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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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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!
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 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
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
(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
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.
Zepplin I can understand but AC/DC? My god they made a career of playing the same song for 40 years.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"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.
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?
P2P is the entire candy store, not just a selection of tracks that somebody who knows nothing about me thinks I would like because several million other people bought it. Download a Gnutella client and you'll find stuff that hasn't been commercially available for decades, because someone somewhere dug out a disc (or digitized an LP or a 45) and put it online. Rare music that you can't buy because it's just not available. People with eclectic tastes (or who just prefer older or non-mainstream stuff) often have nowhere else to go, assuming they even know how.
... believe me, they will. Make it possible for a portable device with an Internet connection to buy music directly and download to itself: that could be a "killer app" in its own right.
... you won't be needing them. Then sit back and watch the money just roll in.
Here's ScrewMaster's Plan for Resurrecting the Music Industry. If the studios really want to substantially reduce illicit downloading and make money hand-over-fist, here's what they do. Create a download service comparable to iTunes but with every track ever published available, and I mean all of them. If they can't find an album in their archives, offer a reward to anyone who has a copy they can "borrow" to put online. NO DRM, but support every compression format known to Man (MP3, Ogg, you name it.) Maybe make the customer pay an extra nickel a track for archival quality. Most people won't care, but those that want the extra quality and can afford the storage can obtain it. Hell, make 16-bit PCM (raw CD format) available as well, in case we want to burn original-quality CDs.
Develop client platforms for Windows, Linux and the Mac that seamlessly handle purchase and transfer of music to portable devices, and not just the iPod. Design your desktop application with a plugin-based interface architecture, and release the specs to the hardware vendors. Let them support their product lines for you
Keep prices at no more than a buck a track for new stuff (seems like a good impulse-buy price point) and maybe half a buck for older songs. Put the ancient recordings that aren't even copyrighted up for free: it will bring in people and they might buy other stuff. Offer quantity discounts to individuals who purchase lots of your music. Offer monthly plans like Netflix and Blockbuster (100 songs for $25/month!) Oh, and fire your lawyers
People want music, and I believe the majority of us are more than willing to pay for it. We just want the studios to do what every other competitive business has to do: listen to us, their customers. That means giving us what we want (lower prices, better quality, and more variety) and in the process finding a way to turn a profit. Oh, and pay your suppliers: we'll respect you more (this "protecting the artists" thing is wearing a bit thin.) With the extra money you'll be making you can afford to. This is not rocket science folks, it's just a matter of good business. Something they know very little about, unfortunately.
Look, with their resources, this is something they could do very easily (hell, Apple already did it, so there's no innovation or vision required! They just need to improve upon Apple's model.) We have a bunch of old-guard corporate types unable to grasp that they are completely out of touch and not in the driver's seat anymore anyway. They could get it back. But they'll have to accommodate us to a much greater degree than they're willing to now.
Period.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.