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Interesting Admissions From Record Industry
way2trivial writes "Many in the Slashdot community say the reason music sales are off is the content. It appears the industry and some music producers agree. In todays NYTimes magazine there is an article that says the quality of todays music is the problem. I have an issue with one part however, it reads "...and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple" and here I thought Apple made most of their money with their hardware sales and a pittance on each track, giving the majority to the producer."
To my knowledge (accumulated from the popular press and talking to some folks at Apple in addition to being a shareholder) is that Apple makes almost nothing on the sale of the music itself, believing that the majority of the profits gained from media should go to the artists and producers themselves. Understandably, the recording industry wants to maintain its profitability, and for that matter Apple would like them to maintain their profitability as Apple is not interested in producing media content. Apple's interest here is that if there is an insufficient supply of affordable, quality media content, then people buy that content and need devices to enjoy that content in addition to having to manage it. Apple then gets to sell lots of widgets that help us to effectively manage that content and better our lives. But Apple rather than the media companies appears to be more willing to be an advocate for the consumer and understands that music, television, etc... beyond a certain price point will decrease sales because people are simply not willing to pay $5 for a TV show or $3-5 for a song. When this happens, Apple sells fewer widgets => bad.
Of course the risk for many of the media companies who fashion themselves as middlemen rather than true content producers is that Apple will simply cut them out of the deal and function as the clearinghouse for media, allowing even more of the profits to go to the artists. How do these media companies defend themselves against this? Its simple really... go back to the model that first got record companies, television studios and movie studios in business. *Create* and produce new, high quality entertainment, music, movies that are driven not principally by profits, but by the desire to tell a story, engage a listener, make a difference. At that point, the profits will come and Apple can even help them to make this happen by producing enabling technologies at ever lower price points, which results in increased profits.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Maybe reality is finally setting in. I remember buying albums because I liked 2 or 3 songs on the album. The rest of the songs sucked.
:-))
But that was my only choice. Now that I have the ability to buy only the tracks I like, I do that. There are some albums
I love and buy the whole CD. Evanescence Fallen, for example. That whole CD rocks.
So if they put out a quality product, they'll get the sales. Deep in their heart they know this. But
they just want people to keep buying their crap because they always have.
Sort of like Windows (gratuitous shot there
Basically the music industry looks back on a decade of not seeing the internet as the opportunity it is, and now the labels frame Apple, which forced them to open their eyes, as the bad guy. They're such good sports.
You mean it doesn't all go to the artist?
This is why when I want new music I try to get them directly from the artist, or through a website like cdbaby.com which seems to have better service than big labels and hopefully gives more money to artists. It also seems to promote a lot of the little guys which is a nice bonus.
lol: You see no door there!
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So, they're upset that consumer don't have to buy an entire album and mainly crumby songs to get at the 2 or 3 good ones that exist?
Of course it was lucrative, one or two songs would be played that people enjoyed and represented the album. But when the album was actually played it turned out those singles weren't representative of what the consumer thought they were buying. they were paying $15.00 to get a couple songs and a bunch of filler.
Make 12 songs worth buying and you'd be surprised, people might actually buy them. But don't complain when people stop buying the filler.
Another lesson learned in the aftermath of ripping people off? Or is it "the consumers are stealing" line as usual?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I'd wager competition plays a part too. A while ago music was competing mostly against other albums. Now there's DVD box sets, video games, ect. Say, for example, a $15 CD gets about an hour's worth of music. Now say a $20 golden hit game gets 100 hours of playtime. Sales are down because there are other things to buy that can net more bang for your buck. And, of course, there's the fact that not all songs on the disk are necessarily of the same quality (maybe only one or two are worth listening to, in some cases) so it stands to reason that some people just opt to download the ones they want.
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seems rather dumb. Quality of the music is an effect, not a cause. If the music sucks, why does it suck? I don't think it is that humans just lost the ability to create good music, it is more likely that the system does not reward talented people enough to keep them making music. Or something...
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Popular music may be rubbish, but that doesn't mean there is no demand for it; if there was no demand for it then there would be no huge p2p effort to supply it!
Certainly the perception of value for a large section of the market may not be high enough to justify paying for it at the current price, but that's not the same as saying that no one would buy it if they couldn't get it for free. The real answer is probably somewhere between 0 sales lost per download and 1 sale lost per download. I doubt we will ever really know for sure.
In any event not liking something is about the most stupid reason imaginable for justifying piracy. If you think it's bad then use your time to consume or create something else instead - there are certainly an enormous number of people giving things away who would be delighted if you took the time to look at their work. A lot of it is really high quality too - I have heard some excellent indie stuff, especially some experimental classical/rock stuff, that could never survive in the commercial world.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Dimwit! It means the DS is bought not the DA. RC make $0.30 on DS but $8.69 on DA. Why buy DA when all that's good is DS !
Mod as INFUCKINGFORMATIVE
Seems to me that downloading singles mainly benefits the ~CONSUMER~.. I'm far from being a big Apple fan, but I gotta say that the reason that iTunes is succeeding is that Apple's actually giving the customer what they want. How many times have you heard a song that you liked enough to actually go out and buy the CD, only to be disappointed by all of the other tracks?
I'm no conspiracy monger, but I've had the sneaking suspicion for some time that the music industry wants the artists to have one single song drive the sale of the entire CD, and may even go so far as to have the artists hold back on other potential singles for the next album.
If ALL songs were judged (in a commercial sense) on their individual merit, the music industry probably worries that their sales would go down (cuz nobody'd by the 'filler' crap). However, if the industry was less concerned with protecting their old business model, they'd notice that they'd make up on volume what they lost on bundling, and in the process would have a much more enthusiastic customer base. Apple has kind of figured that out, no?
Wow, I do sound like a conspiracy nut... hmm, maybe the tinfoil hats really will stop the black helicopters from transmitting signals to my brain. :)
The Digital Sorceress
I think the reason it could be said to benefit Apple over the record company is that the record company would rather sell a record than singles. With the "hit song" music industry we've been in for awhile now the album model is much more profitable because you can make the minimum purchase quantity to get the hit song be the whole album. So, people would buy an album to get the song or songs they wanted. With individual song purchases just the hit is purchased, or just the selected songs, and few albums will sell enough tracks to make the amount per album that the record companies make with full album sells. So, it doesn't really benefit the record company because the record company wants to stick with a model that works really well for them. It could be argued that it doesn't really benefit the consumer if it means the profit margin on music would be driven down such that the money invested in bands went down. It could be argued. But it seems more likely that there is just a new consumer model emerging and companies need to adapt - certain large companies simply won't.
I'm not sure how the iPod makes it easy to share music, since you can't move music from one computer to another with an iPod. The only way I can see an iPod sharing music is with a Y-adapter on the headphone jack.
Furthermore, what business did Apple take from "the business"? Apple doesn't record music, it is a distributer.
I get the feeling that there is a bit of "blame Apple's success for our failure" theatrics going on here.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
It seems like everytime my wife and I turn on the radio and hear rock or metal from the last few years, it's all either whiny, pussy emo shit or non-melodic, screaming heavy metal. We're only in our mid-20s and we already "feel like old people" when it comes to music sometimes. But then, we realize something. Most of us who were teenagers in the mid-to-late 90s remember when rock and metal were more than emo and frat boy headbanging crap.
I know there is more than those types of music, but it's like the music industry ain't even trying to promote anything decent anymore.
So it's Apples's fault that people prefer singles instead of albums? It can't be that Apple is just responding to consumer demand, could it? Actually, I'm one of the those who prefer buying singles because it's been a damn long time since I actually found a entire album to be good enough to buy it.
