Music Execs Stressed Over Free Streaming

itwbennett writes "At the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York, music industry watchers gathered to puzzle anew over the continuing decline in music sales. 'We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years,' said Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group who spoke at the conference. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry. In years past, the blame was put on digital music piracy. At this year's conference, however, the focus was on free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube."

Comments

What about...

[MrEricSir]

...free streaming over the air, i.e. radio?

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

They can control radio much easier than they can control the Internet.

Re:What about...

[brit74]

My guess is that the radio station selection is rather limited. Hence, consumers were forced to buy music to listen to stuff they really wanted to hear when the radio got repetitious. Certainly, that's what I used to do: bounce back and forth between the regular radio (which gets old quickly) and my music collection every month or so (while buying new music to fill-out my music collection). Now, with pandora, I just type in the name of a band I kinda like and listen to that. It seems less necessary to buy music anymore because I have unlimited variety with pandora. At least they make ad-revenue from that, though. I kinda figured that might be where music is going: towards ad-based revenue.

Re:What about...

[Kjella]

Radio doesn't play the music you want to hear when you want, there's no way to skip songs you're tired of and so on. You might find a channel that's reasonably close but that's it, it's no replacement for owning the song. Spotify lets you play any song directly, save playlists, take the songs offline etc. and is much closer to having a huge mp3 collection on a network drive, owning it isn't that important anymore. Instead of buying CDs or on iTunes to play, people skip the "buy" step and play from Spotify.

To them Spotify is a huge double-edged sword. On the one side, it brings many pirates to a legal streaming service. On the other side, it brings a lot of profitable buyers to a not so profitable streaming service. But if they make Spotify worse then people will go back to P2P, probably in even greater numbers than before. Not that I think they can stop the move to digital downloads anyway, fewer and fewer use a CD player anymore. Delivering it on CD is just a very impractical temporary medium until you can get it ripped.

Re:What about...

[mhajicek]

I kinda figured that might be where music is going: towards ad-based revenue.

You mean like radio?

Re:What about...

[TubeSteak]

My guess is that the radio station selection is rather limited.

I've been scanning the dial only to hear the same song playing on at least 3 different stations at once.
This is what Corporate Music has done to us.

Re:What about...

[davester666]

Maybe. But it does seem especially bizarre that he's not complaining about 'stolen' music, but music that is properly licensed and paid for.

I guess it boils down to, decisions that the major labels made several years ago to license their music to these streaming services, now seems to be negatively impacting their ability to sell the hot new song of the week. It hurts even more because they no longer can bunch that hot new song with 9 other songs that are even worse.

Bad executive. No more coke and whores for you. And no golden parachute either!

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Music is going towards affordable.. unless on a shiny disc. The execs are still trying to hold the average selling price to above $10 for a CD and at least $1 per track for downloads.

DVD sales prices adjusted to video rentals. Video rentals got squeezed by Netflix, Hulu, and other sources. Squeezed as in the royalty payments for rentals are high while the price they can charge is falling. Look at why rental is dying. The brick and Mortar stores are melting down as grocery stores and drug stores are selling DVD's for $5 and below.

http://gawker.com/#!5623676/blockbuster-finally-going-bankrupt

DVDs still have new releases that are good enough to attract buyers.

Older titles are lower priced.

CDs of the classics are still expensive.. The industry has not learned. Add in the DRM attempts and major attacks on the user base and the resulting boycott, and it's no wonder sales of the shiny discs are way down and $1 per track stuff is small compared to streaming. High prices and legal liability and risk associated with ripping for an MP3 player is something I don't bother with.

As far as I know they have not changed the license for CD's so it is still illegal to rip them for use on your MP3 player because it is an illegal copy. Since they have not made any move to make the product legally useful, I don't buy it.

Some DVDs have attempted to make the same mistakes. I complained to Sony on the Open Season DRM which made it unplayable on Ubuntu. After a class action lawsuit, they provided a free replacement that did work.

Re:What about...

[Moryath]

If the music was worth buying, people would buy it.

As long as most of what they are trying to sell is disneyfied overproduced crap or bieberfied overproduced crap, we don't want it.

Re:What about...

[makubesu]

I've had the opposite reaction. Whenever I find a great song on pandora, I want to listen to it again so bad that I usually buy it. Pandora does wonders for traditional markets.

Re:What about...

[Kjella]

The point is that if you don't push new music through radio and other broadcast media people won't know about the new music.

If you don't think Spotify and the rest are pushing new music, you can't have used them. Remember, their goal is to have you hooked on as much music as possible that you'd have to buy lots of CDs to replace - particularly music that you don't already own on CD. Not as in sales-pushy, but they most definitively want to be the place you find new music.

Re:What about...

[sharkbiter]

Mod this person up! The music business is all about price models and cost per unit. Nowhere is there any genuine concern for the consumer's tastes, likes or desires. This is a market powered by dollar bottom line and not artistry in any way, shape or form.

When was the last big superstar group? Bon Jovi, wasn't it? They rode around in a frickin' jumbo jet, fer chissakes! And when their music lost favor, where were they then? Right now I'm listening to Duke Ellington and am amazed at the variety of style that that man could come up with in his head and on a train with just a pencil and a blank scored sheet of music. No way in hell would the music conglomerates even think of signing on such talent in this day and age!

