Slashdot Mirror
A Bleak Future For Physical Media Purchases?
KevReedUK writes "The folks at ZDNet are eulogising over the upcoming death of physical media music sales. They refer to the noticeable drop in physical sales of albums whilst digital sales continue climbing (albeit at a reduced rate). Their central argument is that 'the music industry was pillaged by piracy and competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games ... [2007] marked the lowest tally and the steepest decline since Nielsen began publishing estimates based on point-of-sales data in 1993, a Nielsen representative said. The peak year in that time was 2000, when sales reached 785 million units.'"
The future is bleak for floppy diskettes, Zip drives, and CRT displays. This is simply the pace of technology; more efficient distribution formats wind up winning out in the long run (with a few exceptions here and there, true, but even these are eventually superseded by something more efficient). Even with all the music industry's "late to the game" problems and legalistic maneuvers, the switch to a majority audio distribution occurring via networks was bound to happen. Not really news to most of us...
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
"Ya'd think they would drop the price to something reasonable, like $9.99. The cost of the disk is almost nothing."
As I covered in another post, the going rate for CDs is about $9.99. Prices have indeed dropped. They were in the $18 range about five years ago, but due to piracy, competition from other forms of entertainment, etc. etc. they've dropped significantly.
Despite material costs being below $1.50, it's still the case that record companies make pretty thin margins on CD sales relative to margins in other industries. I know this will probably boggle many people who read this, but there's a huge gulf between BOM cost and cost of sale. All of the record companies' expenses (salaries, promotions, overhead, etc. etc.) must come out of the sale of that CD. The biggest piece of the pie, believe it or not, is usually the royalties.
There are plenty of reasons to justify piracy. Actually, it's my long-held belief that you need no justification... if you'd rather have something for free than pay for it, then go for it. It's not like you need to make somebody else a bad guy to justify your actions. But "CDs cost $18" certainly isn't a good justification (as it is a lie), nor is "a CD costs almost nothing to produce" -- another lie. As covered in my other post, we don't like it when the record companies lie about pirates to demonize their behavior... so why stoop to their level?
"I think the real cause for the drop in sales is that the music stinks and the same artists keep pumping out the same crud."
Another common belief, but the sad reality is that most music has always stunk. Browsing the historical Billboard charts will quickly reveal this. Record companies have always pushed what will sell, with actual quality being an afterthought. The big difference between today and, say, 1973 (when the year's #1 single was Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Tie A Yellow Ribbon") is that today, with just a few clicks, we can get just about anything we want for free.
The top five most pirated tracks last week were from Alicia Keys, Fergie, Soulja Boy, Daughtry and somebody called "Baby Bash." The ability to get music for free has not improved our collective taste in music -- we still want that cruddy music; the difference is that we no longer have to pay for it.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
This nonsense of describing downloaded music as "digital" to distinguish it from that on CDs needs to stop.
Much like a spoiled child, they never look at their own behavior. It's always "some else's fault." I haven't purchased any music CDs in over a year because:
1. It's all crap.
2. I refuse to do business with anyone who considers my fair use as criminal.
Yes, I ripped all my CDs. I do so so I can download tracks onto my digital player. I also have a web interface to access all my music from anywhere I have computer access, but the web page is password protected and I don't give access to anyone. The music industry, however, doesn't want me to do that because they see it as a loss of a dollar for every single track. At the moment I have 1400 tracks on my server. The music industry sees that as over a thousand dollars of lost revenue -- even though I've already paid for every bit of music I possess!
How many times must I buy an album before I can use it as I please? Let's take one example, Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". I went through three vinyl albums way back before digital music was invented. I also owned a cassette of it (store bought, not copied). I might even have owned an eight-track version of it during a brief period of insanity. At the moment, I own two CD copies, the regular version and a "special remastered" version. That's seven copies of one album I have paid for. And you want to sue me because I ripped the CD onto my computer? FUCK YOU!