As for the alleged deterioration in music quality - what utter nonsense. As a music lover, you have access to more and better music than ever before, largely thanks to the Internet. No one is forcing you to listen to that mainstream crap, you know.
Actually, I think that there's a connection to be made here: as more and better music becomes available, people become more captious about the audio they listen to, because their time and money is obviously too limited. Instead of buying a couple of pretty good albums from a few artists, people buy a couple of great tracks from many more artists.
(From the New York Times website: properly cited, and being used for criticism and discussion so if you want to complain that reposting it here is violating copyright, I call if Fair Use so go stuff yourself.)
.t.html?pagewanted=print
From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin
September 2, 2007
The Music Man
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Rick Rubin is listening. A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating. He appears to be in a trance. His eyes are tightly closed and he is swaying back and forth to the beat, trying at once to hear what is right and wrong about the music. Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, gray beard, is curled into the corner of a tufted velvet couch in the library of a house he owns but where he no longer lives. This three-story 1923 Spanish villa steeped in music history -- Johnny Cash recorded in the basement studio; Jakob Dylan is recording a solo album there now -- is used by Rubin for meetings. And ever since May, when he officially became co-head of Columbia Records, Rubin has been having nearly constant meetings. Beginning in 1984, when he started Def Jam Recordings, until his more recent occupation as a career-transforming, chart-topping, Grammy Award-winning producer for dozens of artists, as diverse as the Dixie Chicks, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Neil Diamond, Rubin, who is 44, has never gone to an office of any kind. One of his conditions for taking the job at Sony, which owns Columbia, was that he wouldn't be required to have a desk or a phone in any of the corporate outposts. That wasn't a problem: Columbia didn't want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.
What that means, most of all, is that the company wants him to listen. It is Columbia's belief that Rubin will hear the answers in the music -- that he will find the solution to its ever-increasing woes. The mighty music business is in free fall -- it has lost control of radio; retail outlets like Tower Records have shut down; MTV rarely broadcasts music videos; and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple. "The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content," David Geffen, the legendary music mogul, told me recently. "Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it's no longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music. And there's no clear answer about how to fix that problem. But I still believe that the top priority at any record company has to be coming up with great music. And for that reason, Sony was very smart to hire Rick."
Though Rubin maintains that his intention is simply to hear music with the fresh ears of a true fan, he has built his reputation on the simultaneously mystical and entirely decisive way he listens to a song. As the Gossip, which is fronted by a large, raucous woman named Beth Ditto, shouts to a stop, Rubin opens his eyes and nods yes. This is the first new band signed to Columbia that he has been enthralled by, but he is not yet sure how to organize the Gossip's future. "Let's hear something else," Rubin says to Kevin Kusatsu, who would, at any other record company, be called an A & R executive. (Traditionally, A & R executives spot, woo, recruit and oversee the talent of a record company.) "We don't have any titles at the new Columbia," Rubin explains, as Kusatsu, the first person Rubin hired, slips a disc out of its sleeve. "I don't want to create a new hierarchy to replace the old hierarchy."
Rubin, wearing his usual uniform of loose khaki pants and billowing white T-shirt, his sunglasses in his pocket, his feet bare, fingers a string of lapis lazuli Buddhist prayer beads, believed to bring wisdom to the wearer. Since Rubin's beard and hair nearly cover his face, his
I don't think it is that humans just lost the ability to create good music, it is more likely that the system does not reward talented people enough to keep them making music. Or something...
M oney game.
I think you're mostly right on. However, good musicians ARE making music. It's just that the big distribution channels won't play nice with artists, so people who are good and who value their integrity won't play the Come-Record-Label-Please-Fuck-My-Ass-And-Take-My-
Excellent article by Steve Albini:
http://www.mercenary.com/probwitmusby.html
If you don't love making music, get a job at 7-11 or better. If you do love making music, make it, and refuse to comprimise your integrity. You will be much happier in the end. If you are by chance one of the few artists who gets a good deal from the RIAA, then take it. Take it cautiously, and be sure to thoroughly examine the candy before you stick it in your mouth.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Amiestreet.com is showing media companies and artists a new model. New tracks by any artist start out free. As demand warrants, the price of a track rises. Max price is $.98/track. Amiestreet keeps the first $5.00 to cover overhead, then passes along 70% of the gross to the artist after that. Much better deal than any other music distribution scheme.
"Until very recently," Rubin told me over lunch at Hugo's, a health-conscious restaurant in Hollywood, "there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not."
--- Essentially, the music industry has been operating as a monopolistic cartel for so long, and now they are (relatively suddenly) forced to survice in an environment with real, healthy competition. Columbia is on the right track by using Rick Rubin the way they are, but they (and the other major labels) need to do a whole lot more to save themselves.
Ever since the record industry began casting aside the talented musicians in favor of "singer-dancers," they have had total disdain for the public. They have known for years that they can take the most untalented act, wrap it up in a pretty package and saturation-market it, and the mongrel public will stupidly buy it. Ask yourself: "what instruments do they play?" and "do they write their own music?" Then go to your CD shelf and start throwing out the embarrassing evidence before anyone sees it. Look for anything that is eyecandy + microphone.
Are they now suffering from the cruelties of the market? No. They are finally paying for their sins.
This guy is currently producing metallica. I don't think metallica has earned the right to make another album in this digital age of music.
Some have said it: albums vs. singles (that most prefer singles over albums) This is not true.
We all prefer albums. It's just that so few modern albums are worth buying in their entirety.
The only 2 albums I have purchased in the past 10 years have both been Paul McCartney.
My favorite albums of the 21st century so far is "Chaos And Creation In The Backyard".
That's not to say that I don't like any other modern music, but what albums produced in this new century are worth listening to every song on it?
He and I share similar musical tastes. I love the Beatles and never liked the Stones.
One producer, however, will not change the industry.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I recall the time when startup network and cable channels came on the air. The old network channels were decimated because the new channels could do more innovative programming as they were not aiming for huge shares. So Fox had Married with Children and 21 Jump Street, and NBC responded with the throw back conservative Seinfied, which kept the innovators at bay for a while, but now NBC is a the bottom of the heap. And they will stay that way because while they are willing to sell shows, they are not willing to do so at decent terms. Networks now choose programming to minimize cost rather than really compete.
So there is quite a bit of good music, and my music budget is still respectable. The only issue I see is that the major labels are increasingly concentrating their marketing on a few big acts, therefore making it seem like there is little music available for the audiences with uncommon tastes. Cheaper CD packaging, online sales, and the like should let them market even greater number of acts, but instead they are retreating behind obsolete models, i.e. old guys listening to music and deciding what the young people want. Of course perhaps it is also unrealistic expectations in which even the most boring acts expect million dollar deals, and the studios still milk that money for all it is worth, rather than update the deals for modern needs.
This does not even account for the truly sad cases, like the owners of the Beatles catalog, who still believe it has some long term private sales value in the current market. U@ was brilliant to sell his songs on an iPod, and the more has bin the group the more sense such a move makes, especially when the back catalog is large. There is still money to be made for licensing for public performance, and of course they are pissing that money away by killing net radio, but very few people are going to buy the same song 5 times, as was the case in the past.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Ok. Why can't we get a writeup that says, briefly, who exactly said what? Because I'm pretty sure there wasn't a joint declaration by all of the music industry that said what the writeup says.
Are you adequate?
Popular music is informed by youth culture, and thus reflects the hopes and fears of the youth of any particular era. The 60s was about Vietnam (not because of any real concern about the war, but because teenagers faced the possibility of being drafted). The 80s was about overt avarice and consumerism.