Re:What about...

[David Gerard]

The kids don't listen to radio any more. Radio is for old people.

Re:What about...

[TheRaven64]

If the music was worth buying, people would buy it.

The problem is that 'worth buying' is a moving target. A hundred years ago, you had a very small number of AM radio stations, none playing music all of the time. Buying some music was then very valuable, because it was the only way that you could guarantee being able to listen to music whenever you wanted (unless you were rich enough to hire a band).

Twenty years ago, there were a few FM stations that played music most of the time. Enough that you could probably turn on the radio and listen to a genre that you liked, even if it wasn't one of your favourite artists. Genres were quite broad, however, so you may get a lot of things that weren't really very close to music that you wanted to hear. Buying music was still quite valuable.

Now, there are thousands of Internet radio streams. You can connect to one playing music that you really like. I'm in the UK, but I often listen to one in California. When I hit play, it's almost always playing music that I enjoy listening to. I've not bought much music for the past few years, because I find that I rarely listen to music that I've actually bought. I only do when I'm not near an Internet connection, but still want to listen to recorded music, which is fairly rare. I get a much wider selection of music that I want to listen to by turning on the (Internet) radio.

Now, the record companies could do something about this by making tracks cost about 5 for a DRM-free download. At that price, every time I heard a track I liked, I'd be tempted to buy the entire album and listen to it, and I'd end up with a very large collection of music - large enough that I could listen to it in shuffle mode and get a similar variety to the radio - quite quickly.

I pay Radio Paradise a small amount every month, but this goes to cover their costs - very little (if any) of it actually goes to the people who made the music. I'd happily double or triple my donation if I had some assurance that, at least 50% went to the artists. Unfortunately, the money that they pay for licensing goes to SoundExchange, and getting money out of SoundExchange is almost impossible for artists.

Re:What about...

[Joce640k]

Their biggest problem is that they're not listening to their consumers and giving them their music in a format they want. The only music seller which does (ie. Apple) is still making huge money off music.

That ... and number of people who are obsessed with music is declining. Consumers are now spending their money on other things, eg. DVDs, mobile phones, apps for their mobile phones, cinema, etc. The market has changed, music is less relevant.

But still, keep on passing those laws and suing the few die-hard music lovers who are left.

Re:What about...

[drinkypoo]

The problem is that 'worth buying' is a moving target.

The problem is that people overwhelmingly buy what they are sold. Advertisers use borderline fraudulent techniques (in some places many of their astroturf marketing techniques are actually illegal as the source of funding or other compensation must be disclosed) to convince people to purchase things that they do not want by increasing their perceived value. I'm not suggesting that only things with intrinsic value have actual value, but something you don't really want, that you won't use as much as an advertiser suggests you will, has had its perceived value increased by fraud. That's the model under which the entire popular music industry works!

Re:What about...

[raodin]

Ripping CDs for personal use is covered by fair use.

DVD ripping is only illegal because you have to circumvent encryption to do so, and the DMCA can then be used to do an end-run around your fair use rights. Audio CDs are not encrypted, so they are still fully covered under fair use.

Re:What about...

[HiThere]

It may seem weird, but some people want to be musicians. Others want to be writers. Very few can make a living at it. Musicians have even more problems than writers with making a living. And it doesn't matter whether we're talking about performers or composers.

The trick of the Hollywood industry is to create a few stars and reward them exorbitantly. And then to use them as bait for the others. (And exorbitantly doesn't mean as well as the executive is rewarded. But upper management, anyway. And you don't know what parts of their spread the studio owns or decides on. Publicity, you know.)

Recently, however, (do I mean the last 10 years or 20?) the studios have consistently preferred to not promote talented artists. They want people who can easily be replaced if it becomes convenient. This may be a large part of why the arts have so quickly degenerated. It's not the whole story, though. The arts tend to flourish in brief spurts in small areas, and nobody knows why. Why was Kansas city so important? Why Liverpool? Why San Francisco? One can come up with reasons, but the reasons aren't sufficient. All the factors you will list can be present without causing a spurt in the arts. But it doesn't need to crash as badly as it has this time.

Re:What about...

[AmiMoJo]

The industry is used to telling people what they like, not asking. When you control radio and TV play you control what people get to hear and make sure they don't go off and get into say jazz or classical where you can't make megabucks. Problem is now the internet lets people discover music on their own so suddenly all these little guys are stealing a piece of their pie.

people are broke..

[Anonymous Coward]

and most of the music sucks! What else is there to say?

Re:people are broke..

[Draek]

How about "I really love Jamendo"?

Because I do. Just putting it out there in case anybody wants some nice, freely-available indie music to replace the RIAA trash and stop giving those bloodsuckers free advertisement and/or money.

Re:people are broke..

[iplayfast]

I agree. Maybe they could sell more music, if they actually hired musicians. You know, people that can sing, and play instruments. I can't believe people actually pay to hear hip-hop. Although I admit, it's not my generations music, I have a hard time hearing the music in it at all. Just shouting and a beat. I guess it's disco...

I like harmonies in the vocals, and an actual tune. I like the occasional instrumental solo, but the vocals are key (not the bass).

Re:people are broke..

