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17 Million People Stopped Buying CDs In 2008
Houston 2600 sends along an Ars Technica writeup on the continuing downward trend in the traditional music business: NPD's annual survey found that 17 million CD customers dropped out last year. Among the good news is that streaming services such as Pandora are growing fast. "While overall music sales were up 10 percent in 2008, the year saw a drop not only in CD sales, but also in the number of customers actually purchasing music. But according to a new report, the act of listening to music is actually on the rise. ... NPD's annual Digital Music Study found that there were 17 million fewer CD customers in 2008 than in past years. CD sales have been dropping for quite some time, and while 1.5 billion songs were sold digitally last year, the number of Internet users paying for digital music only increased by 8 million in 2008."
...to mortgage-backed securities -- they get a better rate of return.
I don't get the numbers. What made up the gap?
Retail sales in general are down because nobody wants to spend money on luxury items.
I am surprised that people even bothered to do research on this. I could have told you this without looking at any metrics.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
also, I want to know a breakdown of what era the music is being purchased from... the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s or the current decade? Im guessing a big reason for the drop in CD sales is people have filled out their CD collections/replaced all their cassette tapes
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
and yet the RIAA says that the industry is loosing $$ and this states that sales of music are up. Makes one want to go hmmmmm.
Everyone has the right to choose, even to choose wrongly, if ever they are to choose correctly.(Author Unknown)
...but this should show them that their previous business model has failed. It simply cannot function in an Internet-enabled society. How are they going to succeed? I have no idea...I don't have any idea. I have no problem paying for music if I like the band.
I just hope their answer isn't "more DRM." That's shortsighted...the answer to this problem lies in their entire business practice rather than a heavy-handed technical solution. Or maybe, if we're really lucky, we'll witness the dissolution of the RIAA and the rise of smaller, independent record studios.
Ride the skies
Now your drop in overall sales is more likey due to the shoddy music that is out on the market today as compared to 5-10 years ago but that is just the music cycle.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
While reports like these are interesting, they often feel like they are done in isolation to everything else. For example how does that fit in the trend of the market in general, and if it is not fitting in with the buying elsewhere in the market, are other commercial sources like iTunes picking the slack?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I was born listening to 8-tracks, and I will die listening to 8-tracks. And I'll NEVER give them up, dammit!!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just like (physical paper) newspapers, I expect brick and mortar general music stores to disappear completely in the next 10 years
Already, the stores that I've gone into recently are selling more DVD and Blu-Ray movies than CDs and once higher bandwidth to the end-user/consumer is the norm (I'm in North America, by the way...not one of the areas known for blistering fast ISP deliveries) I expect movie sales to move on-line as well and the stores will have nothing to sell.
Probably in 25 years (probably less, but I'm conservative)... even broadcast and cable TV may go away and ALL visual & auditory entertainment will be delivered on-line.
We live in interesting times.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
because 8 million people finally understood that they could buy single tracks online and not have to waste 20$ to get the two or three tunes they really wanted.
The other 9 million either went broke, discovered illegal file-sharing or simply got tired of the crap the industry is producing and moved to other things like books, movies, videogames or that new amazing thing called going outside. I hear the 3D is amazing.
Has no one screamed FLAC yet? I think the problem with CDs was the value in them verses digital downloads -- yes you sacrificed some audio quality to have the songs now and in a convient format without the added silver coaster. I think the only exception is in classical CD's -- which tend to have a booklet that explains a lot of useful information about the pieces included on the CD as well as the being able to rip them into FLAC files since it is nice to hear all the sounds without compression. This is the difference I guess with the latest U2 cd, a drop in quality (sound wise) isn't much of a problem (IMO). If CD's actually added some real value that we'd still buy them and I think some people will continue for the ones that do.
Really, I haven't heard a decent mainstream track in the past year. At least, not one that made me want to go out to the store and buy an entire album. Last year, I got most of the singles I wanted via Amazon spending Pepsi Points.
New York just lost it's biggest rock station, which switched to be yet another top-40 "pop" broadcaster. Everything else is classic rock -- and really, how is playing Led Zeppelin twenty times a day going to boost record sales? The state of modern music is so bad that radio stations can't find enough songs to play to fill up an hour's commute with songs made in the last decade.
Serious, who uses CDs as their main music source. They do not fit in my MP3 player. They do not fit in my cellphone. They are a pain to put in my PC where I only rip them to have it available for my stereo at home.