But what about the 90s and the 2000s? What were they about? I, and most people I've talked to about this, draw a blank. Some people think modern emo bands were influenced by the Columbine massacre and its aftermath, but that is at best a minor facet of popular music.
The thing that characterised our societies after 1989 was a sense of triumphalism. The cold war was over, the world had unanimously chosen the best way of running things (sic), and it was the end of history. Essentially, we were told all the battles had been won and there were no more challenges left for our generation to take up. People say 9/11 'changed everything' but in reality it changed very little, for the most part western society still smugly grinds away as it did before. The daily life of young people is largely unaffected.
So the prevailing feeling is apathy. You go to school, go to college, have kids and die. There's nothing else to do. The music reflects this.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Sure, all of us would like the market to more effectively reward the people actually creating music. Because recording and distribution are now dirt cheap, a free market would do just that.
The problem is that SoundExchange is extending the dead hand of their government granted Radio Empire into the future with bad laws. If existing agreements are not honored, the whole system collapses into a RIAA farce, which will reward artist just as well as the old farce did. That's what they are talking about here:
The way the law is written, that is anything but sure. If participation in SoundExchange is compulsory, it's game over for free internet radio. The fees will bankrupt most stations and the RIAA will once again be the only promotion vehicle around. If fees can't be paid directly to publishers, artists will be stuck with the same dirtbags that have ripped them in the past. Is there anyone who trusts big media with accounting anymore? Sound Exchange is blatant and unAmerican corporate welfare.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
As a music lover, you have access to more and better music than ever before, largely thanks to the Internet. No one is forcing you to listen to that mainstream crap, you know.
If the RIAA gets their way with SoundExchange, you will no longer have net radio that's not "mainstream" in the US. You will still be able to download things yourself and make random playlists, but the magic of just tuning in and being offered interesting new music will go down the tubes. This is the only way the RIAA will be able to survive and force their goofey subscription model on everyone. It did not work in a free market.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Thanks, Absolut-- here's a bigger chuck of the key section: "For everything sold on iTunes, we get the majority of the 70-79p per unit sale price," he said, then added: "But for everything sold on the Ruckus Network we receive the princely sum of £0.005 per unit. That's half a pence. My distributor then takes their 25 per cent off of that, leaving myself and the artists to dish up the remaining fractions of a penny between us."
It's not much better through Real Networks, he informed - for sales through that service, his label receives a penny per track, he claimed. The thousand tracks sold so far have accrued £10 to the label (to share with the artists) rather than, "the £790 or so we'd have got for the same amount of sales through iTunes."
iTunes also drives business at international distributor of independently-owned music and video catalogues, DMG. Revealing the company's quarterly results, DMG CEO Mitchell Koulouris explained: "In last year's first quarter, approximately 89 per cent of our revenue came from iTunes, less than 5 per cent was from subscription services, and we had no mobile distribution."
It's really interesting to see these kinds of numbers and then weigh what the big labels (was it Universal?) and other content providers like NBC are doing. They're used to being the exclusive channel and in complete control of the profit stream coming from the consumer back towards the artists. Now that new forms of distribution and playback are readily available (especially digital copies which can be format shifted and recompressed to best suit new algorithms and hardware capabilities), I don't think those guys have the leverage they seem to feel they do with regard to forcing price increases.
I doubt that Apple really cares where you get the content. From what the first poster said, Apple is running the iTunes music store on a cost neutral basis. Whether you rip it yourself, D/L it for free (sometimes legally such as etree.org, or sometimes not so legally), buy it from iTunes, or buy it from someone else, what matters is whether you have the content you want and whether the device you use does a good job of playback.
I've been trying to figure out NBC's reasoning: presumably they figure that they'll make more money from paid advertising by making everyone watch the live version or DVR it from a live source than they'll lose by not having the $1.99 commercial-free version being sold. Taken NBC's reported pricing at face value, they want to get something like $5 for thirty minutes of viewer eyeballs-- probably about 22 minutes of content and 8 minutes of ads.
Does this mean that if you could sell your eyeballs directly to those who advertise on NBC, you'd be paid about twice the US minimum wage?!! Woah!
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
.... even before he reads all the consumers comments...
Everybody bow down to Rubin now and buy what he tell you.....
From the producer's point of view then it does benefit Apple. If Apple take a cut of profits, no matter how small, then that's money that the producers/publishers aren't seeing. Add to that the fact that people can now get individual tracks rather than whole albums for the sake of a couple of good songs and the producers are severely disadvantaged (compared to their previous lifestyle).
Not that I particularly care if they are, but I'm guessing that's where they're coming from
The problem with music today is that none of these bands you hear on the radio have any stay power. Who are the new beatles? Who is the new Metallica? Ever since the 90's we've been cycling through these specific sub-genres like grunge, ska, techno, emo, etc. After the kids who listen graduate high school, it's on to something else and you never hear of those bands again.
The music industry know this - they're looking for the next one hit wonder because 10 one hit wonders are easier to find than 1 band that can continually make great music. It's not the artists fault that the music industry is the way it is, it is simply a function of an increased focus on revenue. "Quality" is hardly a factor in making money.
or else!
FTFA: "A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating."
Guess what? Gossip has been around since 1999, that isn't exactly new. Somehow people have gotten an attitude that good music will find them and don't bother trying to find it themselves, so when they turn on their radio and nothing but crap comes out they start blaming the music industry for not making anything good anymore. If you think all music sucks today its your own damn fault for limiting your definition of music to crap played on the radio, go do some leg work and see what else is out there.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
No shit, Sherlock! For the past 10-15 years, the record companies have been concentrating on quick-hit novelty hits such as the Flaming Lips (that horrible, amateurish "Peaches" song and the like). Virtuosity in musical performances and songwriting has been virtually eliminated, which is a major factor in getting people to connect emotionally to music. The huge success of Nirvana and the grunge movement, with the punk movement behind that, provided the impetus for the record companies to eschew with expensive talented musicians and take on any crap acts who can pump out a quick hit for the bean counters. Cheap, disposable music concocted of samples and computer-generated blips and bloops, with minimal human interaction with the actual creation of the music.
Heavy metal has lost any sort of melodic element and is now just a brutal assault with guitar-like sounds which for all we know might have been entirely generated by sampler (as Marylin Manson did with his Beautiful People song) and with not guitar virtuosity in sight (please somebody give me a challenging guitar solo - PLEASE!!).
Add to all of this the current propensity of the record companies to compress the music to the point of unlistenability and you have a recipe for disaster. Heart came out with a really good album a couple of years ago which was a real return to their awesome roots but was torpedoed by the Ultramaximiser applied to the final product. I couldn't listen for more than a few seconds before my ears started bleeding. You know, it's interesting that when I mention that I come on here and mention the superiority of analog sound on vinyl records the first thing people point out is the supposed greater dynamic range of digital. Yet if that is indeed the case, you'd be hard pressed to prove that with most modern pop recordings.
Cheers
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Who needs major distribution companies?
What effect do the majors think youtube and its many future imitators - some devoted EXCLUSIVELY to the creation and distribution of music (and other forms of entertainment) imitators - is going to mean? Do they think they will be able to continue their dominance in those environements, given the above developments? If they do, they're deluded.
It's OVER for the majors; the long tail, including human ingenuity in the creation of art (including commercial art) is going to largely replace the current players. Some of the operatives in the majors will find work within the newer
If they think it's going to mean that they can simply morph their lame business models to gain exposure, they're wrong. Their time has come, and gone.
Game over!