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

I will drink to that. I've found some pretty amazing talent on Jamendo, and honestly I get more enjoyment out of music when I know the artists are in it for the love of music. I'd also add in OCRemix if you're into remixed classic video game music. I'm not a huge fan of techno, but some of the artists have turned the video game music I grew up with into truly haunting and beautiful instrumental music.

Re:people are broke..

[David Gerard]

"I have a hard time hearing the music in it at all. Just shouting and a beat."

It's poetry. The most successful form of poetry in history. Kids on street corners practice their poetry and aspire to be poets when they grow up!

Re:people are broke..

[Terrasque]

While we're in the process of pimping sites..

I want to add a link to a small net radio me and some friends are running : Nectarine Demoscene Radio. It plays music from the demoscene, and some music from old games, where the authors were either a part of or a big inspiration from the scene. The music is either licensed from the artists (some of them even frequent visitors to the site), or public domain.

The users themselves decide what to play (each user have three request slots), and the songs are then locked for re-requests for a while, so you get a decent variety. There's some crap music being played now and then, but overall good quality :)

Here are some random productions that we play music from, that also have a YT video.

If you'd like some alternative / computer music, pop in, stay a while, and listen! Maybe you'll like it :)

Funny...

[E IS mC(Square)]

Funny that I bought most of the music in last 3 years after listening on Pandora.

What they don't get is - digitization has made me purchase just one good song from otherwise crappy album and hence paying only a dollar and not a full 10-20$ they used to charge.

Re:Funny...

[skyraker]

Exactly. Not piracy, not streaming. Crappy Albums from a bunch of Crappy Singers. It is hard these days to pick out a White Album or Thriller. Albums that history will remember and we will want to share with our own children.

Re:Funny...

[Nyeerrmm]

I hear this all the time whenever this comes up, but quite frankly, there are a lot of good new albums out there. Its just that they're not the 'blockbusters' of years yore, and as such are harder to find. Personally I like rock with a folk twinge... or maybe folk with a rock twinge, however you want to swing it. Also, plain old singer/songwriters with soft hearts and a nice voices. Some great *whole* albums from the past 5 years that I like are:

Bishop Allen - The Broken String
Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound
Jakob Dylan - Women and Country
She & Him - Volume 1
Metric - Fantasies
Ben Lee - Ripe
The Weepies - Hideaway
Ingrid Michaelson - Everybody
Ben Folds - Way To Normal
Train - Save Me San Francisco (Yes, its super cheesy and poppy, but I love it nonetheless)

Now, there is no accounting for taste, and I'm sure many of you would feel tortured to listen to these a lot. However, I'm sure most people could find new stuff they liked if they knew where to look.

Quite frankly, more than anything else, the music industry needs to accept the so-called long tail, stop relying solely on broad appeal (though Gaga and Ke$ha will always have their place) and learn to spend less but on a lot more markets. Streaming radio helps with that tremendously, particularly customized stations like Pandora, and should be embraced. Change is hard, and while I don't necessarily sympathize with the labels, I understand where they're coming from. Hopefully they come to their senses though, just as they did with music DRM, because that will benefit us all.

Re:Funny...

[Man On Pink Corner]

But every generation thinks that modern music isn't as good as it used to be.

Sure. But the thing is, this used to be something that happened once you hit 40 or 50, when you were old enough to have teenagers of your own.

Now, almost as soon as you graduate from high school and get exposed to more diverse music in college, you look back at what you were buying and listening to, and wonder WTF you were thinking. Pop music has become so irredeemably shitty that the so-called generation gap is all but gone.

Greed knows no bounds

[Clsid]

Greedy bastards. Just suck it up like everybody else is doing it these days.

Re:Greed knows no bounds

[Dunbal]

Except the big Wall St. banks. They're doing just fine. Cha-ching! Oh by the way oil is at $112, cha ching! We'll just get our friends at the Fed to keep interest rates at zero forever so you might as well stuff your money under your mattress since that way at least you will save on all the bank fees. You sure as hell aren't going to get any interest even on a CD. But remember to pay your 5-6% on your mortgage, plus all those other hidden fees, and pay your 20% on your credit card. Making money with interest is not for you, it's for us. Cha ching! Oh and we haven't told you what is going to happen to your savings with all this inflation we're not telling you about (believe the CPI because we take out energy and transport costs - hah, I mean, who uses THOSE THINGS anyway). Your house prices are not increasing though, so you're not even keeping up with this inflation. In 10 years or so you won't be able to afford a car, but we'll lend you one in exchange for your first born. After all it's your patriotic duty to save American car manufacturers! Cha ching!

None so Blind as Those Who Will Not See

[causality]

"We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years," said Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group who spoke at the conference. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry. In years past, the blame was put on digital music piracy. At this year's conference, however, the focus was on free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube.

They will clutch at every straw and leave no stone unturned in their quest to increase sales... except for the myriad ways that they are their own worst enemy. It will never occur to them that suing your own customers is not good for business. They will never think that what is in my opinion the obvious "buy-a-law" political corruption (designed to institute perpetual copyright) in which they engage makes people with a conscience decide not to support them.

They will never consider that threatening tens of thousands of people with lawyer letters demanding they either pay a settlement or face a lawsuit they could not possibly afford, with no regard for the fact that many of them were innocent, might earn them some ill will. Nor will they think that taking children to court and using interrogation procedures obviously designed to intimidate them is something that decent people don't care to reward financially.