Now digital music OTOH. Direct download on my PC. Put them from there on SD card for my car. On my mp3 player. On my phone
Sure, there will be people who mainly use CDs, just like there are people still using LPs. Many people moved from LP to CD and now to digital. This should be a business opportunity to re-sell the LPs and the CDs I already have. Those are things they can just put online at almost no cost and cut out the middle man. Say 10USD for all of Frank Zappa's music. Copyright? To protect the artist? It is not as if he will be making a new album very soon.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Broadcast TV" - I'd really rather see an explosion in the use of Broadcast digital TV and Music. I'm hoping that the cable only networks decide to drop the 'only' bit and put their shows OTA... it's all ad supported now anyways and there are a lot of open channels available on DTV broadcast bandwidth. They can even deliver superior quality if they want. The HD I get for CBS is superb... OTOH I do already pay for internet service regardless... so if they can do ad supported online with very high quality I'd take that option as well. Anything to get rid of the Cable/Satellite pay through the nose monthly for the same dreck 90% of the time and new episodes you don't find out about until they've already aired (cause you didn't even know the show existed - too many channels).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
lately I've bought way fewer because the cd's I want to buy are no longer available. And it's not even really rare cd's stuff like Great White, Dokken, Krokus and Savatage basically all the 80's metal and hair bands. I don't want to pay for downloads I want a cd with cool art on it that I can put in the cubby of my truck dash. Switching cd's is also much safer when driving. I will not pay for a download when I buy something I want something real. Also is the music company going to by me a ipod for being such a valued customer? I think not. My truck is an 06 all it got is a cd player. Long live Hair Nation or the sat radio is going out the window.
Well, with music like that, should it surprise them?
All the music in recorded history that has been sizable and successful hasn't been like that, and yet they whine when ONLY promoting that music and ONLY paying for music like that on the radio, about people never buying it.
I think a number of bands back in the day sold that many albums on a single release alone!
Start releasing something people who are over the age of 14 and you'll see them selling more albums.
It's pretty simple.
TFA says 1.5 billion downloads happened last year. That sounds a bit fishy since Apple alone sold 2 billion songs last year (see e.g. techcrunch article).
And how did they get this count? With the data changing so rapidly, they have no metric with which to measure how many CDs each person bought. They don't know that 17 million quit buying CDs, and they don't know that only 8 million started buying tracks.
It could -easily- be that the 17 million who no longer buy CDs now buy twice as many single song MP3s as they used to buy CDs.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
So many people were buying Credit Default swaps,no wonder the big mess that is U.S economy.
As my headline says if the new music doesn't interest people why by the CDs? Me. I prefer to have hardware (CD) back up for all my music.
I'll be the first to say that the CD form of music distribution has been dead for years. While it is true that illegal downloads are on the rise, legal digital downloads are also on the rise, primarily due to companies like Apple, that jumped on the digital media band wagon some time ago. Traditional music media forces the customer to purchase all songs on a disc at a premium price, while little revenue actually goes back into the hands of the artist. This has resulted in backlashes by consumers and artists against traditional Music Industries. I do believe that digital production and publication can empower artists to gain more control and over the music they produce and can eliminate the music industry middle men, unwanted by artists and music lovers a like. Better music selection online, sampling of at least 30 seconds of any song before purchase, individual song purchase capability and low purchase prices will ensure that legitimate digital music industries will replace traditional industries entirely. Since production and distribution costs can be significantly reduced and physical medium is no longer required, digital music must be a bargain to interest consumers and not sold on par with CDs. Otherwise, illegal forms will dominate.
...the retail store is.
I'm serious. Kodak went thru the same process. Focused on selling physical high-volume goods (photo film & paper), they viewed the customer as the store buying stuff in volume - not the individual actually using the product. As a result, when digital photography started catching on, the manufacturer was faced with threats of retail stores dropping their products entirely. You see, the standard drug-store film-processing model required the end user to enter the retail store three times (buy film, drop off film, pick up prints), thus encouraging additional "well, while I'm here..." purchases resulting from the walk-in photo-processing model. Digital photography trashes that model: no longer must the end user come into the store so often ... which upsets the retailer, who then tells Kodak et al "don't go digital or we'll drop your products entirely". Thing is, by considering retailer = customer, the manufacturer doesn't see that the end user is going to go digital anyway and sales of film will eventually evaporate. Scared of losing the "customer" (i.e.: retailer), the manufacturer fails to serve the "real customer" (i.e.: end user), and isn't ready to handle the transition when it finally hits.
Same problem with music. Big labels see the retail stores as the customers, who complain "if you go to digital distribution we won't have anything to sell, so stifle that MP3 stuff or we'll stop selling your product" - not seeing that the end user is, en masse, going all-digital-download. You're not the RIAA's customer, the retail store is.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Right now the entertainment conglomerates are transitioning their command and control structure.
1. They control the distribution of entertainment media practically worldwide and earn above-average returns maintaining that control. DRM schemes are cheap enough and discourage piracy enough.
2. Execs prosper in a political/corporate culture that has fleeced willing consumers for generations. Why would anyone want to screw that up?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Floppy disk sales down 87!!