I remember" way back when", in 1994, when I had a discussion with several high end music distributors - thay all laughed at the idea of the Internet. I remember a VP of Marketing at Tower Records' now-defunct corporate offices in Sacramento saying "Tower will NEVER sell music on the Internet"
I see a new era of music production in the works. There will be companies that come along, some of them mildly related to the artifacts of the "oldies" (a word that will take on new meaning, as it applies to long-gone primary music distributors of the past).
Just wait until we have more accurate technology capable of determining what music modal, chordal, melodic and other variables our brains prefer - that's coming.
To the majors: yes, it's over folks.
I asked my students - 153 in a lecture class - "How many of you bought a new CD in the past 6 months? Raise you hands." About 20 raised their hands. I then asked "How many of you have downloaded a new song either through legitimate means with iTunes and other companies, or illegitimately, via P2P? Raise you hands." Almost everyone raised their hand.
The fact is: the CD is dead. It's dying because CDs are long format and inherited the interest in long playing music from the LP and 78rpm "Albums". People today have the attention span of gnats, and are too distracted by the gazillion different toys to just sit and listen to music. When I was young, we'd roll a fatty or three and put on some Yes or Genesis or Tangerine Dream and space for hours while we glotzed the gatefold cover art. We didn't have Xbox, playstations, etc, or cellphones or IM or texting or internet porn or whatever. Our options were comparatively limited - TV, records, radio. And these media have their own requirements as passive "sit back" media. Now, with active "sit forward" media of Xbox etc. and the jump up and down of Wii, and the focus of IM and texting, there is really no "pay off" to sitting around listening to music. Actually listening to music seems almost like a meditation practice to contemporary cultural "intake".
The CD's duration was determined by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - one can sit through the entire symphony uninterrupted. With LPs you had to get up every 18 - 20 minutes to flip the record. CDs removed that hassle, and a CD became a musical journey. Constructing such a journey and doing it convincingly is hard work, which is why so many CDs had "filler". Sustaining interest in a listener for 1.3 hours is tough work.
The advent of the MP3 removed the need for the "extended hypnosis" and brought back the spirit of the 78RPM and the 45RPM record - "singles". If you're a talentless hack, and so many musicians are - talentless hacks give a ground to judge how we know someone isn't a talentless hack - then you probably don't have the chops or the depth of a song list to fill a CD. So, it only makes sense to put what you've got going on an MP3 network, and when you hve enough of your crap for a CD, do that too. But the pressure to cook up a CD's worth of tunage FIRST is gone.
This doesn't help matters for the gangsters in the RIAA.
They had a chance to put a meter on P2P with the original Napster. We (at Napster) had developed a billing client, and suggested a very very low price for P2P'd songs - where a DL would be dinged off a client's account value. We tested it - and IT WORKED. It was kind of clunky at first, and we needed to work on optimisations, but it really worked, and it was pretty damn slick. The RIAA et al told us "No". And now those idiots are reaping the whirlwind for their greed and stupidity, and we are all the worse for it.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Problem is, instead of actually PRODUCING good music, it's easier and cheaper for them to maintain the status quo, and bribe lawmakers to pass laws that essentially FORCE consumers to buy their products-all the while bleating "piracy" over and over...
FTA (thanks BugMeNot for saving the login requirement):
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They have known for years that they can take the most untalented act, wrap it up in a pretty package and saturation-market it, and the mongrel public will stupidly buy it. Ask yourself: "what instruments do they play?" and "do they write their own music?" Then go to your CD shelf and start throwing out the embarrassing evidence before anyone sees it. Look for anything that is eyecandy + microphone.
So here's the elephant in the room.
Why hasn't anyone invented Musical Pr0n yet? Cast aside all pretentions of pop music. Just get a bunch on 18-25 year old young ladies and have them gyrate naked (as in full-frontal) to handbag disco music for 3 or so minutes. Get them to lez up every so often.
I guarantee it'll sell like hot cakes. It'll sell itself.
Stick Men
Want proof? Listen to what this guy's BOSS has to say!
Steve Barnett is nervous about the subscription model. "Smart people have told me if the subscription model is not done correctly," he said, "it will be the final nail in our coffin. I've heard both sides of the argument, and I'm not convinced it's the solution to our problems. Rick wants to be a hero immediately. In his mind, you flick a switch and it's done. It doesn't work like that."Uhm..HELLO???!!! You've had TEN YEARS to come up with a subscription model! That sure doesn't sound like "flicking a switch" to me!
Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue. This is unprecedented -- even successful artists like the Dixie Chicks make a large percentage of their income from concerts and T-shirts. "Artists should never give that money up," Natalie Maines told me. "The companies are all scrambling because of the Internet, and they will screw the artist to meet their bottom line. I can't imagine Rick will go along with that."YEAH! THAT'S IT! Screw the artists even more! That's a GREAT business model!!
This is just more of the same one crap thay've been doing all along...Zepplin I can understand but AC/DC?
Zeppelin did three good songs: Black Dog, Rock n Roll and the Immigrant Song. The rest is all turgid fake blues.
Now AC/DC... did they do a good song?
Stick Men
The days of buying a CD just for the couple of good (ie, single) tracks on it are over, and Apple is entirely to thank for that. The only way to get people to buy CDs again is to do what Rick Rubin said (paraphrasing) in TFA - write an album where every song is equally good. The record industry's biggest nightmare isn't Apple and iTunes per se - it's iTunes' 30 second previews of every song on an album. If you listen to 30 seconds of a 3-4 minute song and decide you don't like it, that's a song you don't have to buy, whereas under the old system you were stuck with it, like it or not - and the record company already had your money.
You must think in Russian.
Did you know that you can get up from ANY movie within it's first 20 minutes, go the box office and get a 100% refund of your ticket price with no questions asked? Don't believe me? Try it yourself! This doesn't seem to hurt the movie industry....why would 30 second clips from songs hurt the music industry-unless their products SUCK? Maybe the music industry needs to release BETTER records-ones that are so good that listening to 30 seconds of them isn't enough-ones that make me WANT to buy the track based upon the 30 second preview, instead of the reverse!
People have been saying this since the late 80s, we all know that what the major music labels have been pushing is total crap and that is the real reason sales are dropping. Of course some meathead will say that well Britney Spears (or anyone, come on) is a #1 seller, well if that's all you're selling then no shit sherlock. Push quality and you will get more sales that your crap.
Oh- and Amy Winehouse is total crap.
The band that made it sucks. Don't listen to the band. Find something better to listen to. If everybody did that maybe good music would start getting the attention it deserves. But OH NO!!!! Everybody wants good music but they still expect it to be spoon fed to them. They think a good concert needs 10,000+ people and an expensive light show. Music also sucks because there is simply to many suckers sitting around expecting a broken system to make good music, while ignoring the fact that there are 20,000+ other labels in the world who are sincerely trying to deliver good music to you. Stop blaming the majors for your complacency. I'm certainly don't have this problem where every new album I buy sucks, and I buy over a hundred in any given year.
New! Device Legs: These legs will help your poor OEM installed product escape any hamfistedness it may encounter. Ava
"The clip was from a British show called "Britain's Got Talent," a version of "American Idol." Despite its popularity, Rubin has never seen "American Idol," and he had never heard of Simon Cowell, who is a judge on both programs." no no no - "Britain's Got Talent" unsurprisingly enough is the british version of "America's Got Talent" - both shows debuted at the same time and are produced by Simon Cowell American Idol of course is the American version of the british show 'Pop Idol', yes the brits are resposible for bringing the awfulness of this show into the world.
Up for it.
'They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth.' Thank god, I always hated myspace.
