny how things have come full circle after all these years of the CD being touted as "perfect sound forever". CD players and the like have become very, very good compared with what we had 20 years or more ago, though. Some contenders for state of the art in CD playback feature USB inputs; ironically a new one I have coming soon that has a USB input uses new old stock tubes in the output stage.
I can only surmise that every label is completely staffed by idiots. The reason CDs don't sell anymore is because they don't sign BANDS. They sign vacuous silicon teens masquerading as bands, who can't write, read, sing, or play actual music.
Imagine if Ford started selling cars that didn't actually drive, AT ALL. Nobody would buy Ford.
These people are fucking idiots. If you keep putting out cookie cutter band clones that don't actually do MUSIC, how are you going to sell MUSIC?!?
WOO WOO! HERE COMES THE FUCKING CLUE TRAIN!!!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
There is always live performances, piracy will never kill that for the artists. I wonder if record labels get a cut of that.
On the economics of the music business:
Steve Albini
Courtney Love
Steva Vai
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The record companies just can't give it up, though. They had this 20-year-run of making WAY more money than they had any right to (thanks to the CD revolution), but now it's over, and they're trying to freeze the clock.
;)
I decided to freeze the clock a few years ago.. this MP3 revolution seems to be quite nice. at most i will give into a new format as it gets more accepted
s/©//g
Imagine if the artist only released their 3 songs for people to buy. Now go to their gig...
"How were the Arctic Monkeys?"
"They were only on for 15 minutes"
"But that's because they only have 3 songs that anyone knows"
Seriously, any real fan of a artist knows that there are better songs on the album. Bling by The Killers or Shake Those Windows by Athlete are two examples that spring to mind.
Summation 2
Promoting a new small business is not a new challenge. Musicians can do what other businesses do; take a small business loan, and use that to pay for marketing and promotion services by a promotion company. That would be much preferable to the current system where all of a band's output is owned by the label, and they get a few pence in the pound back from sales. If they absolutely must tie themselves to a label, there are outfits like magnatune and cdbaby who don't absolutely rape the bands for every penny. Internet promotion is not to be sneezed at either (just look at the Arctic Monkeys) and that's virtually free!
The major label record companies distort so many other markets it's not funny. CD production, concert hall hire, radio play, online radio, DRM in vista, itunes etc; all these areas would be cheaper, more accessible and better value for listeners (or gone entirely when it's DRM) if the major labels and their associate corporate entities like ticketmaster and clearchannel didn't have such a death-grip on the throat of the industry. They currently act as gatekeepers, though that role is disappearing, and they desparately want to hold onto it.
Remember, the RIAA's tactics are just what is demanded by Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner. They are to blame for the piss-poor state of music today. If there's any justice, they will become as hated as the RIAA; and eventually fail and die in the marketplace because of it. Long live the indies!
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Yes, it is the music snob in you. To use an irrefutable example, just look at The Beatles. Just because they were marketed out the ass and probably thrust into the spotlight a little early doesn't make them a poor band. What it did do is expose them to a larger audience. Most people in the US wouldn't have known about The Beatles without marketing, no matter how good they were. Look at a band like The Kinks, who weren't marketed in the US and have almost no name recognition among average people here, even if they were just as good as The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, etc. So yes, good bands will probably survive and endure without marketing, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. Most of the great artists of all time were over-marketed. To stay with the British theme, the bands I listed above probably wouldn't have even formed if it wasn't for American blues and rock and roll being sold to them by the record companies. Just because the record companies try and push complete shit a lot of the time doesn't mean that the concept of marketing and selling music itself is bad.
just sell your High Quality track for a reasonable price and make it easy to get.
You'll find that most people wont bother getting a pirated copy, and those that do would never pay for it anyway.
True, copyright is so 20th century.
The Internet and digital media have so much potential to truly revolutionize our society, but most of that potential is subsumed by the old-world intellectual property view.
Everywhere, instead of embracing the potential of this revolution, you continue to see digital analogs of old-world models.
For example, libraries. The digital libraries that I have seen still require that you "check out" books, and they use DRM to enforce that. Why the artificial imposition of the old-world library's limitation to the digital version?
There is absolutely no reason why a digital library should be at all concerned about "checking out" digital books, because they never really have to be "checked back in". There is no physical object involved, yet they continue to focus on creating digital representations of systems for managing physical objects. This artificial scarcity limits the potential that the digital revolution created.
Even the physical library clings to old models when it comes to digital media.
My local library has sections of CDs and DVDs. Sure, you can check them out, take them home and watch or rip them. But why? Why can't the library just give me direct digital access to the content without having to deal with physical media? It's the same result in the end.
The artificial scarcity model has reached the end of its life. It's past time to wake up and smell the revolution.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Looks to me as it they should be considering selling:-
- 'All you can eat' user licenses.
- Content licenced for reproduction by the licencee, and consumption by folks licenced as per 1.
- Selling licences for file sharers
What they seem to be doing at the moment is hurling themselves into disrepute by, in essence, running a barratry racket. This will, without a shadow of doubt, cause them to go broke and out of business. Whether or not that is a benefit to society as a whole would be an interesting subject for debate.To adopt to the new realities ? WTF ?
Well it's true for almost anything nowadays, alot of the margins you pay for anything are spent on marketing, and I am not only speaking about expensive stuff, even in your supermarket it is already the case ...
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
The record companies are suffering because their business plans and practices are increasingly short sighted. It used to be that artists were treated as long term investments, being signed for multi album deals, whereas now artists get deals for a song or two. It's another turn in the downward spiral of disposable culture that Hollywood has sold us, and the cycles keep getting shorter.
It's horribly inefficient to operate this way. Instead of going to the grocery store once a week to buy everything you need for the coming week, you make a separate trip for every single item you need. To be even more extreme, go from buying a sack of rice every week, to a cup of rice every day, to a grain of rice every minute. Spend all your time buying rice, and you'll have no time to eat it, and starve.
(Never mind that you can starve anyway by eating nothing but rice, but I digress.)
