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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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
You mean it doesn't all go to the artist?
Every business has overhead that isn't just paying the people who make the product. I have now problem with the labels taking a share, although usually they take far too much. I'm glad the big labels are realizing that their music sucks, and I'm glad they are putting someone inplace who is interested in making albums, not just hit singles. But I still don't want to give my money to Sony. The music is a problem, but so is the way the big labels have been acting. Don't think you can threaten me, sue me, rootkit me, and bankroll legislation that give private corperations the rights of a judge (DMCA takedown notices), and then just say "Oops, Sorry we just want to make good music." Fuck you Sony. Repeal the DMCA and then come tell me you're sorry.
We are all just people.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
Um, hate to break it to you, but being 42 and seeing music come and go, music has sucked since the early 80s. The mid-to-late 90s is *exactly* the same as today. Grunge wasn't emo and frat boy headbanging crap? And this isn't one of those "my generation was better", I even recognize that my generation's early 80s music sucked. Where are the Led Zeppelins? Where are the Pink Floyds? Hell, where are the Beatles? I recently listened to most the Beatles discography, and it's still unbelievable how different they were from anything before and anything since.
Where is the innovation?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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".
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.
For my particular slice of the demographic the prevailing feeling is bitterness that the generation that grew up in the 60's is refusing to make room for us so we have to make due with less. Graduating at the end of the tech boom and seeing exactly 0 entry level positions definitely inspired that. Right now every generation is living with the gradual decline of our living standards due to an aging and long lived generation taking the bulk of the good life. Likely will shift dramatically in 20 years.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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?