Up for it.
From TFA (Quote by Rick Rubin, the hippy producer that is supposed to be saving Columbia, discussing a subscription model as a way to combat piracy):...The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now....
It may be news to an internet newbie like Mr. Rubin, but there are and have been many services offering subscription services. None of them has come anywhere near Apple's simplistic method of just sell a song cheaply and its yours. Mr. Rubin talking bootleg recording is laughable because bootlegs were to the music industry then what online piracy is now. It just goes to show that Mr. Rubin, while he may be a good producer, is just as clueless and lost as the rest of the music industry (and the whole American artifical reality show model, if I may say so).
I know, no one at slashdot RTFA. Yet, by not reading it, everyone skipped this little gem, which is the tell tale of what is in the mind of the recording industry execs and how they perceive the music business:
Rick Rubin, the "outsider", thinks like this:
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
There are plenty of good musicians, I don't think there has ever been a deficit. There is also great distribution and labels. The problem is Apple and the "Big Four" as well as most modern retail stores and magazines are completely outside the loop. For example eMusic.com sells great non-DRM'd music for around 30 cents a track. I refuse to pay more than that, and because of that, the "Big Four" rarely get my money. It's such a basic example of supply and demand, and everyone knows it except for the big guys. All they have to do is sell music at a quarter per song and people will spend more than they did when it was (what is it now) a dollar per song.
I've bought so much good music lately, it's kinda scary, especially when my bank statement comes in. All due to downloads. There are so many websites devoted to all kinds of genres, including stuff that didn't exist a couple of years ago. So I find a track I like, or a band I like, and then I find the fansite/wiki that lists them which says "If you like 'X', you might like 'Y' and 'Z' too", and I grab a few tracks by Y and Z and stick them on the iPod while I make up my mind.
Thing is, there are no radio shows playing the kind of music I like. I have never heard Nightwish, Therion, Finntroll or Einsturzende Neubaten on commercial radio or the BBC. Ever. Over the Net I can hear bands from anywhere in the world, and if I like it, I can support them by buying their CD. But that purchase is distributed - I'll buy one CD by a band, and it might be a year before I buy another one, even if they've got half-a-dozen CDs available. I've only got so much money, and any money I spend on bands I know I like is money that's not available for expanding my horizons. Why do I download? Because at around £15/$30 a pop, I'm unwilling to buy a CD by an artist I'm not sure of - they might be rubbish. As a result of all this audio consumption, I find my tastes vary from day to day - some days I might want Louie Armstrong, some days I want Leftfield, and some other days, only Dragonforce will do...
There's absolute truckloads of fantastic music out there - more than any unaugmented human could absorb in a lifetime of study. Even with Sturgeon's Law applied, the remaining 10% still contains uncounted thousands of hours of jazz, blues, rock, techno and dozens of other genres that were actually made by artists who gave a damn about the quality of the output.
However, I believe the problem being discussed in the article isn't "Where's the good music?" - it's "How do we get people to buy whatever cr@p we're p1mping this month, so we can afford more drugs.". Sorry, guys - can't help you there.
Google 'em if you need to. Clearly not selling like hotcakes or you would already have known who they were.
Pussycat Dolls is the soft-core version. They were an opener for a concert I went to a couple of months ago -- came out on stage in skimpy lingere, gyrated on chairs as if they were giving a lap dance and did some pole dancing.
The young lady with me offered the opinion that we could have seen a comparable show for a lot less by just going to the strip club.
I got you beat in the geezer department, and I think some of the mid 80s music was really good, ex: huey lewis, zztop, and etc. What was it, summer of 85 or so, EVERYTHING rocked. I like rock from the beginning when it started (and I was listening to it on AM band tube radios) to now, there was crap back then, and gems, and crap now, and gems. What is different is the sheer amount of music, the selections now are huge, just way more bands out there so it is harder to find gems.and conversely, because there were fewer bands back then and the tech innovations exploded, we got some really good music that "stuck", because it was rare at the time and has developed a following from it. Look at the cars from then! Collectibles and pretty cool, old mustangs and camaros and vettes and hemi cudas and such, but today's cars got them beat on speed, handling, comfort and mileage. But...they just ain't cool because now there are just so many of them.
Now, with that said, I have to admit, late 60's to early 70s was the nadir so far though for rock. I don't know why either, but it was. I guess for the most part the huge social changes then drove the artists. You need passion to be great. Skills can make you good, but passion makes you great.
LZ's signature song was pirated from Turloch O'Carolan. Who Dat? He was a Welsh balladeer from the 1800s who ran the bar circuit. It was lifted intact by Plante and passed off as original. All ::ALL:: >All of LZ's music came about this way.
The joke be on you. There is no originality. The Founding Fathers knew this, that's why copyright protection was severely limited. The Abortion Supreme Court extended it to 100+ years a few years ago without knowing this. Actually, the Justices are morons, they don't know anything. Hope the RIAA tosses you in jail.
This is simple greed. The record companies used to be able to sell a whole album for $15.99 that contained the only single you actually wanted. Now Apple sells that for $0.99, giving the record company about $0.70. Everything is available for single sale, meaning they can't pick your pockets nearly as much as as they once did, and artists now need to produce 10X more actually good music as before to sell it all. Oh, the poor dears! As for the rest of us, that $0.99 buys DRM laden highly compressed crap recordings that only play on expensive iPods at that price, so only the uncritical among us (used to be referred to as the "AM radio set") can be completely happy with this.
Of course, the record stores and pressing plants are cut out of the equation, meaning some savings for the record industry, but they won't prosper until they again sell a quality product at a fair price, both of which they continue to not do with their current digital sales model.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think a number of people are missing the point on the Apple profits comment from the article. In a market where singles and single songs sell well but albums sell poorly, the music companies make less money but Apple continues to sell iPods, because their store sells singles and their singles play on the iPod. If people start gravitating back to the album, that is, if albums come with enough good songs on them that people want to buy more than 2 or 3 from the same album, fewer people will be buying the singles from the iTunes music store and they'll just be buying the CDs. And while people can rip songs from CDs to the iPod, it takes effort and a CD is easy to take with you and pop in and out of any old CD player.
The death of the music industry is, then, good for Apple so long as it doesn't go too far and kill off all the content.
Reality Master 101 has an excellent point - where *is* the innovation these days? Look through any top 40 chart from the sixties or seventies and you'll see all sorts of different music, from folk and hippie music through pop to hard rock and early metal. There was a huge amount of experimentation then, much of it pretty bad but enough that was just incredible. These days we still get some experimentation, but music seems to have largely settled into a few genres inside which all songs have very similar qualities.
The Beatles are probably the best example of innovation in music history. Listen through the three decades they touched and you'll hear an incredible range of styles (and a sitar). They did just about everything, reinventing their music every few years. Then there's The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mommas and The Poppas, The Eagles, Little River Band, Kate Bush, ABBA, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead... the list just goes on and on.
I may sound like a cranky old man looking back at my generation's music as the best one, but nearly all of this was before my time. I've looked at the contrast between 'music before my 20s' and 'music since my 20s' and today it just looks so... bland in comparison.
I can't imagine anyone bankrolling a group like Queen any more. Their breakout hit Bohemian Rhapsody doesn't fit any convenient genre and looks awful on paper. It'd be a huge risk to pay for that to be recorded. What about Pink Floyd? There's nothing like them today, nothing even close. The Wall may be the best rock opera yet, but it's impossible to see it happening today.
Today we have an industry that is risk averse, and as a result the music they produce is stagnating. Outside the mainstream things are pretty exciting, but I can barely stand anything mainstream lately. It has to change.