That is exactly what eMusic does. Granted they are distributing non-RIAA labels, but for your example, substitute Naxos for EN, and you've got the same thing.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
If sales continue to drop, the record companies will soon be making a loss instead of profits (even with their outrageous profit margins). That means that the financial muscle of the RIAA will be reduced and possibly, some of the big record companies will topple. This would make the world a much better place. Stop buying albums.
As someone who was there (I was nine when Please Please me came out) I saw just what they did. Sure, the first two albums were effectively boy band albums but once you get to Rubber Soul and Revolver then they're far, far more than that. It's also difficult from this perspective to understnd the impact of Sgt Pepper, an album you cannot, under any circumstances write off as a 'boy band' album. Suddenly popular music was being treated with respect, reviews in the London Times for example, and the musicians treated as artists.
Whatever you think of their sound they were as ground breaking as Elvis or Sinatra and without them you wouldn't have the music you have today.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I've always thought of the album as the artist's "work", and a single just one "scene" in it, if you will.
I think of albums like Sgt. Pepper, The White Album, That's The Way of The World, Purple Rain, What's Going On, Dark Side of the Moon, Kind of Blue, It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Electric Ladyland, etc, and am saddened at the thought of those being released simply as individual songs rather than works in and of themselves.
Many slashdotters have claimed that CDs only have one good song plus filler garbage (that's one of the common justifications given for piracy). I've almost *never* found that to be the case. Even when I've bought a CD just for one or two songs, I normally end up liking almost all of the other songs as well. Most CD's aren't in the league of the examples I give above, but most aren't utter trash either.
So I don't consider the demise of the album to be a good thing. I think it sucks, and this "new reality" that music companies must adjust to is not for the better, not by a long shot.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
This is precisely why places like Youtube are full of talentless, amateurish rubbish. The recording industry has, over the years, obliterated any incentive for talent by its corrupt methods. Only half-arsed tunesmiths with "connections" and mediocre musicians are getting work in the music industry, by and large - their work is tweaked, retouched, and canned. If you could taste it, it would taste like imitation Spam. People with real musical talent are frequently not in the business at all. Those that have had some nurturing are not using their abilities in public (no money in it). Instead they are holding day jobs and playing musical instruments/having their jam sessions at home in the evenings to relax.
As a result, the recording industry can't find talent (because it killed it off) and is stuck with ring tones and other crap.
If we kill off their business model (fingers crossed), then maybe people will once again appreciate the value of live performances and music will become an event, an experience, not merely the auditory equivalent of fast food.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
"I think it's the advertising that stymies people."
And the advertising is needed because of the other guys advertising. They pay payola so if you want to get on the radio, you pay payola. Monopoly protected markets end up that way; as there is noone else who can sell an equivalent cheaper product if you overspend on marketing, you end up with a market where a lot of the revenue is spent combating eachothers advertising efforts.
As the competition of the internet takes away the other guys advertising budget, and the flatter channels like social networking sites and personalized 'radio' channels take over, the relevance of the advertising effort decreases. You can still spend your revenue on advertising, but overspend and the only thing that will get you is less profit. The useful model for the work 'labels' do today changes into getting the band onto music services and social sites. A days work, and work for hire (a bit ironic, considering it wasnt that many years ago the labels wanted to make artists and composers part of it work for hire).
End result; a lot more of the total revenue of music sales goes to making music rather than marketing it. The revenue will be far more widely spread and over a longer piece of the long tail, we get a more varied and richer music culture and we all win.
Well, except the labels.
oh please!
what a load of crap.
artists that used to rely on albums are still doing so, and they are still selling.
i wish these people would clarify their statements, even at the behest of not getting their hysterical punchy story headline.
popular music artist's albums are dying.
that's because they were only ever out there to make a few extra bucks, and they are filled with the hit singles and then a bunch of shoddy filler material that no-one ever rated anyway. is it all that surprising, now that it's easier, and more economical to buy just those songs that you like, to do just that? no.
real musicians are still doing just fine. they always used to concentrate on making the best albums they could (as opposed to just a few catchy songs), and they still do.
guess what? i bet they are selling just as well as they used to as well!
Well, at least Piero Scaruffi (a well known musical critic) seems to disagree with you:
Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason. They could not figure out why the Beatles' songs should be regarded more highly than their own. They knew that the Beatles were simply lucky to become a folk phenomenon (thanks to "Beatlemania", which had nothing to do with their musical merits). THat phenomenon kept alive interest in their (mediocre) musical endeavours to this day. Nothing else grants the Beatles more attention than, say, the Kinks or the Rolling Stones. There was nothing intrinsically better in the Beatles' music. Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney. The Stones were certainly much more skilled musicians than the 'Fab Fours'. And Pete Townshend was a far more accomplished composer, capable of "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia". Not to mention later and far greater British musicians. Not to mention the American musicians who created what the Beatles later sold to the masses.
The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic. If somebody had not invented "beatlemania" in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time to read a page about such a trivial band.
(Note that I do not agree completely with this, but at least it shows that the status of the Beatles as artistic geniuses is at least debatable)
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
You might (this is just a theory I have ...) be looking at things the wrong way. I wonder - have the music industry hoist themselves on their own petard?
For a long time from the beginning, singles were the lifeblood of the music industry. Songwriters, musicians, and performers were effectively the property of the record studio, indentured to turn out song after song after song after song. Take the next song off the pile from the songwriters, throw the studio musicians at it, and stand the current / next voice and face of the week up front to make the next single. Get enough together, and a studio could rotate them fast enough to have two or more different singles on the go each week - one at its peak, one on the way up, and another waiting behind it.
Young 'ns may not know this, but in the first heyday of the record industry - the 50's and 60's - people didn't have album collections - they had singles collections.
But then, somewhere around the late 50's - early 60's, the industry noticed that people became attached to artists - not songs, and not the studios. Studios took advantage of this, and started releasing whole albums of content - firstly as a compilation of hits, then adding a couple of new songs (which became the new singles for the next couple of weeks). What they didn't forsee was this slowing down the sales of singles. Eventually, to recapture those lost sales, artists - self contained artists, who could write & record their own stuff - were given a slightly longer leash; long enough to do their own thing with whole albums of content and build an even more loyal fanbase.