Nope, it's them evil pirates, those horrible music streaming services, etc. Of course it is. That adequately explains everything.

It's at a base level and I openly acknowledge that, but I can't help but to smile when I see that they are showing signs of desperation. They deserve more failure than they are experiencing.

Re:None so Blind as Those Who Will Not See

[oik]

I totally concur. I actually had to stop listening to Pandora since it was becoming a bit of a financial drain: song plays, "Oh, that's good", click-buy-album, wade through a few more songs, wash, rinse repeat. I realise that I'm a bit old skool in that I still do buy actual albums (and that you do get bitten by the old one-good-song-in-chaff problem) but Pandora still found plenty of really good artists that I would have never stumbled across otherwise.

I know I'm preaching to the converted here on Slashdot but the radio in the US is just terrible. Every station plays the same 5 latest "hits"; it's things like Pandora which keep music alive for me.

Man, I sound old.

Re:None so Blind as Those Who Will Not See

[symbolset]

In 2003 their claim of piracy was a decline in growth. This year it's a decline in sales. That's clear evidence that they're being stolen from, to them.

Or it's proof that they're not giving us what we want, or that they no longer control the channel for music. Or that they're producing crap. Probably some combination of these.

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

- RAH, Life-Line, 1939.

Make better music and provide better service then

[igreaterthanu]

I for one use YouTube to "try before I buy" and if I was going to buy something I might not, all thanks to YouTube!

That said, I do buy a reasonable amount of music online, around $500 worth over the last year, so I can see where they got that 14% statistic from.

I for one think that piracy is wrong, but there are some people who don't think like that. If they want more money they are going to have to provide a better service, especially by dropping the price. Thanks to YouTube I can decide that it is not worth paying $15 for an album, drop that to $5 and I (and many others) will probably buy it.

Management Woes

[jimmerz28]

This sure sounds like management at my job trying to solve a problem.

A must be causing this! Oh not A? Must be C then! Damnit if it's not C then it's gotta be B causing all our problems!

Like gasping for air underwater...

Re:Management Woes

[Merls the Sneaky]

The rickroll of the future.

Really??

[Nyeerrmm]

14% of buyers accounting for 56% of business sounds pretty normal. They're called enthusiasts. And I would bet a lot of that 14% probably do a lot of free streaming too.

I'm guessing that I'm one of that 14% (I buy a new album every 2 weeks-ish lately), at least in the past three or four months. The main reason for that is that I started a job that involves a lot of sitting at my desk, and i listen to a lot of pandora.

The market is changing, diversifying and reducing the power of "blockbuster" artists, and that's scary for these companies. However, streaming services like pandora make it *easier* to make money off of a diversifying music market, by making it easier to find new music even as tastes narrow. Hopefully theyll figure that out sooner rather than later.

Re:Really??

[Superdarion]

The market is changing, diversifying and reducing the power of "blockbuster" artists...

If anything, these streaming services are doing the oposite. Just go look at Youtube's Most watched videos of all times. I'll be damned if Justin Bieber isn't benefiting from that! Sure, many people use Pandora (and the likes) for finding new music and listening to different styles, but to say that the blockbusters are losing their power because of it is short-sighted.

Oh... gee... I wonder why...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you didn't make it such a pain to use your product by telling people when and how they can use it this wouldn't be happening? Also, I'd buy more music from you if you actually released what I wanted. Give me easy access to Svetlanov's recordings of Tchaikovsky's Symphonic Poem Manfred, or good recordings of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Harpsichord Concertos and Orchestral Suites. The complete set of Beethoven's Sonatas, and Chopin's Nocturnes and Etudes at reasonable prices and we'll talk again. But alas, my local music store only has the latest on all the cruft that's out there now and only the first five seconds of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony*.

* I happen to own the full CD set of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Karajan playing all of Beethoven's Symphonies. Best recordings I've ever heard, ever.

Re:lawsuits?

[Dunbal]

Not a coincidence. I've discovered that I can live without "buying" music, and I will be damned if I give them another penny. Plus as many others have pointed out, the music sucks balls anyway. Who wants to listen to 90 year old "rock stars" cough up a lung, or pre-pubescent teenagers sing about the "angst" of a life they haven't even begun to live yet, or stupid "look at me being a gangsta is so cool but all my friends are dead or in jail" crap. They can keep it.

The problem is with them

[Dishwasha]

The music industry is doing nothing to actually groom and foster music. My wife goes to bed every night with the same radio station on and I swear I have heard the same 5 songs repeated over and over and over and over again for the past 8 months to the point where I want to shove an icepick in to my eye. If you don't take risks and support more artists you're doomed to decay from the inside.

Re:Call me a troll but ....

[brit74]

Doesn't this disprove the theory that getting movies and music free gets people to buy more?