I know what the problem is. The music industry is very unhappy with CDs because they never wear out. Back during vinyl days you had to repurchase an album because they wore out, no matter how careful you were. They weren't too pleased with cassettes because you could record an album onto it and greatly extend the life of your music, but even cassettes wore out and pre-recoreded cassettes were purposely made cheaper to shorten their lifespan. These days, CDs don't wear out so replacement revenue is from the rare event of physical damage. And digital music never wears out.
So the music industry has seen their revenue from replacement purchases completely disappear. This leaves only one option to them, make the consumer purchase a different copy for every single device, but we're not going along with their plan, and they're now in panic mode. A panicked animal attacks anything and everything within reach, without thought, the music industry is no different. So they attack what is most convenient, their customers. We just need to stay out of reach until they bleed to death.
-- Will program for bandwidth
That's an easy charge (and in the case of Ms. Spears, absolutely correct, even though Fountains Of Wayne prove that "Baby, One More Time" is actually a well-crafted pop song as written) but I'd have to say Timberlake's voice is of a significantly higher quality, and he does occasionally do something interesting with it.
Really, though, the music industry's woes can be summed up in the following:
"Gee, I've got $50 in my pocket - will I buy three CDs with one decent song each totalling maybe 20 minutes of entertainment, a couple of DVDs featuing movies and features I'll watch all the way through, or a video game I'll play for hours? Hm...."
It's all about value for money spent, and most of the major labels' output just ain't got it, when compared to the other stuff that's competing for the dwindling supply of disposable cash.
Plus, this is an industry that:
- insists on treating its customers as criminals rather than trying to figure out what they need to do "right" in order to give their business a future.
- insists on treating its contributors as mere cogs in the machine, rather than its actual driving force...and those cogs are catching on. The industry's been in overdrive trying to spin Radiohead's online release of "In Rainbows" as a boneheaded move, when in fact it's very much the opposite.
Even investor reports are now coming to the conclusion that giving the music industry another leg to stand on only gives them another foot to shoot themselves in.
"Another common belief, but the sad reality is that most music has always stunk."
I disagree with this. I personally tend to listen to a lot of older music (early 90s and before). I'm 18 so nobody can claim it's because I'm just being nostalgic. I have a firmly held belief that what makes modern music so unpalatable to older listeners used to listening in the 70s and 80s is NOT the quality of the actual music itself. The difference lies in the way the music is produced.
If you used to listen to a lot of older music in the 70s and 80s (and sometimes early 90s) you will probably find modern music fatiguing to listen to. It might sound like a wall of noise, with little to no dynamic range or variation - A BLAND SOUND THAT IS JUST A CONTINUOUS ASSAULT ON THE EARS WITH NO BREAKS. This isn't just your imagination - this is due to an actual phenomenon:
Enter the loudness war. Modern music when produced tends to be subjected to the producers desire to make it just as loud or louder than all the other songs on the radio, CD changer or itunes music collection. Human hearing determines loudness by the root mean square value of the sound's power. The PCM format (used in CDs and any music ripped from CDs) has hard limits on how loud a sound can be. Within these limits, the absolute loudest sound you can produce is a square wave. As sound engineers are pushed to master cds at higher and higher volumes, they are forced to resort to using extremely aggressive volume compression and hard clipping techniques to get the perceived volume up. This results in a waveform that starts to approximate a square wave the harder it is pushed. IT IS THE EQUIVALENT OF CONTINUOUSLY BEING SHOUTED AT BY SOMEBODY WITH A MONOTONIC VOICE OF CONSTANT VOLUME THAT DOESN'T NEED TO TAKE ANY BREATHS.
This youtube video can demonstrate the process far better than I can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Unfortunately this technique is rampant in the music production industry - virtually all modern music sounds like this. A lot of younger people just accept that this is the way music always sounds, and when an older or better produced cd comes on they might tend to think that because it sounds much quieter, there is something wrong with it. I think that if the music industry stopped putting so much pressure on sound engineers to MAKE THEIR CDS SO LOUD then they people might actually enjoy listening to the music more, and cd sales might just increase.
Sam
This is how the loudness war is killing music.