I personally have stopped buying music in ANY form to protest the disgusting shit RIAA is pulling. And I'm coping just fine.
When it's 1:00am the morning, the band is done playing, and the bartender shouts "last call," I don't really care what the band's website is. Just give me and my friends the standard deal: shirt+CD for $20. That'll get you the gas money to get to the next town. If CDs go away, you're fucked. What are you going to do, give me a piece of paper with your website address on it?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
that new amazing thing called going outside. I hear the 3D is amazing.
Oh yeah, heard of it. The gameplay is very difficult to understand when it comes with interacting with NPCs (wish it comes with a manual), but some players succeed and are given access to body surfing the NPCs.
Yea, I was in this category. I humor myself as a TurboLuddite because I squeeze every last ounce of value out of something before upgrading, so I skip tech generations.
I just got out of tapes about 2003. So some of those last-gasp sales were indeed me building out a $1500 CD collection.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm pretty sure the last CD I bought was back around 2003.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To be honest, I probably buy less music than the average person. Part of that is because I think too much of the money goes to the labels. But when Radiohead released "In Rainbows" for a pay-what-you-want download, I gladly forked over a large wad of paypal cash to support them directly. I did the same when Nine Inch Nails released "ghosts I-IV" and Saul Williams released "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust" for $5 mp3/flac downloads. I have also bought concert tickets to all of them. If more artists would cut out the rich middle man, I would be more willing to fork over some cash, and probably be a lot more broke.
But until the record companies stop being so greedy, as Trent Reznor said, "STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that's not right."
17 million not sold, but how many were sold? If only 17 million were sold this is a big deal, if 1.7billion or more were sold, that's less than a 1% drop, and with a recession, I would say that's pretty good.
-=Down Syndrome in Maine
As a business model, particularly for a small band starting out and trying to get tours going where they can actually make their money on their show fees and merch. you can't sell digital downloads as merch, and you also can't have digital downloads signed by band members (I actually have a few signed CDs myself, and it's really quite nice having them).
Basically, from my perspective, digital distribution could lead to the end of music as we know it. So that's a bit extreme, it's really more like music will become harder to make and tour with.
Record labels are something to be satiated and dealt with, in the eyes of an upstart musician who is still trying to get his first band started. They foot the start up bill for tours, which can often be too pricey to deal with, and they also pay for time in the recording studio. Studio time can be really expensive, and there's just not a lot anyone can do about that. There's always the option of at home recording, however, I don't know if any of you guys have ever tried to record at home, but without at least a few hundred dollars of equipment, you're going to have a hard time getting anywhere. Especially if you want it to actually sound good.
You do have to have music available before you can put it up for download, and you have to money to record it before it can become available.
Then there's also a certain factor of presentation. As a fan of progressive rock and heavy metal, I often find myself listening to albums as a singular entity, and when digital distribution has its way, there's no real uniformity to hold that experience together. The idea of the record as a whole rather than the single song is severely damaged by downloading just one song and not getting the rest of the pieces. I plan on writing a few concept albums before I die, and I know that I damn sure want them to be listened to as a whole. To me, the problem is that this artform of storytelling in music is going to die out because of a distribution method. That seems like a gigantic waste, doesn't it?
Something else that's nice about physical media is that feeling of actually having something. I dislike paying for downloads because you literally have nothing to show for it in the long run, as hard drives get wiped and passwords get lost, not to mention that you usually end up paying for a low quality mp3 or a proprietary equivalent thereof. In closing, digital distribution could literally kill off certain parts of the music listening experience (if internet induced ADD hasn't already).
Nobody wants them even when they are free. Newer better options exist. CD have been around since 1982. That is 27 years. It is surprising that anyone still buys them. Someday nobody will and that is absolutely fine.
I stopped to buy CDs and DVDs from major lables some years ago because they implemented DRM, troyan horses and other things that do not match the CD standard. If I buy music then I do it at concerts, directly from the musicians. As this is the only way to allow musicians to get back parts of their investment I think it's fair to do so.
Then there's another thing: Where can you buy CDs and DVDs ? There's no small CD/DVD shop around the corner where I get guidance about what to buy...
Shit, I don't even DOWNLOAD music newer than 5-10 years old. Nothing in the last decade has really caught my attention.
I'm an old man already at 22. :(
GET OFF MY LAWN!
Already, the stores that I've gone into recently are selling more DVD and Blu-Ray movies than CDs...
Lets see, I'm walking through Wal-Mart, they have music CDs that have all the cuss words censored out for twenty bucks, but lets see, here's an uncensored version of a two hour movie for five bucks. Which one should I buy?
Free Martian Whores!
Developing artists (as opposed to "made" artists) take time to become mainstream, if they ever do. Some of the very best music in existence is necessarily on the fringe.