I think that was shot-down a while ago, but people don't really want to hear it. In 1999, the music industry was getting $16.4 billion in sales revenue from CDs. By 2008, that had declined to $5.4 billion in CD sales, $1.5 billion in digital music sales, and another $1.0 billion in mobile ringtones sales. That works out to a gain of about $1 in digital music sales (not including mobile ringtones) for every $7 lost in CD sales. I've seen some studies claim that music pirates buy lots more music than non-pirates (one source claimed 12x as much music), but assuming this was causal (and not a symptom of big music fans being the first to become pirates), it's really hard to explain why the music industry got completely hammered in the past ten years - seeing over a fifty percent decline in sales revenue at the exact time that piracy was on the rise. Oh well, at least they might be making a little more money from music streaming services.

and?

[bugi]

14% of music buyers accounted for 56% of revenue. How is that shocking? So you have some kids buying too much over-priced music. How is that new?

Oh that's right, you have "music execs" who either won't or can't do their job. Wait, how is that new? Maybe it's the reporter who jumped on some numbers and assigned the same meaning to them that "music execs" always give whatever numbers are handy. Or maybe a bad summary, but I'm now too bored to even spell out RTFA.

Would it help to use percent signs instead of spelling out "percent"? Word problems are hard.

They forgot secondhand music

[CycleMan]

I can tell them all why I'm not paying $18 per album: there's a thriving secondhand market and format conversion is easier than it used to be. I used to spend $1000/year on CDs. Now I'm mostly buying vinyl at thrift shops for a buck a disk. Someone's parents died and they don't have a turntable, so off it goes, and I find it. Granted, I don't always know if it's good before I buy it, but for a buck, I no longer need to; it becomes a great adventure. For the albums I really like, that's 10 MP3s for the price of one iTune. This won't work for those who need the latest releases or artists, but if you like classical, folk, or oldies, it's probably out there waiting for you.

Re:Call me a troll but ....

[Dunbal]

Music has been declining in sales in the internet era, yes. However this doesn't mean that everyone is pirating. Back in the 70's and 80's there was absolutely nothing to DO except either watch network television, or listen to music. Now there is so much more to do, and music has been relegated to a smaller share of the market. I refute your theory.

Re:The "problem" won't go away

[plover]

Nothing will make the problem go away, because at no point are any of the modern musicians going to be as wondrous to today's audiences as the musicians of the 50s, 60s, and 70s were to theirs. Prior to then, music was pretty much local. If you lived in the hills, you listened to local boys with banjos. If you lived in Italy, you listened to local boys with mandolins. If you lived in Germany, you listened to local polka bands. If you had money and traveled, you'd hear different local music.

Then as recorded music became available, so did Elvis, the British Invasion, Dick Clark's American Bandstand, rock and roll, and it was all NEW to everyone. People created new sounds, they collaborated with other musicians, and it was an amazing time for everyone. The record companies printed money in the shape of round black vinyl discs, and hired people to shovel cash into their limousines.

And then it wasn't new any more. Music fashions appeared and disappeared, new bands came and went after sharing a one-hit-wonder with the world, and the mummified corpses of the 1960s and 1970s bands were propped up on stages around the world, with such unforgettable names as the "Steel Wheelchairs Tour" and "The Traveling Dingle-berries", hawking overpriced concert tickets to acid-brain-washed aging hippies who never really left the 1970s. And as time was unkind, they had to get out of their own limos to shovel the money in.

The system was already getting tired, and then along came digital music. As modern music entered a new age of suckage, perfect digital copies introduced the modern consumer to a new age of self-empowered selfishness. The double whammy has left the music industry where it is: barely able to afford Korbel Brut taps in their limousines instead of hot and cold running Dom Perignon. And nobody wants to drink Korbel after that.

Alternatives

[Lorien_the_first_one]

Here are some interesting alternatives not mentioned so far:

Jamendo (CC music)
SomaFM (streaming)
BlueMars (streaming music for the space traveler)


I use the bottom two every day and go to Jamendo when my eMusic account runs dry for the month.

Most of the music sucks

[symbolset]

And they're more concerned about the constrained supply of Bolivian Pink Flake. Music executives are what Charlie Sheen would be if he had no work ethic.

Re:The "problem" won't go away

[NiceGeek]

"As modern music entered a new age of suckage" - if you think modern music sucks, you're not looking hard enough. Thanks for proving that despite my years, my mind is still young.

Re:The "problem" won't go away

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone mod this up!

While I don't necessarily agree that music can never be that wondrous again, this post really sums up my own feelings -- a "perfect storm" of factors has actually gotten me away from listening to as much music as I used to. I now have XM, news radio, podcasts, etc. and can skip to any song I want within my own collection. I also have audio content I find more stimulating than music at the time, but I MISS having music that I care about. Consequently, I am not forced to listen to the radio or entire albums -- which means I do not get used to any songs that I wasn't explicitly trying to listen to.

I don't buy music not because I can get it for free, but because I wouldn't even know what to buy that I don't already have. Back in the days of cassettes and CDs, certain albums would become the 'soundtracks' of certain events or periods of time for me. I don't know what music I'll remember from the 2010s, if any -- I certainly remember nothing from the 2000s. Maybe if they stopped producing such "truly average" stuff, things would be a bit better.

Ironically enough, my musical tastes were greatly expanded in the era of Napster, and I have bought more music during this time than at any other time in my life so far -- I could explore other people's hard drives, burn CDs, make playlists without restriction, and once I got to really like a song I got the album it was on, expanding my musical horizons to other things. I can't put up with Pandora's skipping restrictions and mandatory streaming and turn it off in annoyance every time I try...