Loyalty to the artist had replaced loyalty to the studio. And there was much rejoicing...
Slightly later - it started in the mid-late 60's, hitting its stride in the 70's - the music industry realised that, despite the added $$$ they were getting up front from selling whole albums, this actually had the effect of slowing sales revenue. Sure, a top-selling album raked it in big to start with - but, with very few exceptions, there was a huge initial peak followed by a quick decline and long tail. Further causing grief was the fact that by the time they got around to releasing the next lot of singles from an album, most potential purchasers already owned it - and so were lost to the market.
Come the rise of the "2 good songs + 10 tracks of filler" album. This was the best of both worlds for the studios - 2 singles to sell + just enough reason for people to pay the extra for the album = single sales + album sales + a short "hot" time so they could rotate the next "big thing" into place quickly to start the whole cycle again.
Now, quickly ffwd to "modern" times. People are wise to the "2+10" formula of the average album, and are sick of it. Worse still, from the studios POV, they now have an alternative that shortcuts both the "release lots of singles quickly" and "release whole albums" formula - an alternative that started underground with IRC & FTP sites, hit the big time with Napster, was kept alive post-Napster by Kazaa/Limewire/Bearshare/etc, and continues today in the form of BT. The studios are struggling with the loss of singles and the loss of albums.
Where to now?
One obvious niche choice - ringtones. It's almost a new version of the singles formula - take lots of songs with "I want it now!" appeal, whack a top-dollar price on them, make them ridiculously simple to buy without the purchaser seeing the money leave their hands (until the next phone bill), and turn 'em over fast.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I listen to lots of band that have no major marketing and still put out beter music than most fo the "popular" bands out today. True the lables have the advantage, or at least had it before the internet. Today many artist are exposed due to P2P and other sources. I cant remember the last time that bought a "main stream" artist at a record store like Fye or some other place like that. I think that it was Candlebox way back in 1993...when the "post-grung" movement was in full marketing play. They were a prime example of that.
You're putting things out of perspective. The musical scene was completely different at the time and the Beatles pretty much (although not with their first albums as the poster above pointed out) single-handedly created modern pop music.
Of course hadn't they done it somebody else would have, the elements were there. But they did it first.
A lot of musicologists believe that turning moments in the 20th century music were jazz, rock and the Beatles.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I heard it on the wireless back in '82
lying awake i could only think of you.
And now I understand the supernova scene.
But this means that there's going to be a lot less filler, the musicians can spend more time on individual songs, they are beholden to the record company for considerably less time, the risks for the record label are smaller, and the quality and choice of music will improve, which will be good for the consumer.
Given that it is next to impossible to be objective about artistic merit I'll make two points which may, or may not, be significant.
- Despite it being fourty plus years since it was written the Beatles music is still played and their songs still covered regularly. Ray Davis may have been a better songwriter but, apart from posibly Waterloo Sunset and Lola, which of his songs can you list without having to look them up?
- On a purely personal note, as someone who has an extensive music collection and has worked in the music business, there are precious few other bands from the 60's which I still listen to. Tommy and Quadrophenia, both of which I bought when they came out, I now find pompous and overblown. I still like the Stones, a band I would place up there with the Beatles but I can't remember the last time I listened to the Kinks.
Whilst longevity and popularity do not neccessarily translate directly to artistic merit, they're definite pointers in that direction.init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I dont remember an album that i ever bought or listened that had more than 2 (often 1 and a half) songs that i liked from the 10-12 songs it had.
they were just pushing us ten times the product we wanted to buy.
all industry should adapt for the new trend of people buying ONLY the track they like. that would also save the bands a lot of wasted creativity on creating crap songs to fill an album.
Read radical news here
I feel like music in general (At least in the rock world) has degraded to such utter crap that we're lucky to even get one good song. People get to where they only buy an album because they used to love the band, I hear all the time people sort of wishing they wouldn't have wasted 20 bucks on an album and there's not any good songs on it, or maybe just 1.
the Political Inquirer
That's how I discovered Blind Guardian, for one. And subsequently bought all their albums (8 and counting).
Same for Nick Cave (13 and counting)...
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Personally, I always hated CD singles. For one thing, the whole point of the CD format was convenience, that is, being able to easily play the tracks you wanted. Having to change the CD for each 3-minute single was a PITA.
Another thing was that they were generally *way* overpriced and far more expensive than 7" vinyl, or cassette singles. Sometimes you could get them for £2 the first week they were out. But after that they were usually £3 on a good day or £4(!) otherwise. What a ripoff- and that was mid-90s money, taking inflation into account that'll be something like £5.50 (US $11.00) in today's money!!! I often bought the cassette versions, simply because they were much cheaper, despite the CDs probably costing less to produce. Yeah, CD singles often included countless extra tracks; but they were almost always crap or remixes, or whatever.
And I also hated the racks of plasticky, identical and soulless slimline CD cases. With a few exceptions, I made high-quality MP3 transfers of the songs that I still wanted to listen to, and sold most of my CD singles. 7" singles had a tactile romance about them, and fitted into their era. CD singles just smacked of digital overpricing with the pointless physicality of one piece of plastic crap per song, something that now seems really dated just 10 years later. Good riddance.
Back on topic, personally, I'm not bothered about the albums that contain two great hit tracks and ten pieces of filler, but I think that the true "coherent" album will probably survive in some form. Of course, there is always the risk of missing great album tracks, which I'm sure that a lot of us wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Of Tony. He didn't low the prices, so the Internet got him. RIAA should learn from that.
Music companies would love to see the end of 'artists' struggling to produce 15 tracks. Pound out a single, move on to the next 'artist'. Does anyone think 50cent didn't make 99% of his money and the record company's money from 'In Tha Club' and whole rest of the 'album' was just filler?