The sue-your-customer mentality of the **AA has put me off buying CDs. The last ones I bought were from a Goodwill store. And I don't download music, either. BTW much of the music I've bought over the years has been from the performer, at the concert.
Sales of wax cylinders, reel-to-reel tapes, and 8-track tapes continue to drop. When questioned about the drop of new wax cylinder users from 9 to 7, the RIAA stated that the deaths of those two consumers were indeed not from thier advanced ages of over 100, but rather caused by "Pirates" attempting to hurt their profit margins.
The RIAA was optimistic about the increase in clay pot recordings with the recent fad in "accoustic archeology" and hoped to once again start producing new releases in this format in Q4 2009. Questions concerning the validity of such archaic technology were pushed aside with "If the format fails, it because of the Pirates".
Paying $20 for a CD you can download for free or $.99 per track is the first thing to go when money gets tight. Why do you think Starbucks tanked last year?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What does that really mean-
a) more of generation dumb favors the shitty sound of lossy compressed online music versus
the superior cd even with its limitations
b) not only that but they prefer to steal it online and will wonder where the music has gone
sometime down the road and why is it all shitty rap, hip hop or a sea of equally
worthless garage band, indie loser, 2 chord robotic lacking harmony melody or anything
beyond cut and paste derived tunesmith drivel
So not only do they not have an appreciation for audio fideltiy but they are tasteless, clueless morally bankrupt idiots who voted for Obama
Welcome to 2009, doing its best to make biblical prophecy and the coming apocalypse, a reality
Perfect Storm of Stupidty and I for one will welcome the culling
Have a nice day
Let's compare buying a CD from a retail store versus downloading, shall we? Let's say you hear this rad Britney tune on some awesome Youtube mashup and you just have to have it, right freaking now.
Retail:
1) Get out of bed. Not something I do willingly.
2) Shower. Or not. Depends on how offensive your personal aroma is. After 2 days without a shower, I smell like roses and candy.
3) Get dressed. Okay, so I don't have any clean underwear. I'll just flip these inside out, nobody can see the skidmarks.
4) Find car keys. For me, it's usually a 5 minute desperate search until I realize that they're already in my pocket.
5) Drive to store. Traffic sucks, gas costs money and if I get another moving violation, I lose my license. No, Officer Friendly, I have no idea how fast I was going. Why don't you let me in on the secret?
6) Park in big box store parking lot. It's a long freaking walk in direct sunlight, and my basement-dwelling geek-pale skin might just burst into flame. Lean against door to rest. Wheeze loudly.
7) Go into store and find desired CD. Lookit that, they're out of stock and I came all this way. Shucks.
8) Stand in long-ass checkout line behind Welfare Queen and her brood. Screaming kids are always a pleasure, the little darlings.
9) Pay uncaring, minimum-wage clerk $14 for your purchase. For 6 bucks an hour, you KNOW she cares what you think.
10) Drive back home. More gas, more traffic, more chances for that moving violation.
11) Open CD. Break out Sawzall to cut through multiple layers of plastic and security tape. Cut finger open. Curse loudly.
12) Rip CD to disc. Can't browse porn while it's ripping or it might mess up. Hunt through 433 cable channels for something to watch while CD rips.
13) Upload to mp3 player. Rock out to Britney's latest. FINALLY!
Elapsed time: 90 minutes, $14 plus gas, plus cost of speeding ticket (if any).
Download:
1) Roll over in bed, open laptop, brush Cheetos dust off sausage-like fingers, click on Amazon.
2) Pay 99 cents for the one track you want.
3) Browse porn for the 60 seconds or so it takes to download.
3) Upload to MP3 player. Rock out.
Elapsed time: 3 minutes tops, 99 cents. No clothing, no shower, no speeding ticket.
- Pithy comment goes here.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
The younger generation isn't interested in having physical copies of the music and older farts like me have already fleshed out our collections.
*sigh* back to work...
In other news.... Sales of tapes are down as well. Experts believe this to be the first signs of the end of the music industry, nay the end of recorded sound all together!
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
I never stopped buying CDs, and never will!
One simple reason: I never started...
I never baught a single piece of music in my entire life. Instead I relied on radio and tapes to listen back to the songs I liked.
As for today's times, I barely listen to radio anymore, I rely on webradios and the few MP3 that i have, wich are mostly songs that can't be baught anywhere in North America legally anyways...
I know this only applies to about 1% (if that) of the market, but I have mainly purchased records in the past 2 years. Discographies have been the only CD I have bought, which normally contain out of print materials. I have noticed even some of the bigger retailers, like Best Buy, starting to carry LPs again. The great thing about LPs is that they normally come with a digital download coupon.
CD's are an obsolete format. I'll bet 8 track tape sales are down to.
Gee Wiz.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I still buy CDs, and I buy the occasional song (or full album) on iTunes.
