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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."
...free streaming over the air, i.e. radio?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
and most of the music sucks! What else is there to say?
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.
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
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.
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!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
John
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.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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