Conversation between old bastard RIAA guy, and Green Day:
[RIAA dude] Ok, here's the deal Green Day, we are giving you the privilege of signing an exclusive deal with us for two songs, and one ringtone. In return, we will let you keep a hefty 0.5% of all proceeds!
[Green Day] Um, are you serious?
[RIAA dude] I know! The deal IS too good to be true, but we feel you would be a valuable addition to our team. Oh yeah.. you also have to pay us 'contract' fees, and will pay our taxes for us because that's the way we do it.
[Green Day] That means we end up losing money AND paying your expenses?
[RIAA dude] hehe, yeah-- isn't that great? AND you'll be even bigger than you are now!
[Green Day] You've got to be stoned.
[RIAA dude] No, that's why we would make you do a ring tone. I was thinking something along the line of 'doo, dee dee doo dee doo wop'
[Green Day] 'doo, dee dee doo dee doo wop'? Are we really having this conversation?
[RIAA dude] Ok, tell you what. It's a big decision, and I'm sure you will agree it's a very generous offer. Oh, by the way... if you don't comply we will sue your grandmothers.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
I completely disagree. One has to do nothing other than LOOK at what artists are producing full length albums that follow through, versus artists of the one track variety.
They are not peers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
it always has been, even before napster artists pumped out one or two really good songs, and the rest was like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard. obviously there were exceptions, even today.
For me, when Napster came along, I could listen to samples of the whole album and decide if it was worth my money. I wish I had that ability back in the 80s & 90s.
Now technology has caught up with the recording industry, and it shows. People can find out what they are getting before they make their purchase, some wont even make a purchase because of being royally screwed over in the past. I will still buy a CD blind if it someone I trust to make good music, otherwise I will always test drive, and more often than not, I will walk away.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Back then, Virgin used to carry a good selection of CDs. However, for some reason they charged *more* for back-catalogue CDs than those in the charts. Mid-price ones were £8-10 or so, full price single CDs were £13-15, slowly creeping up over time. And circa (IIRC) 2000/01, the typical price for many full-price CDs trickled past the £15 limit (i.e. £16+). Taking inflation into account, in today's money that's £18+ (at the *very* least) or US $36. WE HAD THE $35 CD!!!!!.
Virgin sell *some* stuff cheaper now, and you can bet your life that if it weren't for competition from Amazon and filesharing, they wouldn't have done that. They're still a ripoff for many things, and I still wouldn't waste my time checking their back-catalogue if it's not in a Sale. Fopp have tonnes of back-catalogue stuff for £5-7 (unlike HMV, they sell it cheaper than the chart CDs) and Amazon have a *much* wider selection and better prices than Virgin.
F*** those outstandingly mediocre stores; since they gave over much of their space to DVDs, they don't even have that great a selection outside the chart stuff. Urgh.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The Beatles were pretty formulaic in 1963 or 1964.
Their finest hour didn't come until after they stopped touring. Then they wrote good music, every bit as good as The Kinks or the Rolling Stones. They weren't writing catchy 3 minute ditties then (which is perhaps a giveaway this critic wrote this piece in about 1964 or 1965, or perhaps hasn't listened to much Beatles stuff) - they were writing entire albums.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The problem with albums are... 90% of the music sucks. Because a band puts out 1 good song I like doesn't mean I'm willing to pay 20$ for the cd to get 1 good song and 14 that blow donkey balls. I'll just pay for my one song thanks... hell that was exactly why I bought singles tapes in the 80s.
There are a few exceptional albums that are an exception to the rule, but mostly... even the best of bands, have trouble putting out 15 tracks that most everyone is going to like. Hell even 5 tracks.
Shadus
After you put in the CD(or DVD or any disc!), hold the shift key until it stops spinning.
Yes you can disable "autorun" somewhat in properties but I have seen some situations where you get autorun'd anyhow.
The Real solution, however is ditching windows and going Linux.
Any flavour except MS Linux (Suse)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This argument has become something of a meme in the popular culture. People take for granted that "every album that comes out has only 2 good songs on it, and the rest suck/are filler" without even thinking about it or giving the album a chance and being able to speak with some authority on it. Or perhaps listening to some music critic trash the album and never giving it a chance yourself. As a fan of music in general I am tired of hearing it. It's nothing more than a thinly veiled insult at pop music, often lobbed by Gen X-ers (can I still use that term?) like myself looking back at the music we enjoyed growing up as being somehow better or different. As if back in "my day" we didn't have nearly the same amount of so-called overproduced crap as there is today. Like many people, I grew up listening to pop and then moved on as my tastes expanded.
I guess my point is that if you like a song by a particular artist a lot, you should give their album and/or their wider catalog a good hard look before you decide the other songs are crap. Buy the album, and sit down and give the entire thing a listen. Several times. Not skipping any songs. See what grows on you, if anything. I have listened to full albums by one hit wonders - some of which were actually pretty good, even to the point of lamenting the fact that they were never given a chance. Don't call an album "45 minutes of filler" just because the record companies want you to believe that. They don't want you to enjoy all twelve songs on the album because that means you will savor it a bit longer before buying again. The artist probably takes a different view.
Don't misunderstand, I agree that there is plenty of crap out there written and produced by people without a lot of talent. But there is a lot of legitimately good music out there that never gets a chance because of this old tired argument. Decide for yourself whether the music is any good, not what other people think or want you to believe. How many of us have "guilty pleasures" that we never admit to liking in front of our friends?
Of course the marketing department is part of what is driving the demise. I listen less and less to the radio and more and more to internet/other sources. The problem is best summed up by when Lenny Kravitz released his album with "American Woman" on it. I dislike his version of "American Woman" (I love the original). A couple of months after the album came out a friend of mine played the rest of the album for me (he pirated it off the internet). The only song I didn't like off the album was "American Woman"...the only song off the album I have heard on the radio. Why? because that is the song the Label pays the radio stations to play. I know that happens a lot. The record companies can't seem to get the idea that they should find out what people actually want to listen to. They keep trying to "market" me into wanting to listen to what they think will be the next "big thing".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There's always at least one or two songs in each of Ian and Company's albums that you can get a distinct picture
without any other part of the album. Most of the songs in Aqualung are that way with the very definite imagery
of Aqualung, Cross-Eyed Mary, Hymn 42, and Locomotive Breath. The names don't tell you precisely what the song's
about, but the song itself portrays a vignette of the entire story in Aqualung. The same goes for the bulk of
Warchild's songs (Though Sealion doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you hear it in it's proper place in
the album...heh...it's kind of a unique song...)- Queen and Country, Warchild, and Bungle in the Jungle do the
same sort of thing.