I almost never buy any CDs locally, though, because the selection in local stores is pathetic. Instead, I buy from Amazon, HMV in England and FNAC in France. If I can't get it through any of them, I probably don't need it anyway.
Yes, I too find most of the current "music" awful, and have heard little of interest since about 1991. You can't blame me for not buying stuff that sucks. Other than reissues of old stuff, my most recent CD purchases include Dial M for Monkey by Bonobo, Hakol Ze Letova by Dana International, and Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno. I bought Bonobo on iTunes, Dana International online, and Azucar Moreno at a record store (albeit one in Costa Rica).
...laura
FACT: lots and lots of great music is made all the time.
FACT: human beings "bond" with music in their teens as music has an emotional component and the flood of hormones wreaks havoc with ones emotional make up and ordering. As a result: people "focus" on the music of their "coming of age" or maturation.
FACT: there has been no decrease in talent, nor has there been a decrease in creativity.
So, as people age, the hormone disaster retreats, and they lose interest in music as it is crowded out by careers, marriages, kids, and mortgages. Combine that with a multiplicity of technologies demanding one's attention (TV, Wii, XBox, Movies, Internet, etc.) and it thusly comes as NO SURPRISE that people think "music these days sucks" and "there's no good music anymore", when in fact, it is simply one's perceptions and hormonal predispositions have changed.
I'm an Older Geezer - I saw Genesis with Peter Gabriel, Yes, and King Crimson with Wetton on bass. I saw the Gang of Four, and the Clash, and MX80, Blondie, etc. Then I graduate university and I continued being fascinated by music. I also got married, and I saw my (now ex) wife lose interest, and my friends lose interest, and in the mid 1990s one of them said "yah know, Ralphie - music pretty much died in 75 and 76 when Disco and punk came down the pike" And I responded, "No, dumbass - you graduated high school in 75, and got that soul-deadening job at the air conditioning factory that drained all the life out of you."
I continue to listen to new music, even as I lose my hair and go ever grayer. I have thousands of CDs and LPs (most of which I have digitised or collected digital versions of) and I listen to music all the time and I am always listening for new good music, and I am never disappointed. There's TONS of great stuff gushing out of the world every single day. It's Art. It's WHAT WE DO because WE ARE HUMAN.
so when you say "There hasn't been any good music in 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 years", I say FUCK OFF and OPEN YOUR EARS.
Wanna learn more? get "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC". Read it.
nuff said.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I started to realize that I was getting a bad deal out of buying CDs:
* got booklets with no lyrics (two Midnight Oil albums), or incomplete lyrics (some Aerosmith album).
* one or two good songs, the rest is filler (several albums, including the aforementioned Aerosmith one).
* very limited choice in local stores (could never find any Chris Isaak album).
* couldn't justify the price after a point.
* audio quality gone downhill with the loudness war.
And after all of that, unethical moves by the record companies, and DRM.
I've mentioned this one here before: I was about to get Iron Maiden's Dance of Death, pretty much had the wallet in my hand. Then I saw a 'copy protection' logo. Put the disc back on the shelf, looked around, picked Judas Priest's Painkiller instead. Some time later, I downloaded Dance of Death (so much for copy protection). And it was the most awful thing they had ever done.
So I won't fall for that trap again. I'll download as fuckin much as I goddamn want. If the artists want my money, come to my city and do a concert!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Regarding Broadcast/OTA TV. I could see cable taking a big hit from OTA digital broadcasting. Cable was the first thing to go when I started looking at saving cash and I doubt I'll be going back as they've homogenized the channels too much for me to want to pay for them. Meanwhile OTA is moving the other way with stations dedicating channels to sports events, weather, kids programming, etc...
Online streamed video I'm not as enthusiastic about. Sure it's great that I can watch BSG on Hulu or a movie on Netflix, but only if my all neighbors aren't doing the same thing. Buffering video is more antitainment than entertainment.
The ISPs can claim to sell me an 8Mb connection, but it's pretty much the same as it was when it was an oversold 1.5Mb connection.
NFM
Now that the perceived value of a recording is approaching zero, people are becoming less willing to pay for it, either as a CD or as downloadable media.
The solution, for talented artists, is to stay independent, focus on the quality of live shows, including making quality recordings of those shows to give out as advertising for future live shows.
I stopped buying CD's based on the attitudes of the record companies and their affiliates. I don't care who it harms; I'm not supporting that method of business, and anyone with links to it deserves to fail.
The word isn't spoken much, but the term is boycott. Many times a boycott is called for publicity. This one is because people are not needing the the product and find it not worth the money as well as not liking their business association.
The truth shall set you free!
When the RIAA and IFPI started to sue innocent grandmothers for ridiculous amounts of money...
And I am not goning to buy in the near future anything from this mob!
Just cause CDs spin in circles like LPs doesn't mean they are analog encoded.
