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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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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
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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...'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.
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.
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.
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.
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?