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."

Comments

Go back to the beginning...

[BWJones]

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.

Re:Go back to the beginning...

[Realistic_Dragon]

So the conflict is that Apple wants to maximize the number of iPods sold, which means getting people to buy the maximum number of songs to fill up their iPods, thus requiring a bigger iPod.

There is already enough stuff out there to do that. There is also enough television that you could start watching now and never come to the end of it. There are certainly enough books that even attempting to read just the good ones would be a fairly impossible goal for one human lifetime.

So when will copyright no longer be needed? Will it always really be necessary to keep offering such strong protections to creators at a cost to society? 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?

Re:Go back to the beginning...

[mmarlett]

No, the risk for record companies is in investing in new talent. They want to be able to plug into "the formula" to market and sell albums. The companies look at what is working in the marketplace then find something just like that to invest their marketing dollars in. When they find the sound they want, they then go looking for the people who look the look they want and can make that sound. It's not a new technique -- The Monkeys, for example, were completely manufactured this way. But also (more recently and more to the problem) Creed only got a record contract because they sounded like Perl Jam, but better washed and without all the righteous indignation that can be so difficult for a record company to get around when marketing. It didn't matter that Creed was essentially a bunch of no-talent hacks because they could do the Pearl Jam formula, only without all the fuss.

But now they've become so refined in what they think people want and so limited in competition (there are only, what, three major labels now?) that they are just regurgitating and eating their own crap. They're actually cloning their clones. After Creed worked so well, they dug up Nickelback. That worked too, so how about this Three Days Grace thing ... and, well, Three Days Grace sucks ass, and they suck so bad that the record companies have to admit that the music sucks. But they can't see that it's because of their refusal to get out of their formula. They think it's the talent pool. They think there aren't any more good artists because they can't find somebody else to fill in on the played out "Pearl Jam" slot. And all their other slots.

In the past it has taken about 12 years to go from innovative revolution to played-out commercialized copying clones -- 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991 ... but now it has been 16 years without a revolution. There hasn't been an Elvis, or a Beatles, or a punk/new wave/disco explosion, or a Nirvana. These record labels are completely lost. The only thing that has really changed is that the labels have consolidated so that they have no reason to try anything new. They are idiots.

The missing decade

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The missing decade

[ScrewMaster]

The music and motion picture industries have always tried to maintain the status quo. If that involves going to the Supreme Court and attempting to get specific technologies outlawed ... so be it. That's why they're so dangerous: they are willing to go to any extreme to protect what they already have, and need to have new opportunity shoved up their collective asses before they recognize it. Look at the motion picture people and the VCR ... fought it bitterly until they realized they could make even more money by selling us prerecorded tapes! If the Supremes had ruled in their favor and made the VCR a contraband device they'd have lost billions! Yet they couldn't see that until well after the fact: I'd say we're not dealing with particularly intelligent people here.

The music companies are no different, and are still thinking in terms of eliminating the competition (or, in Apple's case, a middleman they never really wanted in the first place.) They have no vision, no real awareness of the possibilities, no ability to take measured risks. I believe that if there were a magic button that, when pushed, would make the Internet, data compression technology and all audio/video recordable media instantly vanish from the face of the Earth ... those bastards would trample each other trying to be the first one to press it.

Dangerous parasites, all of them.

Not just quality

[ChromeAeonium]

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.

Seems to me...

[DigitalSorceress]

"...and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple"

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. :)

Re:Reality

[cayenne8]

"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 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.

Sure...I bought singles on some songs...a few clunkers, but, large part...most every album I bought, the whole or 99% of it turned out to be quality music. What has happened to that? Why are there largely not bands that put out full quality work?

The music industry...plain and simple. They are only interested in a quick buck, one hit and out the door. Bands today don't get the luxury of developing...that takes time and work. I personally don't feel that there are as many good venues for new bands to play and hone their skills before 'breaking'. With licensing the way it is...hard to let a band play cover tunes, and guess what....that is how many of the old bands started!!!

Sad....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 can barely find a band today that has a guitarist of the caliber of Page, Claptop, Vaughn or the like. Seems today they are more interested in sampling the playing of the past, rather than learn to play, sing and excel at original content that is fun to listen to.

They summed it up well on page 4

[intrico]

"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.

Re:Turn that shit off!

[Reality Master 101]

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?

New Music?

[servoled]

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.

"the quality of todays music is the problem"

[Elbowgeek]

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