The only thing that can save music, I suppose, is for Justin Bieber and Britney Spears to have a baby who is raised by the surviving members of New Kids on the Block and Milli Vanilli!!!

Re:Make better music and provide better service th

[hedwards]

I haven't bought any from them in years, and I won't be buying any from them until they learn to behave themselves and place nice. If they want to sue pirates, that's there right, but I'll be damned if I'm financing those questionable law suits. Restrict the suits to people that are likely guilty of significant distribution and ask for a reasonable sum and I'll start buying music again. Until then I just won't buy anything and they can make whatever they can off of those free sites like Pandora.

Only in the last 5 years?

[houghi]

Free streaming is not something of the last 5 years. Free streaming was invented more then 100 years ago. And recording of the free streaming (for which the music industry pays) has been done on a medium that was licenced free of charge.

I understand them. They see Banks and other industries getting a shitload of money, so they want some too. It is as if they are saying "Boo-hoo, competition is HARD! Please give us enough money and power so the money we make matches the slides we showed our shareholders (which is us)."

Well, if you don't like it, get out. But buying some politician is easier. Especially if the media is on your side and actually part of the whole process.

Define "buyers"

[sjdude]

We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years

This is easily misleading. If Mr. Crupnick means "album buyers", he is more likely to be correct than if by "buyers" he meant total number of customers buying music. The fact that people can now easily purchase single songs when they previously were forced to buy entire albums in order to get only one or two songs they really wanted might have something to do with this. In fact, it might have everything to do with such a typically misleading music industry claim.

Re:Make better music and provide better service th

[Eugenia Loli]

Agreed. Last year I paid *over* $2000 for music, so that puts me probably not just on the top-14% of consumers, but probably on the top-1%. But like you do, I always check what I buy, I don't buy whatever random stuff are around. Youtube has neither good or bad effect, because it neutralizes its position by helping me decide to buy something or not. If youtube didn't exist, I would probably buy LESS.

What's the killer though is that 80% of my new music these days is downloaded for free from BandCamp rather than bought. Not because I don't want to buy (I've can prove that I do to anyone who would check my iTunes and Amazon receipts), but because the KIND of music I listen these days very rarely can be found on iTunes, and to much less extend, on Amazon. I started listening to obscure indie bands that record at home, and these people just do music for fun, and so they often don't charge any money for it.

More importantly, it's that THESE musicians are pushing the boundaries of music, since they don't have to answer to any music exec. 95% of popular music will never win me back, so for these execs mentioned in the article, I'm already a dead customer. Even if I spend so much money for music (since it's mostly for indie labels' music, and the rest is music I get legally for free).

Music industry shot own foot

[SeanBlader]

I stopped buying music when the labels started sueing their best fans. Doesn't seem right to support that kind of company.

I used to buy music

[BearRanger]

And then, around 1998, I stopped. Not because I started "stealing" it. And not because I started listening to streaming music. I stopped because I had enough music. Enough music to fill a 100 GB iPod. If I listened to it continuously I'd be playing music for weeks without hearing a repeat. Why in the world would I buy any more?

As it is now I'll occasionally run across an old song I haven't heard for years. And wonder why. Buying more music, especially music that isn't as compelling to me as the old stuff, would be a waste of money.

I wasn't buying much

[rsilvergun]

but what I was buying I found on mp3.com back in the day. I like power metal, but it's so hard to find new bands. I know there out there, but there's lots of pretty lousy acts and even if funds were unlimited (there not) it's just too much bother to find them. I miss being able to just pull down a bunch of cool demo tracks from mp3.com from up and coming bands. Stuff like Dragonforce, Power Quest, Frostweaver (anyone but me heard of 'em? Only had 5 tracks).

I guess I got a taste of the good life (musically) in the 90s and it spoiled me. emusic was great while it lasted, but they've creeped up to to 50 cents a track and more. The economy's in the toilet. I don't have $30 month to blow on mp3s...

Re:lawsuits?

[nabsltd]

Part of the steep drop in sales came long before the lawsuits, and I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact that about 10 years ago, pretty much every bit of music in the back catalogs had been made available for sale, and everyone who wanted that music had already acquired it.

Then, because CDs were not only generally more resistant to damage, but were also able to be backed up and shifted to different devices with no loss of quality (in general, if you assume MP3 is close enough for most situations), and you end up with at least a decade where the only music that could have any real demand was the new stuff. Until free Internet streaming really hit big, there wasn't much advertising for the new music, so sales dropped. At that point, consumers already had the ability to only purchase the very best individual tracks, so total revenue dropped.

Now, the record companies want to kill their best advertising, and once they do that, revenues will drop again. Since the record companies can't comprehend a world where people might not want to listen to (much less pay for) every bit of new dreck that is produced, they will again decide that piracy is the only possible reason that music isn't being purchased.

Re:lawsuits?

[Eugenia Loli]

>That's like saying you'll never go back to Vivaldi after hearing Mozart...

No, because both were good. In my case, I can't say that Rihanna, who sells millions of records, is better than Washed Out. She's not.

> Music is all about taste

Sure, but there's also a common denominator threshold. When you cross it, things sound kitsch.