As far as the Frank Zappa comment, people work for the benefit of others then themselves. That's why things like life insurance and wills exist. Just because he's dead doesn't mean his family's standard of living should drop. If you want his music but can't afford it, then you need to take actions to put yourself in a place where you can afford it.
I think the business model the brick and mortar business needs to adopt utilises the electronic format. They need to retain a digital library that real customers (ie the listening public) can download onto a cd/mp3 player/whatever in whatever format they require.
The distributors can set up server farms supplying downloads to their customers, on a pay per d/l ( a cheap rate ~10c per) passed to the customer.
Charging the customer ~1.00 per song (or less), will result in them purchasing $15-$20 on a cd. They get what they want, the business makes a profit, people keep their jobs, everyone wins.
Of course, the existing industry doesn't want everyone to win, only them. Greed is not a viable long term business model, as history shows, and will demonstrate again on the festering corpse of the RIAA and it's associates if they don't whack themselves with a +12Clue Stick real quick.
i've said this before.
people aren't buying as many CDs because they already have them all, and we have them backed up.
i buy a few albums a year, but that's about it. why so few? because i spent the last 10 years buying CDs of all of the bands that i like, and i now have them backed up to my computer. i no longer have to buy multiple CDs if i want to have convenient access to an album (one for my living room, one for work, and one for the car), and i don't have to buy another CD if my current one gets scratched.
thats why i dont buy CDs. i already have all of the ones i want, and if my CD breaks, i really don't care because i can make a new one or listen to my iPod.
i don't own a single piece of illegal music. my music library is 6,000 or so songs, and i paid for each one of them. that means they have gotten a lot of money out of me already.
so if the RIAA wants me to buy more, they need to quit putting out shitty music. they need to create radio stations with good music. give me a radio station that won't play a song more than once a day, doesn't play anything by Brittany Spears, Link Park, Nickelback, [insert lame band name here]..., and i would probably buy a lot more music, because i might actually hear something i like (or heaven-forbid something that is new, crosses boundaries, and is completely fresh).
Music are up by 10%, in a year where almost everything else cratered.
Everything else is blah blah blah who cares? CDs have been dead to me for years, DVDs and books are next. Vinyl records, actually worth keeping around because of their acoustical properties, are the only dead media that I really miss.
That's a boycott in action for you. The protest against stupidity is working. Keep it up!
I probably won't stop buying CDs as long as they're available to me.
I want the physical product. I want to be able to look on my shelf and see the mass amounts of music as some sort of badge. I'm still in this mode of paying for a virtual product (yes, I see the irony in this statement).
I rarely buy 'big label' music, not because I have some kind of principle against them (which I do) but because I can't justify spending $20 on something I know is only worth $10. Most music I purchase is through CDBaby.com, eBay, used stores and at the venue of the live act. Given that the HMVs in Canada recently saw most of the music catalogue (the older stuff in alphabetical order) reduced by about a third of what it used to be, and their movie and video game stuff expanding, the outlets to buy the kind of music I want will not be at retail.
As more and more artists stop producing CDs (at a fair price), I will have to move to digital means to purchase my music, however I have yet to pay for an mp3 (almost did a few times).
And to you music elitists, there is good new music out there, you just have to work at finding some.
How many left to go?
I came up with a new word for the type that can't live without malls... Yammies, for "Yet Another Mall" It is primarily a subspecies of the Yuppie.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I don't illegally download music. There are enough legal, inexpensive ways to get music that downloading has no appeal. But our purchase of new, mainstream CDs is sharply down from, say, 10 years ago. There are a few reasons for this.
Back in the old days you had to buy a mostly crap album for one or two good songs. Great for the record companies, bad for us. Being able to buy a la cart blows that paradigm right out of the water. Filler just sits on the server, unpurchased. I think this might be a significant reason CD sales are down. Sales will carry on due to inertia, but eventually as more people discover a la cart service, it's inevitable that sales would drop. What is my motivation for buying a CD which almost by definition has content that I don't want? Especially if I'm just going to rip it for my ipod? Sure, I might discover other songs I like, but I can accomplish that by previewing the track on Amazon or itunes or a dozen other places.
When we do buy a CD, I always look for a used version first, at the local Everyday Music store, or on Amazon. If I thought CDs were reasonably priced, it wouldn't be worth my time to do this, but the list price of the average CD is just too rich for my blood. CD resales usually don't count as sales. In an economic downturn, people will look for cheaper solutions.
Is it just me, or is most of the "mainstream" big-label stuff absolutely crap these days? Am I having a "get off my lawn" moment? Not just in content, but the sound quality is just abysmal. Not in all cases, of course, but it seems more and more likely that a new CD will be noise at a constant volume. I was an early adopter of the CD when it started coming out, and even to my elderly ears, older CDs generally play at a lower volume level but with much more detail. Too many brand new CDs just sound like crap. And buying the tracks off itunes doesn't help -- it still sounds like crap. The ability to preview tracks may make this situation even worse -- people don't just buy "The Boss"'s new album on name only, they preview first. If it sounds like crap, it's not a sale.