I haven't bought a CD (or even pirated modern music) in years (>4). When I discovered Andy McKee and his record company, where you can buy unprotected MP3 and transcriptions of his music, I spent >$100 on the equivalent of _one album_.
It's all about the content and the distribution method.
It took me years to write it
They were the best years of my life
But if you're gonna have a hit
you gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05.
Too much power by the A&R guys, the producers and the stuffed shirts in the biz.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Synopsis:
Scared failing business hires a mythic figure who has made big money for them in the past, to somehow bring miracles in a new world that they no longer understand.
Mythic figure has momentary crisis of conscience due to evil-doing by failing business, resolved in the usual way by a combination of seduction and graft.
Mythic figure has gone brain dead at age 44, now listening to the never-talented Rod Stewart, and Frank Sinatra in his talent-gone alcoholic later years. Retains impressive beard to remind people of his past successes.
Mythic figure somehow thinks that helping failing business to shop for Los Angeles real estate (whose most likely fate is seismic annihilation), will have anything to do with motivating people to buy more of their stale and overpriced product.
Proposed miraculous solution is to have people pay a monthly fee for a virtual boxload of industry-decided crap that they most likely don't want, which is essentially the same business model that record "clubs" operated on decades ago, except the boxloads arrived physically by mail rather than virtually by wire.
Conjecture:
Public have finally noticed, in the aftermath of an orgy of cheap credit, that they are deeply in the hole because they have fallen for a whole bunch of supposed essentials, each of which requires some sort of monthly fee: $1300 for rent, $300 for car payment, $150 for car insurance, $60 for cable TV, $40-80 for cell phone, $24 for landline phone to give to credit card companies to keep from getting dunning calls on cell phone, $700 for a shakedown shell game that calls itself "health insurance", and $60 for DSL or cable Internet. That's $31608 per year in after tax cash. Food, water/sewage, clothing, and energy not included.
Public have also finally noticed that they listen to only 1-2 songs on a typical CD, and that entire CDs often have nothing worthwhile on them.
Meanwhile, industry tries to sell CDs for upwards of $27. Because industry executives live in Los Angeles and eat in Beverly Hills, they believe that $27 is the cost of two hamburgers, and is therefore reasonable.
Compare and contrast to movie "The 11th Hour":
Expensive Hollywood actor relieves anxieties about trying to live in now-insufferable Los Angeles, by showing lots of pictures of it and reading from a script written by New York liberal arts majors with huge Rolodexes and a good understanding of fictional literature and of little else, who either are on meth or have very short attention spans, or who believe that their audience is or does.
Surely this audience will be motivated and inspired to deeply understand and solve difficult problems, by being bombarded by seemingly hundreds of talking head clips pasted together with lots of stock footage of disasters, wars, and poverty, plus some whales and penguins (exactly why were these penguins being released from mass confinement in cardboard cartons?), in a vast wallow of nightmarish scattershot incoherence.
Our salvation lies in a locomotive with the conventional large diesel-electric system, replaced by a CAD cartoon of a system with 1/10 the prime mover power, and some mysterious purple boxes. What may or may not be the realization of this design, is shown hauling exactly zero payload above its own mass, across level ground.
The music's pretty good though.
of illegally downloaded material. Heck, all illegally downloaded material is downloaded ON A COMPUTER. Alert the media - I sense a hysteria-spawning opportunity here...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
There is still good innovative music it just isn't on the radio or tee vee, go listen to Mr. Bungle, Andrew Bird, Calexico, Neko Case, The Arcade Fire, DJ Spooky, Howe Gelb, Spoon, Sufjan Stevens, and then get back to me about how "terrible" today's music is, and BTW I am 41 years old and by no means a stuck up hipster, there is just no excuse for being stuck in a rut and bitching about today's music with a whole internet out there to learn what sounds good.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
One big blow job for Rubin. A subscription model is the savior for the music industry? Uh, no. They've tried that at least a dozen times in the past 15 years, and it goes nowhere because music fans like to feel like they own what they pay for, not rent or license it. This guy's going to push Columbia and the other majors to re-orient their collective corporate models to a subscription model, and it will all collapse. Or, only a couple or none will and it will collapse in more colorful ways.
The music industry is ailing partly because their content sucks. But it is fundamentally ailing because it produces something that can be copied infinitely with little or no guilt. The music industry came about to market and distribute music. Now they are not needed to perform those roles, and so no longer need to exist.
The music will all be free, and the revenue for artists will come from concerts and merchandising. That won't go away because concerts and merchandising are physical quantities whose relative scarcity can be controlled. If labels survive at all it will be as specialized advertising or PR firms who serve at the whim of artists.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The homogenious 'look, i'm playing my guitar really fast' college music just graduated from its 3rd rate college radio status to 3rd rate on a top 40 station. It is 3rd rate and sounds just like everyone else and thus lame album sales.
I'd guess that the talent that could produce good quality sound with analog equipment is retired or leaving the industry and the current crop of producers, mixers, engineers, etc are only good at digital sampling and repeatedly overlaying of one track on another. It's quite unlike the actual talent of taking 4 analog tracks, tweaking them 1 time and then mixing them on an analog 4 track system's tape which would be used to cut the vinyl master album.
Same argument goes for movies and tv since the explotation film producers in the 1970s are now the decision makers. Thus, bad product with a band aid of special effects to 'bail it out'. Example genres, 1) action movie where 1/2 the movie is a multi-part chase scene - full of action yet not good, with little or no plot and dialog 2) drama movie with cliche laced dialog, re-tread of a plot (e.g., involving a lawyer or the president), and acting as interesting as watching paint dry.
I am amused daily by our 4 classic rock stations struggling for material to play and struggling for an audience given that they are limited to 1972-1982 material. Several of the stations have changed format, changed promo jingles, tag names, etc in the last 2 years.
I'm more often turning off the radio and video than watching/listening given that it is nearly always a waste of time and un-entertaining. I'm in for a good movie if it is actually entertaining, but more often than not, it is the equivalent of buying something made in China with substandard quality.
There was an article earlier "The "Loudness War" and the Future of Music" and it clearly stated the problem with the "music" industry, which it no longer produces music, but a sum of loud sounds & faint voices. A clear example would be Evanescence's latest album "The Open Door" vs. their older albums. The background musicis just too loud and the vocals just don't "pop" like they used to.
Crappy clowns who jiggle around and dance with crummy voices, don;t deserve to be called singers, just because they can dance and they look good! It seems like EVERYONE is a singer, just as long as they have the looks!
Another problem is the lyrics; Seriously, it just boggles me whenever a song like "This is why I'm Hot", or "Chicken Noodle Soup" reaches the top 10 chart!!!! Forget all about the off-beat rhythm, forget about the foul & obscene video clips, forget about the nasty vocals, just tell me what the hell do these word mean?!! NOTHING! Go back 10 years and compare the quality of lyrics, then go back 10 more years and compare again.
What confuses me is that, there are people (teens?) who actually listen to that sort of crap!Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Actually, the trade-off between single and album sales goes back decades. I have a few books on ABBA (as my nick implies, I'm a fan -- and a mouse). In these books, their manager (Stig) mentions that he tried to avoid releasing too many singles from his other acts because even though they were popular, people would routinely buy the one or two good songs on an album, cutting into more profitable LP sales. Of course, he found that ABBA was popular enough to sustain both, but record producers and labels have long been suspicious of single sales, which bring publicity but also cannibalize album sales. The only reason to mention iTunes is that it has made "single" the default format for most songs, before a marketing decision has been made about whther that maximizes record company profits.