It's like watching "Lost in Space", and then you started watching "Babylon 5", after someone transported the tapes back to 1967 for you. After you go Babylon 5, and see how much DEPTH there's there, you will find the rest of 1967's TV boring as hell.

Same with music. Yes, there are tastes, but what I tried to communicate goes beyond tastes. For example, the "taste" paradigm would work for me when thinking that I like "Surfer blood", but I don't like "Toro Y Moi" -- both pretty hipster artists otherwise. But when it comes to Rihanna and Surfer Blood, then that's not a matter of taste anymore, because we're talking about two different WORLDS. Two different products: one's music, the other one's not!

Re:I'm holding out for google music

[jawtheshark]

AC: He said that she is not very computer literate. Believe me, even if he supported Windows or Apple, she probably wouldn't buy music online. My wife is not computer literate, either. She used to have a PC with Windows XP, she couldn't do much with it (Burn a CD? No chance in hell, I usually had to do it). When it finally broke (after respectable 6 years of functioning - blown caps), we replaced it with an iMac. The primary reason, for her, it being pretty. For me the primary reason was the hope of having to help her less. I tried explaining that she could now buy music on iTunes and put it directly on her iPod. (I am aware you could do that on Windows too, but iTunes on Windows isn't exactly a nice program) I even set up an account for her in such a way she technically just had to click "Buy".

To this day, she has never bought a single track on iTunes. She still buys CDs, because that works. She has a CD player in her car, there is one in the living room and it's just inserting the disk and push "play". Oh, and for the record: I bought her that iPod, which resulted in me ripping all her CDs and putting her music on her iPod. Why? Because she won't do it.

My wife isn't 30 yet... It isn't age, as my sister is the same age, and she does the above in her sleep... It is computer literacy, and said computer literacy doesn't come without a certain effort (and probably even a way of thinking) which some people don't want to do.

Viable alternatives

[theexaptation]

I think it has a lot to do with recorded music itself not being a social experience like it used to be.

I used to buy and listen to a lot of music because listening to music was a social event where friends would gather, hang-out, and listen to music together.

I very rarely have experiences like that anymore.

Things like going over to someone's house because they had a great stereo.

I am sure those who loved knitting bees or some other past social outlet experienced much of the same thing only there wasn't a YIAA (Yarn Industry Artists Association) suing them for copying knitting patterns.

I now spend most of my at home time reading and communicating with friends online, and when my friends do come over craving some electronic entertainment, we play video games and watch movies.

Music just never enters into the social event unless it is the social event (live music) or something like going out to a bar, dancing, or to a party and then the music is already ubiquitously provided instead of being personally collected.

Maybe the alternatives are just better and people are consuming what brings them the experiences they want, which unfortunately for the recording industry, happens to not be their products.

Dear RIAA

[Tridus]

People aren't buying your product because your product isn't music. It's noise. Lousy noise, at that.

When you learn how to master a CD without succumbing to the loudness wars, let me know.

Also, when you learn to hire people with musical talent instead of the hacks you hire for looks these days, let me know. Until then you don't have a product I want.

Record companies suicide

[Wowsers]

From my point of view in the UK, streaming music is the least of the record companies problems.......

1. CD's have not got appreciably cheaper despite manufacturing costs having become so.
2. Online stores that sell individual tracks have got more expensive (and the media companies enforce their region cartels to stop shopping around for tracks).
3. CD's keep on getting remastered and the sound quality gets butchered because the record companies seem to think I like their idiotic loudness war. I return CD's like this.
4. Compilation CD's are also remastered sound (see point3 ).
5. Tracks from online stores still do not offer FLAC as default.
6. I have more important things to spend my money on.
7. These days, record companies push what is laughably described as music, more descriptive to say it's noise.
8. If your "artists" need to strip to their g-strings in videos and concerts to sell stuff, you should have figured by now your business is totally screwed.
9. Not one song I can recall from mid-1990's onwards can ever become a classic, they are just cr@p. Record companies have done this suicide without outside help.

All in all, I think it's obvious that I will continue to spend less and less on music. It is up to the illegal record company cartel to change their ways to make music attractive. Suing people for copying is NOT going to get more people to buy music.

I have no sympathy for the position the film and music companies have got THEMSELVES in.

How about looking in the mirror?

[aeoo]

Of course bad, boring, unoriginal and soulless music can't possibly be the problem. Trying to charge too much money can't be the problem either. Treating your customers as if they are thieves can't be the problem, nope... Suing innocent moms and pops for infringement and demanding 10 million dollars for each downloaded song can't possibly be the problem either.

Oh right, it's Pandora's fault!

Don't think so, the user has other options

[SmallFurryCreature]

The entire problem recently is simple. It is the MP3.

It has changed fundamentally how we listen to music, how we use music and how we expect to get it.

Napster wasn't just about not paying for music, it was about a different way to GET music. Only very recently has the music industry stopped the old practice of releasing a song for radio with a lead of a couple of weeks before it is available in the stores. The OLD logic was that they would advertise it through being played on the radio, create hype for the release , then have it released on a day with people queuing like they were selling iPhones or something. It worked because the consumer really didn't have much choice. There were few radio stations back then and you couldn't count on them playing the songs YOU wanted, so to hear your favorite artist when you wanted to, you needed a recording of it. Because only physical media existed this either meant buying one yourself OR getting a taped copy from someone else (and this happened a LOT, far more then the record industry would have you believe) OR borrowing an album from a friend (this happened a LOT as well).