But, few could pull off ONE effectively album length song. Jethro Tull did it twice. I would have liked to
have heard the album Ian was striving for in the Chateau D'isaster Tapes (a flawed first pass at A Passion Play
had some interesting stuff in it...) But, I don't mind what we actually got in A Passion Play.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The labels aren't stupid, they aren't aiming only at pop culture but they do their damnedest to make it look like that. That's because the "counter-culture" has many people that feel more important by having non-mainstream tastes and would drop any band that "makes it big". The labels still take those counter-culture bands, prop them up, etc but they make sure they don't run on the pop radio so the people don't think they sold out. Look how many big label bands there are that never get played on the radio (hell, even Metallica doesn't get radio play outside of the odd Nothing Else Matters run). The radio is aimed at only one demographic and most bands don't fit that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
To me, the biggest source of resistance from the music industry lies in two areas. One is that their investment in CD-production facilities have been fully amortized and so the marginal cost of producing CD's is trivial. Protecting those CD profit margins is at the top of their list. I would venture that the CD-duplication plants are essentially worth scrap value at this point, except for marginal revenue from CD production. The second source is the traditional system where A & R people would spend tons of money on throwing promotional parties, expense account meals, payola and so forth. These people don't want to see their gravy train derailed. I talk about this more at Music CD sales shrinking constantly.
My other thought on this issue is that since buyers can now purchase their music by the song, they are not bothering to purchase the "filler" songs that in the past made up the bulk of the content on albums/CDs. There's no doubt in my mind that just about every adult American has bought a CD after hearing a song they liked and then were disappointed with the rest of the songs included. I personally have had the misfortune of purchasing several CD's due to a popular song only to find out that the style of the hit song was nothing like the artist's core style or any other songs on the CD. That means you, Goo Goo Dolls! The conclusion I draw is that the incumbent music industry infrastructure will inevitably shrink to the point where the fixed costs can be supported by what consumers are willing to pay for music.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Love it or hate them, the major labels had a marketing focus. They picked a select set of new albums to release each week/month/year which had a large effect in creating a musical culture. Look at the 60s, 70s or 80s for example. There was a certain "style" or culture created by the marketing of music. Today, as the majors lose their effect we've got hundreds of little media outlets pushing different individual bands and a huge range of music. It's hard to find a "channel" to tune into that you can really identify with and find consistency from and beyond that it takes a really long time to scour all of it. I read Pitchfork and Stylus and Coke Machine glow, listen to Last.fm and read some major magazines like Spin etc. It seems like the 2000s may go down as a nothing generation in terms of music, no mega stars, no shared musical culture. Michael Jackson Thriller was not the best record of all time but you could often to go a party (even today) and find yourself dancing with 20 other people who all knew and enjoyed the music. We might be sacrificing some benefits of shared culture with all this choice.
Sure it takes the energy and emotional feeling out of music but think about the remote control batteries it saves. So why can't the compression be done in the player as opposed to in mastering?
bands that make 1 "good" (radio friendly) song and fill the rest of the album with crap simply aren't worth my time. i just don't listen to shit like that. i listen to artists that make good *albums*, meaning artists that have the ability and talent to not only create a single great song, but several.
i don't care about the feel good hit of the summer that will be forgotten by november. i care about the actual decent music i'll listen to 10 years from now and still enjoy.
I am in complete agreement with the entirety of your post.
/I/ enjoy a song will always be the ultimate measure of a song's quality, and needing no more justification than that.
That said, what constitutes artistic merit? What is the value of having it? What purpose does music serve?
To be honest, "artistic merit" to me is just a differentiating feature that makes that product suit the tastes of a particular audience. Originality, complexity of composition, exclusive appreciation, take any of those factors, isolate, and maximize them in an absurd fashion and they don't seem very valuable in and of themselves. In more practical blends of these factors, we each enjoy them according to our preference.
Anyone can make original music, but it won't necessarily be good music just because it's original. People have been entertained by simplicity in the music as well, "Taps" for instance. You can complicate the composition increasingly until you have what amounts to white-noise for the listener. And exclusive appreciation is the hardest measure to appreciate a piece of music with. What if a song was only appreciated by one person, not even the originator, and no one else? Does appealing to an exclusive "elite" audience make that music and its genre better?
It seems to me, that the best measure for a song's success and value is how many people enjoy it, to what degree, and its significance on culture/history(I can't say how many historical events have a song as a major cause outside of music history.) And for me personally, how much
"...way to find good music,"
I love the attitude that if ti's popular then it's no good, but if it's niche it is good.
Laughable, really.
He is a hint: Most Niche artist suck-didly-uck flanders. Most nich Artists only appeal to a few people, ever.
Not that there is anythiong wrong with that, not am I implying the popular music is always greate. But people implying niche=good is really annoying.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's so rare to find these days a good album which you could listen to it from start to finish without getting bored.. I'm too young to be nostalgic, but in the old days you had albums like Sergent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Dark side of the moon, The Wall, Blonde on Blonde, Are you experienced?, Rumours and so on. Today you have 50 cent's or britney crap albums. Of course there are exceptions, but these are isolated cases. We need figures like Bob Dylan, John Lennon and the like to create quality albums and 50 cent might be good, but he could do better.
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
When any other band spends 175 weeks in the number one song position, get back to me. When another "boy band" has 15 number one songs, let me know. :
When some other band for THREE weeks has
The number 1 and 2 top singles.
The number 1 and 2 top E.P.'s
The number 1 and 2 top albums.
please tell me all about it.
