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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."
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.
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.........
(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.)
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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
Why do you think Applet should get a cut from *calls* made with an iPhone?
I pose the question why do shops like Universal think they should get a cut of the sales of the Zune (which was paid by MS) and the iPod (which was not paid by apple). Perhaps we should that Universal has also implied that Apple should pay them for (by Universal's estimation) "the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material"
Not to mention that Universal-NBC wants consumer to pay significantly for downloads of shows that they could buy on dvd for less.
This all boils down to a the last throes of a failing business model.
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?