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Media Research Exec Says Music Industry Is On Its Last Legs
Ponca City, We Love You writes "For years, the major record labels have fought a pitched battle against the MP3 format. Although major labels like EMI and the Universal Music Group have embraced MP3s in recent months, a story from the Mercury News says early returns from those moves indicate they've had little impact on the industry's fortunes — for better or for worse. 'These are ailing businesses on their last legs,' said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a market research company focused on digital media. The question of copy protection on song downloads 'matters a whole lot less to them than it once did.' The industry has a bigger problem. Consumers used to buy CDs for $10 or $15 a pop. Increasingly, they're buying songs at about $1 apiece instead. So, even if transactions continue to increase, the industry is seeing far less money each time consumers buy and it's having a difficult time making up the difference."
I just need to call enough attention to it. Slashbots will complain about any perceived slight, no matter how unaffected they are.
This has been a long time coming. The music industry has been hosing over it's customers for decades and now folks are hosing them back. I'm not saying stealing is right, but from poor quality vinyl records to over priced CD's and more recent crappy or inconvenient formats like DRM or SACD and DVD-A's, the big labels have created fertile ground for music industry anarchy. Reap what you sow.
I like supporting my favorite entertainers, but I don't feel that the music industry gives them a fair shake either.
So good riddance.
I think you mean John Cage (for the silence part, no idea if his soul is now property of the RIAA)
4'33": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
You, Sir, were not alive in the 80s.
And YOU, my good sir, were not alive in the 50's and 1960's, else you'd know that those were the true golden years of the one-hit-wonders. After all, "making a record" meant a 45 rpm single phonograph disc back then with the primary song on the "A" side and some filler material on the "B" side.
True. I have yet to understand why ClearChannel can get away with almost a complete monopoly of the radio business. I bet you if you looked up every major radio station in your area, (assuming you live in the US) you will find that the vast majority of them are run by this one company. They have openly admitted they play a very strictly regulated playlist on their stations, driven by sales, not by listener demand, or the search for new music. They are generally limited to a very small list of songs as well, both as a means of "playing it safe", playing only songs they think everyone wants to listen to (thereby not taking risks on new music) and as a means of keeping their royalty fees down. It's a sad state of affairs, but unless you have satellite radio, you're stuck with pretty bland choices.
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
Record labels' bigger issue is replacing CD sales
By Troy Wolverton
Mercury News
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:11/17/2007 01:37:25 AM PST
In the end, the long battle by the record labels against unrestricted digital music may have been little more than sound and fury signifying nothing.
At least, that's how it's starting to appear now that two of the major labels in recent months have embraced in some fashion the MP3 format, which has no copy protection. The early returns from those moves indicate they've had little impact on the industry's fortunes - for better or for worse.
Instead, the moves highlight a bigger problem. And that is how the labels are going to replace sales of CD albums, which constituted the core of their business and have plummeted in recent years.
"These are ailing businesses on their last legs," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a market research company focused on digital media. The question of copy protection on song downloads "matters a whole lot less to them than it once did."
For years, the major record labels fought a pitched battle against the MP3 format. The format doesn't allow for any copy restrictions, which made it a popular choice for songs swapped on illicit file-trading sites such as the original Napster and Morpheus.
To combat such piracy, the major labels insisted online stores that sold music had to wrap songs and albums in digital rights management (DRM) technology, which can restrict the number of copies users can make of a song or the number and types of devices it can be played on.
But online music and electronics vendors complained that such restrictions were limiting sales, in part because not all formats worked on every type of player.
In the past year, the music labels have become increasingly receptive to those arguments. In April, EMI announced it would make its entire catalog available for sale in DRM-free formats. In August, Universal Music Group, the world's largest recording company allowed the sale of a significant portion of its catalog in the MP3 format.
The labels' moves have opened up competition in the digital music space. In September, Amazon.com launched a digital music store, featuring only MP3 tracks. Meanwhile other, older digital music vendors, including iTunes and Wal-Mart's Web store, added DRM-free tracks.
Because those songs lack DRM, they can be played on just about any digital music device.
Although it's still early, DRM-free music seems to have had, at best, a slight positive benefit to the music industry.
Sales of DRM-free music to date have "outperformed" EMI's expectations, and Wal-Mart has seen its MP3 sales grow "considerably" since August, when its Web store made them available, representatives for the two companies said. However, neither they nor other labels or Web stores disclosed specific sales results.
Overall, the number of digital songs sold each week seems to have been unaffected by the launch of the major DRM-free stores since May, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital song sales - both of tracks with and without DRM - are in the same range after May as they were in the weeks before DRM-free sales started.
But that's small consolation for an industry whose wholesale revenue in the United States was down 11 percent in the first half of this year, according to IFPI, the industry's global trade group. That's on top of declines in retail sales in six out of the past seven years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
Even if the effect has been questionable, some analysts think that eventually all the labels will sell DRM-free music.
"The writing on the wall, for the most part, is here for DRM," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president and research director for Jupiter Research.
But not yet. Universal and Warner are still just experimenting with DRM-free music, and Sony BMG isn't even doing that much, analysts note.
"The marketplace wil
Actually, as an independent band with our digital distribution handled through CDBaby, we get about $0.60 per iTunes sale. I think 60% is a pretty fair shake for something that costs us nothing. And, getting checks without worrying about remaining physical inventory is a delight. We sell CDs primarily at shows now.