Dear Lord I hate the RIAA. Even their ordinary business models are scammy, and have been since their member companies were formed.
Make cheese not war 8:)
The thing that characterised upper middle class white people after 1989 was a sense of triumphalism. The cold war was over, the world had unanimously chosen the best way of running things (sic), and it was the end of history. Essentially, we were told all the battles had been won and there were no more challenges left for our generation to take up. People say 9/11 'changed everything' but in reality it changed very little, for the most part western society still smugly grinds away as it did before. The daily life of young people is largely unaffected.
So the prevailing feeling is apathy. You go to school, go to college, have kids and die. There's nothing else to do. The music reflects this.
I corrected your post. you're welcome. Just because most of slasdot is composed of upper middle class white people in the U.S. don't just ass-ume that eveyone in the world is having the same experience. Yes upper middle class white people experienced enui in the 90s and oughts, others didn't and have made more interesting music because of it, perhaps you should listen to Buena Vista Social Club to see what I mean.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
He-he. You are SO wrong.
I have been updating myself with the terminology and (mainly Russian) copyright law due to AllOfMp3 case, so I easily see you misunderstanding.
Ending of the phrase should read: "giving the majority to the copyright holder."
Not to people holding "authorship" (== artists), nor to "producers" (== recording companies) - but to the people who took it all in their hands: "copyright holders". Most of the money are NOT going back to people who write music and songs. Nor to people who are involved in organizing concerts and arranging recording sessions for CD. They would go back to few who usually remain in dark, but control all money flows.
P.S. Just think how screwed your U.S. entertainment industry is if your language already made "artist" != "producer". The people who have "authorship" (and are on LP/CD covers) more or less automatically precluded from copyrights by your system.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
It says that the majority of the money earned by downloading singles goes to Apple. It does not say that Apple makes more money from downloading singles that from selling hardware.
Everyone's talking about the Apple statement, but the reporter seems to have said that; he's not quoting an industry exec.
Not that it matters. That's only one tiny sentence in a 10 page article. What the article is REALLY about (aside from needing new content) is how it's tough to market artists in today's environment. According to the article, the music industry was finely tuned to the old way of promoting artists, which reigned for 50 years -- radio, Tower Records, MTV, Rolling Stone. but focus groups are showing that kids don't listen to radio anymore, they mostly steal rather than purchase music, and MTV has long since gotten out of the 24-hour music format. The industry is in distribution free fall, and everyone seems to be saying that a low-cost monthly subscription model is the answer.
New format.
For old rope.
RR
I see young kids even today..wearing AC/DC and Zeppelin shirts....I mean, I'm very happy to see the music I grew up with has lasted...but, really, these bands should have been replace with quality groups today.
I too see young people 15-20 years old in T-shirts bearing the names and images of 60's and 70's rock stars and albums. I don't quite understand it. I'm too old (late 50's) to just start a conversation with them about it.
I'm inclined to believe that these young men (always young men) in these classic rock T shirts actually have no interest in the actual bands or music whose logos they are wearing. I suspect that this is a totally ironic gesture, a mocking of the baby-boomers over-identification with rock stars and individual pop music recordings.
Possibly, they are wearing band and album T shirts in the same manner of detachment that the Beatles wore Victorian Military uniforms in the Sgt. Pepper era [between 1966 and 1968]. It would have been a misunderstanding of the older people to assume that the Beatles had taken an interest in the values and history of the British Army in early part of the 20th century because they appeared in these old uniforms. But that would have been a logical thing to assume on their part. The Beatles were using the old military uniforms to emphasize their 'apartness' for the mainstream of the society that evolved from the actions of the men who had worn those uniforms without irony.
Same with the young people who wear the classic rock T shirts. It is probably a means of punctuating (among themselves) the differences between themselves and the baby-boomers who worshipped these classic rock artists without irony generations ago.
I may be wrong, but I think that it is too easy to assume that the young people wearing the classic rock T shirts actually know and like the bands and albums on the T shirts. There's something more complex happening.
the industry should have been proactive about his but is still on time to flood p2p networks with Barry White's music :)
To my knowledge (accumulated from the popular press and talking to some folks at Apple in addition to being a shareholder) is that Apple makes almost nothing on the sale of the music itself
Well I don't know what deals the majors record labels have done, but for indie musicians using aggregator services like tunecore, Apple keep 29c per 99c song sold. Does the iTunes store really cost that much to run? I think they must be making money.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I have an issue with one part however, it reads "...and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple" and here I thought Apple made most of their money with their hardware sales and a pittance on each track, giving the majority to the producer."
The statement is not denying that Apple benefits from their hardware, it's only pointing out that the main beneficiary of downloaded singles is Apple.
If you think that's incorrect please feel free to write that, for example, 'I thought Apple made a pittance on each track, giving the majority to the producer'. There is no need to start an unnecssary Apple hardware/software profit discussion on this topic.
Are record sales low because of bad content, or does the music industry not invest a lot of time and work on content because revenues are low?
As a music industry insider, I can witness to the fact that many records are produced in less time and by less qualified people nowadays because record companies have to lower their break-even point. This of course fuels the downwards spiral.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
I'd have to agree that the quality of music "seems" to have gone down, but that's because most of the quality music is coming out on smaller, independent labels, which are underrepresented in music stores (what's left of them anyway!) and on TV/radio. The music industry also tends to ignore the fact that the video game industry is steadily gaining share of consumer entertainment dollars. They blame file-sharing, and even sue file-sharers, and this is a "problem" that's not going to go away, especially now that there's encrytped file-sharing apps out there that keep people's exchanges private, such as GigaTribe: http://www.gigatribe.com/
I'm a musician for about 10 years, one of the problems I see on today's popular music is that it has to much production and poor real music (on the melody side).
As I see it (and probably I'm going to repeat someone's post since I didn't read it all), the band goes to studio with no songs, or crappy songs and the producer as to transform that in to a commercial success (is carrier is probably in stake also) since is name will appear on the album credits.
So in the end we have lazy bands that just don't play and practice the instrument has they should (or are not that talented), producers make it audible (?!) and teenagers listen and buys this crap having a wrong idea of what is GOOD music.
When a show a song of mine to a teenager they promptly say: "Sorry, I don't like instrumental music.". So wait a minute: They don't like instrumental music?! Can I argue that listeners are also being lazy? They need to hear someone tell them the artist's/song's message in their language with lyrics? I can feel pain just by earing an instrument's solo, depends on how good the instrumentalist is. Maybe is where the problem resides.
The studio's production can make any Joe's band on chart's top.
Think about it. (Feel free to listen to my instrumental rock songs, even download them and please, judge them). No, I'm not a professional musician.
I've been listening to streaming euro-trance exclusively for about the last 6 years and I'm in the heart of North America. So what is the payola to my local stations getting the record industry from me considering what they put out to have played?
but that there was a wider VARIETY of crap. This made the worst available really bad, but meant that (in the personal opinion of the listener) the best fantastic. And you tend to forget bad things in the past, so the golden age is in the past.
But the variety wasn't one-dimensional. It was multi-dimensional. You may hate a genre but there were many more genres available on the high street, which meant that there were more you hated but some you loved.
Nowadays, if you don't like the style of what is currently "the new hotness" you'll hate most of the stuff out there because there's little outside it being marketed. Even if you DO like it (say, you're a teenage girl) then there are so many clones that you wont' like them all. So there's a lot more poor (but less terrible) stuff out there, but nothing "great" any more either.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 55 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
..and if you ARE a lawyer, just change IANAL to I-ANAL and presto! (This is not a knock on lawyers -- if you aren't that way, you miss things your clients need you not to miss.) And that actually is a problem for lawyers too. I think my comment was meant to be funny at first, but it got me to thinking. Here comes the offtopic part, but /. has had anti-lawyer rants lately (e.g. "way too much for the Iowa antitrust lawyers").
