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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.
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.
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...
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
If a singles album has ten songs on it and costs ten dollars, but only two of those songs are any good, then we are being charged ten dollars for two dollars worth of goods and being told we got our money's worth. This is somewhat like having a vacuum cleaner demonstrated at your house in order to receive "two hundred dollars worth of home furnishings", only to discover that they are giving you a cheap photocopy of a Norman Rockwell.
There's more. Even if every song on the album were solid gold, the fact is that it never cost any ten dollars to get it to the customer. Ninety cents on every dollar (say) goes to developing, promoting, and marketing no-talent "hormone bands" in the hope that they're the next New Kids on the Block. Or what-have-you.
Why should I have to pay twenty God-Damned dollars to listen to thirty year old music? I particularly like Procol Harum, but I would bet that their marginal profit hasn't gone up a cent. The record companies' certainly has, however. If I thought that the band members got a healthy cut, I wouldn't mind paying for such genius. But knowing that record companies use(d) die-hard fans like me to pay for such offensively vapid fare as fills the top 40 charts goes a long way toward easing my conscience about downloading files.
When the technology was firmly on the side of the RIAA, we felt the lash. Now, who's holding the leather? Suck it up, RIAA. It's your backlash--you've earned it.
Good luck selling songs one at a time. The rest of the world beat you to it.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
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
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".
Maybe that little faggot will have to sell his jet air plain.
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.
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
You say others are young but you call CD busted and old?
I checked the article, 85% of music sales is still on CD. It's declining but it's nowhere near dead. I still buy music on CD because that gets me an uncompressed archive. I just don't listen to them in that form. The same article also says that it was when the Beatles came around when full albums became popular, I don't think it had anything to do with CD. When I've flipped through vinyl collections, I don't remember ever seeing singles. The same goes for 8-track and cassette collections too. I have a few CD "singles" but they are rare. I generally don't listen to crap artists so usually I like most songs on a given CD.
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
I disagree. A British punk group named Koopa has made top 40 and is going to release a cd without being signed. Them doing it shows that mass production of CDs isn't the only way of releasing an album. I'd argue that a download/burn at home method is less expensive (and easier on the environment- no fuel spent shipping) anyway.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
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."
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.
"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
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.
As far as playing multiple singles, you could stack 45s fairly high, and when the stack was done, you lifted the whole stack, turned it over, and placed it back on the spindle to play the B sides. Before the player dropped a disk from the stack onto the platter, the automatic tone arm would lift and tap the side of the stack to determine if it held 45s or 33s, adjust the speed and queue the first track accordingly.
Single-play turntables came into vogue after albums eclipsed 45s in popularity.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
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.)
The music business has forgotten its past. When it first started in the US, during the Tin Pan Alley days in Manhattan in the late 1800s, it was selling single songs. Now all it has to do is fire the executives that are loading down these companies with their excessive salaries and bonuses, get back to the days of promoting and selling single songs. The days of single sided 78s and two sided 45s are back.
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
Nope. She, for example (disclaimer: a friend of mine) did it for less than 1000$, and now tours Europe and her record has been higlighted by Beck as the second best of 2006. She's not as famous as Missy Elliott, but she makes a good living of her music.
And she doesn't endorse DRM ;)
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
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.
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NickFortune wrote:
You missed one source of the problem: CDs have nearly double the capacity of LPs, and to make people feel like they're "getting their money's worth" bands resorted to recording many slight variations of what's essentially the same song: listening to a CD straight-through is almost always really samey, if not tedious. It's a long play format that no one wants to play for very long -- they work pretty well if you've got a five-CD shuffle deck, but otherwise...