When another band has sold 107 million records in the US alone, I'd love to hear about it.
http://www.jpgr.co.uk/stats_trivia_a.html
And no, I don't think sales number are the only indication of a good band, but you just can't argure with numbers as impressive as that.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I think in the 90s Radiohead to a cue from that strategy. Think of how friendly Pablo Honey is. And then, many consider The Bends to be a "perfect" pop album. Sell millions of records, make your label mountains of cash, then go off and do whatever the hell you want on your next records. It's genius.
And I for one am not sad about the demise of the album, because I think it is only dying (if not altogether fading away) in the mainstream market. Those stuck in Top 40 habits are the ones that think singles take priority over the complete album. As a music lover (and amateur rock historian), I will continue to support those excellent musicians that do complete works in the form of a full-length album.
--- these days, what with business and stuff, you gotta get your emails...
Ah ... an antiquities dealer.
I should talk. I've got several wooden crates of LPs, nicely working Technics direct-drive turntable and ancient Grado (or is it an Empire ?) cartridge. The fine-tune speed adjust strobe light still works and everything.
Of course, the gerbil died a long, long time ago.
Poor Fuzzy. He's deeply missed.
So, pretty soon I'll be able to add "releases full albums" to my list of quick differentiators between bands I may be interested in and those I am not? How nice of them to keep making the decision process easier.
sic transit gloria mundi
I hate "singles", defined as 2 pieces of music per playable object.
The way to do it is flea markets & charity sales, where $100 buys not five, but FIFTY albums. Then you round out your collection with the quality albums you want.
I also damn near skipped the entire CD era, because tapes were more rugged. (Fewer Tape-Melts compared to CD-Scratches). And these were the ones you could get turbo-cheap, when CD's were the rage.
Digital tunes are not "singles", they're menu items. Stack as many as your wallet and/or your music player can take.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
A wise editor friend of mine used to say for the novelists, he was mentoring: You just write. Don't worry which story is better than the other. In order to write the Nobel Prize winner book, you have to write quite a few much worse one. You can't just cherry-pick and write the one or two, real good one, which will grab all the attention and fame.
Being an artist is a life-long process. As an artist, you have to keep working continuously. It means that some of your work will be better than others. Not only some of the songs on a CD, but some CDs will be better than the other. You may start up writing good stuff, become famous, then for years or decades your work might be considered much less exciting, while years or decades later you may find yourself doing something as good, or better than the early good works.
As an artist, you have to find fans, not simply customers.
A customer will cherry-pick the latest hits ("the only one or two good track among the crappy ones") from all the current artists on the top. There is nothing wrong with that, the top songs on the list all have something that catches somehow the imagination. There is a clear trend of more and more stuff competing for everybody's attention while we still have limited time to absorb all the available "stuff". Perhaps an ever increasing population will always remain just "customer", with a severely limited attention span, which will never let them consume a full CD, an entire book, a documentary, which goes beyond newsbytes, etc. They will rush through life, with not much more understanding on their death bed about who they are, what they are doing here - than they knew when they were born.
A fan on the other hand is something different. As an artist you strike a chord with them, which may start with a song, but goes beyond that. This song and many other just builds into their life and in return they are getting interested in your life, as well. Not only your one or two hit songs, but the rest of it, which may not be so catchy, such a perfect hit, but still part of the bigger picture of who you are, as an artist. These fans will follow you on your journey as an artist, even if they clearly know that some of your works is much weaker than the ones that they loved at the first place. They will be extremely happy if years or decades later you can make it again.
So we need the bad songs, the not so good novels, the weak screenplays, the crappy movies - because they are part of the life of even the best artists, part of the process of creating any outstanding art. It's not just a "filler" - only in a consumer/marketing context, where "you deserve" the best, the top of the line of everything, all the times, because, you know... "you are worth it".
Do you?
http://soul-amp.com/freebies/
House of Guinness April 27th Waukesha WI. 10:30 - 90 minute, improvised non-stop jam.
If I was smart I would make a page and sell ads on it...I will get hundreds of hits because of this message.
This highlights the transition...direct music sales will be secondary for bands as the music is used for backdrops to all sorts of other activities. Already many bands make more money from music used in Ads, or sold as a package of "music" for public environments. CD sales and even singles will become a small part of a diverse lineup of revenue streams.
Buy a t-shirt for $15, get a free disk....no one wants to just buy a disk and get a free t-shirt anymore...
This is so true. Look at what the record companies make from ringtones and compare that to what they make from legitimate downloads.
No wonder they have no interest in promoting legitimate online offerings - people will pay WAY more for just a fraction of a song!
And as you say, today's hot ringtone will be dated and lame next quarter, so there is constant turnover.
The record companies are not in the business of making music, they are in the business of making money. It is easy to see why they prefer to sell ringtones, and not singles and albums. The markup is a disgrace (even by their standards) and their precious content is locked down within an inch of it's life.
Better still, most of contracts they sign with the talent make no provision for ringtone sales, so the record companies don't have to pay royalties either.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Is the value that supposed "real" fans give to their unsigned "real" bands just because they are the only ones who know about them. The second the band makes it big these fans lament how the band sold out and disown them. There is no light without darkness and there are no cool indie bands without the RIAA.
People seem to want the labels to disappear and the marketing to disappear. Okay, poof. All gone. You walk into a music store and find a billion songs/albums individually wrapped in brown paper. Where do you start?
I'd like to think that every band has a potential audience out there somewhere. Connecting the band to the audience is always going to be something of value. I'm not saying the system we have had is the best one, it was just the easiest and most profitable one for the labels in the past. But we need some sort of system, or else you're replacing the RIAA with rand()%NUMBER_OF_BANDS_IN_WORLD.
a song's quality is a function of the frequency with which they're hearing it
:)
For me, this is an inverse function
Through everything from sat-channels to mobile phones (there's a good 'killer app' for 3rd generation phone networks). Mobile data penetration is constantly rising, and mp3 players with FM broadcast capabilities are cheap (if you want to utilize the car stereo).
The lure of actually getting music you like, as opposed to music many people can stand (least common denominator) is huge once you start using such functions.
