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The Music Industry's Crisis Writ Large
The NY Times has an opinion piece that makes starkly clear the financial decline of the music industry. It's accompanied by an infographic that cleverly renders the drop-off. The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming. "Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday. ... 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent. ... [T]he percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music 'regularly' and nearly a third listen to it every day."
Free music IS NOT the way to go. Warez IS NOT the way to go.
However, streaming music services certainly ARE. Spotify has been around for an year in europe now and its getting close to US launch soon. Everyone I know has stopped pirating music because of it, and personally me and my friends paste spotify links to listen to good new music. And same thing is with my gf, specially because she's been away at her home town this summer. But we like the same kind of music so we paste those link on facebook. Easy and convenient.
I'm actually happy record labels have started to support these things. Great respect for them for that, because thats exactly what we need and want in these days. And they still get the compensation in ad revenue or premium membership. We cant buy every album, because theres just certain amount every person can spend on music per month. But we can listen to them with flat rates or ads. And everyone benefits, including record labels.
I love it how the previous comment got moderated down as troll to hide opinions that actually reflect reality :)
And, similarly, the banking and money-printing/regulation industry has it's hooks into every transaction. Movement of money costs so much it's turning generations into slaves, working and working and working in order to increase the numbers into someone's account. Money is virtual and can grow infinitely. We are busy converting our lives and our planet into virtual numbers.
"Monetizing" everything, growing the numbers in the accounts, depleting our relationships, our environment, our lives.