I don't have, like, hundreds of data points, but it seems to me that the music produced by indie groups is generally of better sound quality than the music produced by the big labels. Independent bands, some working out of converted spare bedrooms, are producing better sounding albums than the big labels. It's just amazing. I know, a lot of this has to do with the "loudness wars", (and it's partly due to sound recording technology becoming better and more affordable) but what it means is that when I *do* buy music, it's less likely to be from a major record label.
So let's see. I try to avoid filler, I by track-at-a-time from non-concept albums, I preview and reject crap both in content and sound quality, the CDs I do buy are generally used, and I'm more likely to listen to indie groups. And I'm sure I'm not alone. But I'm sure the drop in CD sales is all about piracy...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you're willing to look beyond radio pap, there's plenty of good, new music.
I buy CDs if they're priced reasonably or better yet, used or borrowed and import them to iTunes. I basically use the CDs as backup for my music. If iTunes allowed you to download everything again if you lost your hard drive, I would stop buying CDs completely.
The RIAA's response - People are Pirating our music.
The truth - We stopped buying music altogether because all you release now a-days is cookie cutter crap. Go back to your roots and discover some new fresh unique artists. Instead of inventing them!!
I heard about a couple albums recently that I wanted in their entirety: Sea Sew by Lisa Hannigan and The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists. I found them both as legal, DRM-free downloads for $9 or as CD's for $14 with shipping. Then I had to ask myself: Are a plastic disc and paper liner notes worth $5 and five days of waiting?
My reluctant conclusion was no. The last CD I bought was ripped and then left to collect dust for the past six months. These albums might have nice notes and artwork, but I can't justify paying 56% more for that. Instead I'll download an extra album and contribute to the trend.
I think the best part of getting older is that well done music from pretty much any genre sounds enjoyable. I seem to appreciate complex music more, and also appreciate artist skill & abilities more. My musical taste continues to widen, and thus I encounter "new" music all the time. I agree that there's very little new music from the studios that entice me. The dynamic range has been compressed to the point of sounding poor. The new independent music produced on a limited budget sometimes sounds just... so simple, unprocessed, and refreshing. The most recent discovery old music is of Django Reinhardt. Check out the wiki on him. Then listen to what he made a guitar do. The discovery before that was Tommy Emmanuel. Youtube him. So much good stuff. It's old but all new to me.
"Overall sales were up by 10%". That's a win in my book. I don't care who I'm selling to, or what format they're buying in so long as my profits went up.
..so it's not just overpriced major label stuff, or mainstream music sucking, or backlash against lawsuits that's killing sales. Obviously the CD is over, the question is whether the music industry can survive if only a fraction of its customers are willing to pay for the music they enjoy.
First of all the music publishers themselves. The number of CD releases seems to have gone down and what's out there is limited to fairly recently produced music. If it's not a recent release it's probably a greatest hits releases by a band. Now while I like greatest hits release every so often -- they're great if you want fill up an old CD changer with a bunch of greatest hits from various artists and have a nice variety of music for a barbeque or party -- running into nothing but those gets real old, real fast. And you miss out on the little gems that weren't monster hits but well worth listening to.
Then ther's the retailers (Best Buy, Borders, etc.) who used to devote a pretty good amount of space for displaying CDs have cut way back on that floor space. As a result of not having the real estate to display a wider variety of CDs, all you find they have on sale are the one or two most recent releases by a band and a bunch of greatest hits CDs.
And the two seem to feed on each other:
Publishers: `Retailers don't have the space so we won't make such a variety of CDs any more'
Retailers: `Gee, the music companies aren't making anything but a handful of releases from the artists we used to carry so let's cut back on the floor space for the CDs. Besides, we need more room for the 74 styles of iPhone cases that just came in.'
Given that there's so little for sale any more, is it any wonder why people aren't buying CDs? When it takes you all of ten minutes to pretty much skim through their entire stock and you don't see anything new, who's going to continue to waste their time coming back. Next thing you know folks are downloading music from whereever they can find something that's different from the aging stock that's collecting dust at the local retailer.
I think it was the music companies cutting way back on the active selections in their catalogs that started the process. We used to have a Sam Goodies in one of the local malls. (I hardly ever went in there but, when I did, I always marvelled at how little the staff really knew about any kind of music either current or older stuff). At first there was a fair amount of stuff for sale. Then the aisles became wider and wider and the shelves/tables got smaller and smaller. Before they finally closed, you could have driven an SUV through the place and not knocked anything over.