I'm going to admit it: *I* am a former lawyer and I'll tell you, you have to be SO CAREFUL in this business: everything you do has to be re-done five times and sweated about all night and sometimes you don't sleep. But you only get to bill one hour for the five you actually had to work, and nothing at all for your rough night, because you can't charge your client more time than OUGHT to be expended on a particular kind of case. I was a solo practitioner, but partners in large firms know this well. If a young associate has a quota of 2000 billable hours per year and he works twenty hours on Case X only to be told by the partner "this is being reduced to a two hour billable because that's all the time it should take", is it any surprise that many young lawyers work eighty hour weeks including regular time on Saturdays and Sundays just to hope they won't be let go after all the fiber has been worked out of them and before they could make partner themselves?
So a young lawyer right out of one of our better law schools can make $160,000.00 per year at a white-glove firm? That looks a lot more like $80,000.00 when you figure the hours worked per week, and it takes NO account of the stress and lack of time for any other life. (Most lawyers I know know NOTHING but Law and Golf, and good luck trying to find someone with some personal depth.) I stopped practicing after 25 years when laid low by a stress-related heart attack.
Law is not a glamorous or pretty job.
"Subscription model done right"
A subscription model done right has possibilities but so far the subscription models have all been crap.
No sig today...
I do notice a wee bit of hypocrisy here in that Apple refused to pay universal, but expects for AT&T to pay a similar fine.
It's not hypocrisy at all, Apple makes both the iPhone and the iPod, it would be hypocrisy if ATT made the iPhone and Apple demanded royalty.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm not too up to date on the iPhone situation but I get the gist that you can ONLY get them with AT&T. Right?
I think you're wrong, that you can get an iPhone without getting ATT service. It's just that the iPhone is setup to only work with ATT's service without any hacking, which I think is BS. Hardware shouldn't be locked to one service carrier, you should be able to use any phone with any service. But Apple isn't the only one doing this other cell services sell cellphones that only work on their service without hacking.
FalconShould there be a Law?
At what point could we look to patronage and ego to supply enough new works to keep things fresh, without needing copyright law at all?
Can you say the same about your work? Would you work only for ego and patronage? To expect artists to do so when you won't smacks of hypocrisy. I bet just like you, artists want to get paid for their work.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I take it that you are referring to Australian dollars? New releases here in the US average sub-$14 and have for a while. In a perfect example of your explanation of prices finding the right point on the curve, CDs were $20 in the US about ten years ago.
CDs costs under $14 now? The last tyme I bought new CDs, about three years ago, the cheapest I paid was $18. And they weren't hot pop performers, the last few new CDs I bought were by Niko Case and Norah Jones, I suppose you could say they're pop jazz. For both Amazon is showing for the street price about what I paid for most of their CDs. Now, the last CDs I bought were only half that but they were used and included Melissa Etheridge and other older ones.
FalconShould there be a Law?
'So when will copyright no longer be needed?'
Today
'Will it always really be necessary to keep offering such strong protections to creators at a cost to society?'
It was NEVER necessary.
'At what point could we look to patronage and ego to supply enough new works to keep things fresh, without needing copyright law at all?'
We are there. In fact, I would contend that patronage and ego would produce better quality materials than the commercialized crap we get now. Even movies, the greatest expense these days is paying actors (there are lots of actors in the world) and for special effects (serious artificial inflation in this field, several orders of magnitude).
Technology has made copyright obsolete, copyright was only implemented because of fear mongering by book publishers in the first place.
I bet just like you writers want to eat too. If a writer has to have another job that pays a living wage why would they want to take the tyme to write? Especially when someone can take what they wrote and sell it themselves? Ego only goes so far and there aren't a lot of patrons willing and able to subsidize writers.
On the other hand someone else responded to a post of mine like this saying that some buyers would be willing to buy from the writer in order to support the writer. But that's a gamble, one that some would be willing to take but not others. For instance I might be willing, self publish with an open source license as a way to get my writing in front of people. Then again I'm not dependent on writing to make a living and because I don't work I have a lot of free tyme.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If Apple were truly an "advocate for the consumer", then they would drop their proprietary formats and allow their iTunes songs to be played by products other than their own.
That's why Jobs called on the music companies to get rid of drm, without drm music it could be played on any player. And Apple was the first to offer legal music without drm, other than groups like the Grateful Dead who allow recording and trading. It was only after EMI allowed Apple to get rid of drm when Apple was able to offer it.
Of course they are no more likely to do that than MS will be likely to port MS Office to Linux.
MS was stupid they didn't release Office for Linux, they may not of sold so many Windows licenses but they could of sold a lot of Office licenses to Linux users. Because they didn't Open Office gained a foothold in Linux and is now spreading to Windows and OS X. People get a good taste for opensource with OO then they'll be more willing to try other OS software as well. It could turn out MS's very monopolistic practices could do more harm than if they were more open. At least I hope so.
FalconShould there be a Law?
but the reporter seems to have said that; he's not quoting an industry exec.
Not that it matters. That's only one tiny sentence in a 10 page article.
I was thinking I was the only one who noticed that. For all of the talk about Apple here you'd think TFA was about Apple.
The industry is in distribution free fall, and everyone seems to be saying that a low-cost monthly subscription model is the answer.
Forget that for me, I buy I don't rent. Not only that but I plan on buying a new turntable to replace the one I used to have, I've been seeing more and more store carrying and selling vinyl turntables. I much prefer vinyl to digital music.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They've yet to discover this thing called the Internet[s], except insofar as people use it to "steal" "their" content. If we've learned enything with the Net, it's that info-iteration loops can be completed very rapidly and cheaply--we don't need to spend $millions to discover a flop.
The labels haven't figured it out yet but some performers are onto it, so small and or local bands use the net to get their music out. Magnatunes and some open source, creative commons, websites are used for this.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"Maybe reality is finally setting in. I remember buying albums because I liked 2 or 3 songs on the album. The rest of the songs sucked. But that was my only choice. "
Yeah...that is sad really. I mean, sure, I did that too with a few songs I really like back in the 70's and early 80's. But I gotta say, the majority of the albums I bought back then...I liked EVERY song on.
I may not of liked all of the songs on an album back in the '70s and early '80s but I liked most of them. Today only one song might be good. Because I found some stores that sale new vinyl I've been thinking of getting a new turntable, and I've been seeing more and more stores carrying turntables. I just need to find out what are the good ones and find a good reel to reel tape deck, then save the money to get them.
I bought the album for 2-3 songs, but, it turned out...the WHOLE album was great. What happened to that? Boston's first 2 albums...all good. Dark Side of the Moon, Animals, The Wall, the entire Zeppelin collection (with the exception to Hat's off to Roy Harper on Zep III), A Night at the Opera, Get Yer Ya Ya's Out (possibly one of the greatest live albums ever), Some Girls, Tattoo You, Paranoid, Abbey Road, Klaatu, Hope, Aqualung, Back in Black....etc...etc.
Agreed! With some of those. I'd add ZZ Top, Lynard Skynard, Alabama, and BTO. Gotta take care of business. Or go to the House of the Rising Sun.
Should there be a Law?
'rock' music really encompassed a lot of different styles.....
Ah, "Those were the days". I know a couple of radios that play a mix today, good old Rock and Roll, country, and Jazz.
FalconShould there be a Law?