There was no other choice, recording from radio was a lot of work and many stations talk(ed) through songs to try to stop this. The akwardness of LP's also meant people listened to music differently, you either had the radio on for casual listening OR had to flip a LP every twenty minutes or so for "serious" listening. While there were LP changers they were more expensive and couldn't play the B-side (at least mine couldn't, yes, I know I am old). The physical medium forced consumer behavior.

With the Sony Walkman this changed. While tapes had been available before, now people COULD play music on the go and HAD to make their own tapes (commercial tapes are to short). This helped create the era of the mix-tape, where people would create their own mix of music and share this as some sort of DJ on an individual basis. It made people see LP's not so much as things you listened to, but merely as containers for music which you then "downloaded" to your Walkman.

It was still a slow and akward process and the Walkman lost some of its original appeal. With the MP3 player it came back with a bang. Now people could create their own custom collection for hours upon hours of music. It changed the way people got their music.

Rather then having to buy an entire LP pre-filled with a music selection or get a friend to mix a tape during a slow process with a desired music collection, you could just pick music up from all sorts of places and use it in one long playback. Until you actually created your own tape with different music from different sources you just are not capable of understanding what a change a M3U playlist is. Just put a binary file on your MP3 player and it will be played. Guy at work has a new song? Copy it and you can listen to it. Among your collection, no quality loss like with a tape copy, no having to splice it in or create a new tape.

And because we could just take bits of music from anywhere, we did. My own early MP3 collections where a complete mix of different encoding settings and filename conventions, picking whatever song I liked from where I could find it.

AND then LISTENING to it, whenever and wherever I wanted it. Exactly the music I wanted, anytime, anyplace.

I don't just not buy music anymore, radio has all but disappeared from my life. If it wasn't for the radio on my MP3 player, I wouldn't even have a radio anymore. Oh wait, my clock radio has one and I use it because NOTHING wakes me up faster with the vile bitter hatred I need to get my day going then being woken by morning radio.

As for ads? Why should I listen to ads when I pick my own music? Ads are what we put up with on radio until something better came along. We no longer consume music this way.

And because we could pick up music anywhere, buying it is no longer an option. I had maybe a collection of 100-200 lp's. But that was build up over years and there were plen

Hip hop is not music?

[Steve Hamlin]

"Although I admit, it's not my generations music"

You should have just stopped there, because to me that simultaneously explained and undercut everything else you subsequently wrote. If you were 30 years older, you'd like Frankie Vallie, hate rock'n'roll and think Elvis was destructive.

I have diverse musical tastes (rock, some metal, blues, some country, bluegrass, many types of electronica and produced music (techo, lounge, trip-hop, trance, DnB), some pop, classical, world). And I love a whole lot of hip-hop.

Try The Roots, or Talib Kweli, or old Fugees, Common, Oukast, Beatie Boys, Jurassic 5, Digable Planets, Nappy Roots, WuTang, Wylcef - that is all real music.

I'll get off your lawn now.

Two things we know

[toddwv]

1) It's the RIAA's fault
2) They're most likely lying.

The RIAA is a dinosaur that is slowly dying. It's their own fault. They've spend unknown millions of dollars fighting the digital age instead of embracing it. By fighting it so feverishly like they did, they forced people to come up with solutions and as we know in the digital age, when people want something, it happens. If the RIAA would've embraced the potential digital revenue, they would have feature rich and mature delivery systems available that they control. Instead, they are running around trying to put out little fires. So instead of capitalizing on a potentially lucrative environment, they decided to attack their fan base. In addition, the changing of the model has led to a huge increase in competition for the relatively short attention span of their usual cash cows. Video games, unlimited on-demand movies, hundreds of TV channels, texting, social networking in general - the RIAA's cut of a dollar has shriveled in the past 20 years.

The RIAA seems to be very shortsighted and making a series of VERY bad moves. Now the ball is rolling downhill and they may not be able to stop their demise. I say good riddance. It's not like it's going to affect ACTUAL music that much. God forbid we lose a few autotuned teen friendly beat mixes!

As for the lying part, I doubt that I have to go into detail about that. I'm sure everyone knows that the RIAA has never been fully upfront about their true profit streams. They'll cry about how "Sales are decreasing" when it only refers to one outmoded part of their revenues. It's another reason why nobody takes them seriously anymore.

For instance, even though digital sales have skyrocketed, you hardly even hear the RIAA mention them:

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/08/global-digital-music-sales-to-overtake-physical-by-2016.ars

Abandoned new music all together !

[tuxidriver]

Thanks to the heavy hand and morally bankrupt behavior of the RIAA and much of the music industry, I abandoned new music all together. I simply stopped listening to it, even on the radio. I have a reasonable collection of CDs from prior to the year 2000 that I still enjoy. nI want to see the RIAA, Sony, and all the other creeps in the industry go out of business !

I don't download music off the Internet and I don't borrow CDs from anyone outside of the family. When the music industry stops lobbying to destroy our freedoms, and starts treating both their customers and the musicians with some respect I'll again start purchasing music again. Until then, the industry won't get a dime from me nor any attention. .