Well, the record labels will just have to start suing the artists for their lack of creativity to be able to generate a full album. After all, it must be costing the labels BILLIONS in lost revenue, and hey, if it wasn't for those beneficial labels, those artists would just be a bunch of music creating hippies.
I'm definitely not arguing that they weren't commercially successful, but in my world, that has mostly nothing to do with the quality of the music per se, as you can readily see from the somewhat random top lists. What sells well there is not music, it's the artists.
c++;
The problem at its core is that we as individuals unconsciously have determined the music being written and performed today SUCKS! Its the content that leaves us uninspired since music is the most accessible instant inspiration to be had. Its always been portable and wide ranging until today that is. Its still portable but lacks substance, range and musicality. I say performed above to really mean music reproduction in general because there are more shall we say, lesser capable muscians in the industry today than ever and all thanks to the availability of modern computing tools which allows any dickwad to "create" and deem it worthy. There is less "playing" going to today than an audience that gets "played"!
You can think of this as a far more efficient shit maker than your anus
This is whats missing, the lack of capable players and writers who exist but who cant get a fucking deal because they aren't pretty or fucked up enough.
Why?
The short-
Its a reflection of our collective cultures demise into soundbite/quick fix driven reality presented in hypersexualized form with strict adherence to youthful presentation all the while disregarding the lack of musical talent a pair of tits and ass may not be in possesion of.
We have traded porn for music. Personally I like my porn delivered in strict adherence to the standard it has established over the years rather than musicians masquarading as soft core porn artists of which never resolves into sex but rather another cut and pasted chorus or pitch corrected vocal. I wont even comment on production since that would require a fucking billboard.
In addition, when you factor in our collective cultural demise of language, the death of sublety, innuendo, inference and other complexities and range possesed by earlier generations (as demonstrated in their writing both personal and professional in everyday life and barring novels to some degree) you begin to understand that our modern culture is losing its ability towards the romantic formality of yesterday which makes for great song.
I am not saying all music was or has to be of that but today it is all the same degraded form of grunts and talentless rap speak. EVERYBODY SAY HOOOOO, FUCK YOU!
It just so happens that language is the basis for communication and regression is what we see today. Music today lacks the sophisticated wit of yesterday and is far more repetitive and devoid of meaning AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, MUSICALITY...HARMONY, MELODY, PROGRESSION.
Its the dumbing down of all things cultural and now its time to pay FOR OUR IGNORANCE.
For the record I play 4 instruments (guitar, bass, piano, drums in that order of proficiency) and have been performing for over 28 years. I learned from the records (thats right "records") of the past and from the musicians on those records who were the best example of what is lost in music today, organic, interesting and intelligent.
To correct the current forward course, look back, put down the mouse, game controller or drum/looping or other software/hardware and learn to really play by holding the instrument.
But who do you give this message to? Who would listen?
You, teach your children well, encourage musical based social skills, and music education and then maybe just maybe you wont be listening to a microprocessor generated shitstorm of random lameness.
iPod just popped up Wish I Could Fly (like Superman) this morning, on drive in. The live concert album of theirs, from the early 80's, is still damn good listening. What's funny though, is that while I love the Kinks' songs, whenever a late era Beatles' song comes on, I'm still finding new stuff there. Same thing with the Stones and, to a lesser extent, the Doors. Here's music I've been listening to for almost 40 years (still have original albums from back then) and the music's still interesting.
I drank what? -- Socrates
True to a point, but you never sell 107 million records if the music is utter crap. And I seriously doubt if any of the other bands selling well will be mentioned in the "did they change the very face of music" discussions the Beatles are the cornerstone of. Like you, I don't judge music solely by it's popularity or revenues generated, but in the Beatles case they also have influenced many other bands - something that can hardly be said about the current group of chart toppers.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Above is nonsense. To historically understand ground breaking music you have to listen to the music before it. There would have been no Kinks, as they sounded, without John Lennon's early rhythm guitar. There would have been no Lennon without Chuck, but the styles are different.
...) and you pass directly through Meet The Beatles.
> it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic
Proving he doesn't play and doesn't know any pop history. Draw a line from Words Of Love (or Johnny B Goode) to Waterloo Sunset (or Quadrophenia or
Above critic snobbery reminds me of some of the (third rate) modern jazz guys dismissing The Hot Fives and Sevens or guitar nerds in the 80s saying Hendrix wasn't 'clean' enough, or JS Bach falling out of fashion. Arguing with a music critic is like arguing sex with a virgin, if he was getting some, he might know something.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I don't buy compressed MP3s due to the overall poor quality of compressed digital audio. I do purchase CDs and DVDs which contain high quality recordings and uncompressed digital tracks.
We were given warm analog recordings in vinyl, followed by mostly sterile transfers onto CDs and now we are expected to pay good money for highly compressed digital audio. Yeah, I'm showing my age but it's true none the less.
When musicians I like offer quality recordings, I'll buy them. With bandwidth such as it is these days, I'll be happy to pay a $1.00 for a 24bit/32bit 96hz stereo or multi-channel recording.
Trying to stay somewhat on topic, I rarely see that kind of consistency with the popular artists of today and music seems cheap and disposable, which is sad. Things like iTunes (et al), propagate the one-hit wonder. With that in mind, it is not hard to understand why "albums" do not sell anymore. I'm not saying this is bad. To each his own, I say.
I am not a number. I am a free man!
Man, realmolo must be young. CDs had nothing to do with the album concept or the rise of Album Oriented Rock. The term "album" came from the old vinyl records or "LP"s. The marketing of a complete album of music came from rock 'n' roll in the mid to late 60's. I remember buying albums like Adam Heart Mother, Electric Ladyland, Tommy, Sounds of Silence, etc. This was 15 years before the first CD was issued.
Just my 2 cents
RLH
No offense intended, but you know ... it's spelled "Dire Straits".
... kids these days ...