I occasionally drive by a few remaining music stores and keep wanting to stop in if only to pay homage to the last of their kind. You know the kind of place: each of the black-clothed staff has more piercings than three punk bands combined, there's a waft of incense that hits you in the face when you open the door, T-shirts and posters for obscure bands, a display case full of vintage, collectable vinyl, and there's always something blasting at about 105 dB. I'm thinking of places like Wreckless Eric's, Wax Tracs, or Record Breakers (the closing of that one broke my heart). Come to think of it, there's a "new and used" place just South of home. Think I'll check them out before they're gone, too.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It's only normal to move to digital iTune or MP3 format. The biggest challenge of using Apple's iTune store is that the songs from iTune store are DRM-protected. Otherwise, itâ(TM)s a nice and complete platform.
Speaking of DRM-free music, Amazon does have an awesome MP3 store that is DRM-free with a large selection and often good prices. (It would be nice if Amazon had the same thing with Kindle books.) If Apple could also move in that direction, it would be perfect and its competitors will not have a shot.
That is a big reason that Amazon has a lot of successes with its MP3 store.
On the note about Amazon, I recently came across an interesting table that details the discounts on Amazon. It is at http://www.uberi.com
Maybe someone will find it useful too. PC World has also recently recommended it to its readers.
Audacity is your friend. It can encode anything from any source into OGG, uncompressed WAV and FLAC for free.
Best editor and capture software for both Windows and Linux!!
I've used it alot to rip soundtracks from YouTube.
Ahem!
1. $14 for a CD? Possibly, unless you take more care to hunt down music at more reasonable prices. Okay, so I'm in the UK but $14 equates to about £10 and although I consider £10 to be extremely good value for a CD containing music I will enjoy over the next 30-50 years - besides which, I don't actually remember the last time I paid £10 for a CD anyway.
2. One track costs around 99p in UK money. For ten tracks, that's £9.99. Many CDs (especially the Expanded/Remasters of the classic rock stuff I tend to buy) may have anything up to 17 or 18 tracks. That makes downloads more expensive.
3. No DRM on a CD (as long as you avoid DRMed CDs which are pretty rare these days anyway). So I can rip the CDs at whatever rate I like as many times as I like, and do the sociable thing of letting family and friends borrow them also.
4. No download restrictions. I have a pretty much unlimited usage ADSL connection but lots of people over here have capped monthly usage. Music downloading contribute to that meaning there's less bandwidth for everything else.
5. Call me old fashioned but with a CD I have something tangible to file away on a shelf and admire - not to mention sleeve notes to read while on the loo.
6. I have a reasonable hi-fi - so why would I waste it's capabilities by playing compressed, lossy music on it?
7. I'm a discerning CD buyer anyway but *if* I get bored with a CD, then I can resell it legally. Again, because I listen to a lot of classic rock albums, when they get remastered & expanded I can buy the new version and resell the old one on eBay. This means that I can actually get the new version for just a couple of pounds.
8. I don't need to spend additional money buying hard drive space to store and backup my music collection onto. You should take this into account when doing your cost differences between CDs and downloads.
9. Downloads will kill music. What happens to the good bands who bother to tour currently based on a new album release if all they are doing in future is releasing music track-by-track? How often can they tour if they don't have much new material to play live?
10. Downloads are for people with short attention spans, not music fans. Sorry, but if you need "pick 'n' mix" music because you think every album only has 1 or 2 good tracks on it, then you're not listening to good music.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I tell everyone I see to boycott the major labels but that is another story. The major labels don't, can't and/or won't see it and as usual want to keep blaming the customers. There are many reasons out there for showing bigger results than their customers stealing from them. The economy is the biggest and it isn't just people not spending for a long while there has been a shift in where teens want to spend their money. there are a lot more options today than yesterday. People not having jobs or the money to support themselves let alone buying luxury items. The number of true quality artists that have emerged is decreasing. Whether the artists are themselves walking away from the labels, being pushed away from the labels or just do live shows, the true quality artists are not in the spotlight as much as they used to be. The major record labels only want the "pretty people" that they can sell, doesn't matter if they have any talent. I remember many moons, I would hear music and just love the group or individual.. I might never know what they looked like until I actually saw the album or saw them performing but it didn't matter I was there for the music. The major record labels don't want to see hip/hop or rap that is encouraging and insightful they want it to be nasty and controversial so those are the artists they promote. They want the quick dollar not the real artist. It is a shame because there could be talent there but it is hidden with all the smoke and mirrors and the glitter. They are not looking for the real numbers or reasons, the major label exec's see that their profit is lessening and rather than be creative and know the market and people's wants they quickly blame the issue on others.. I personally hope they lose all their customers. They lose all their money then maybe the true artists will emerge again in the spotlight and it will be about the music and performing not just money and ego.