The funny part is, it was spelled correctly up top in the article. *Sigh*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_Straits
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
"Promoting a new small business is not a new challenge. Musicians can do what other businesses do; take a small business loan, and use that to pay for marketing and promotion services by a promotion company. That would be much preferable to the current system where all of a band's output is owned by the label, and they get a few pence in the pound back from sales."
Taking out a bank loan and doing it yourself is a good proposition for that subset of musicians who (a) qualify for a bank loan in the first place, and (b) are able to repay the loan. For the rest... that's why record companies still fill a need. The record companies are evil and all, but if you get a record company to pay the costs of producing and marketing your CD, they take the loss if it fails. Banks are not nearly so forgiving and can do some incredibly nasty things to you if you default.
"Internet promotion is not to be sneezed at either (just look at the Arctic Monkeys) and that's virtually free!"
I am of the understanding that the Arctic Monkeys are an exceptional example of self-promotion using the Internet -- similar to the "results not typical" examples one sees in weight loss commercials.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
If record companies stop releasing albums for new bands, what is going to happen to the live performance business? Would you shell out $25-$50 to see a new band based on only hearing one or two singles. Oh, I forgot, the ring tone is going to get you hopping in the isles. I know personally that I am much more likely to go see a band if I have heard their album. I know what to expect and I can look forward hearing more than one song I like.
p l. On the other hand when they perform live the either get a fixed fee or a percentage of ticket sales. So the lack of an album may mean that you have no fans willing to shell out the cash to see you live, so there is little point in touring to support the single. And because you are not performing regularly you do not get the practice and experience to be an excellent musician. So you single may be your only single. Oh ya, I forgot, that ring tone is going to make every one want to download your next single.
A big issue with loosing the live performances and the band going out on tour is that they do not get a chance to work their skills. To be a good musician you have to play a lot. It is called "getting your chops". Practicing by yourself is find for the physical aspects of playing an instrument. Ya, s/he can play the notes. Rehearsing with a band makes you better a playing with other musicians. But performing in front of a live audience puts you under the gun to perform well. Not just play the instrument well, but to reach past that and put some magic into the music. Playing in front of a live audience 5 days a week, allows get comfortable with playing so that it becomes natural. Hard to do that with a click track and a MIDI band.
Finally what about the money. A lot of bands make more money from live performances than from music sales. For a good read on why you are likely to make more money per hour flipping burgers than from making a gold record try reading Moses Avalon's "Secrets of Negotiating a Record Contract" or try his Moses Avalon Royalty Calculator at http://www.mosesavalon.com/cgi-bin/calculatecopy.
Just hoping to hear the album so that I might want to see the band.
RLH
What does anyone think artists feel about this? As a musician myself I find that the record companies are out to do just that, make records. It's the artists' job to write music that appeals to an audience and the record company's job is get the music to the audience. The problem is that record companies have NO IDEA what their audience wants and rejects most artists that write with originality and creativity and instead produces crap that no one wants to hear. I would buy more CDs (and still do for certain artists) if more was readily available.
Peace is not the absence of trouble but the presence of God.
The Beatles are an exception, true. I think that's because they didn't care for the attention, stopped touring after a couple years, and just focused on the music. And sure, there have been other bands that have done the same thing. But the music industry was a lot more willing to wait on bands trying out new things back in the 60s and 70s than they are today, too. The tendancy is still to push too much attention too soon, and then chase the passing wave of interest and leave musicianship by the wayside.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I didn't think anything I said was inconsistent with many if not most "niche" bands being of low quality due to lack of talent and/or production capabilities, and likewise a large number of popular bands being of high quality. I might even concede that many or most naturally gifted and technically proficient artists usually sign big record deals and receive heavy radio airplay: for instance, the band in your sig. :)
However, depending on your tastes, some or MOST of the quality (in your subjective view) will be found in the niche or independent artists. In that case you can either ignore it and just decide it's not worth the pursuit (after all you can't vacation to EVERY south Pacific island), or you can try to locate it (in my opinion, one of the things that life is really all about, finding great art that stimulates your senses and mind). If you select the latter, the hardest part of finding good quality music by little known bands really is wading through all the crap. And the fact that it IS mostly crap has been kind of an unspoken, even subconscious strike against any kind of obscure artist (guilt by association, so to speak), in the eyes of the casual music fan. But as more alternative channels of music distribution spring up, especially those that are genuinely caterred to the individual listener, that distinction really will not be applicable anymore.
audioLibre - freedom of music
Yay. It is as i have foreseen. The album is obsolete. Most albums have 5 worthwhile tracks and 10 mediocre tracks you skip, but they charge you for all 15. Abraxis and albums like it still have a place. If the songs are a series or set, by all means, release them as such. But artists should focus on making good tracks and playing concerts.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Few artists have ever released an album that is entirely golden. The Stones' "Beggars Banquet," the Beatles' "Abbey Road," the Doors' "Strange Days," and Led Zeppelin's "Led Zeppelin 2" come to mind, but these are MY selections, and are entirely subjective. I have a complete Frank Zappa library in CD format, but this includes some albums I hardly ever play and some which get played weekly. Bob Dylan also comes to mind, and while I own many of his CD's, I almost never listen to his "Jesus Albums," and have been listening to "Modern Times" daily for a few months now.
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
(Ah, Stormwatch- one of my favorite albums. That'd be the fourth Tull album I'd ever bought from any source... Warchild was the first, Thick as a Brick was second, Benefit was the third...)
I definitely can agree. Albums don't sell because they've got a couple of decent songs and then a BUNCH of what would be considered drawer bottom tapes; much like Nightcap was from Jethro Tull- of interest solely to the real fans of the band, and possibly not even that good. (Heh, there's some gems in Nightcap- and then some warty, nasty, smelly old things that probably only a hardcore fan could gain any enjoyment out of... Much like a good bottle of Laphroaig would be to a Scotch drinker... Not everybody likes that stuff... >:-)
I'd rather get the good stuff via some venue like iTunes than buy that whole pile of junk- and spend only a couple of dollars instead of $12-20 for what is mostly a pile of moldering rat droppings. I'm dead certain that most other people are the same way.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas