Music Downloading not Entirely to Blame 538
Outlyer writes "A recent article in The Economist discusses the proximate causes for the decline in music sales. Of some note is this quote in the article:
"According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy. [...] Other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself. But creativity doubtless plays an important part." The article discusses in some depth the short-term viewpoint of the majors and why that is likely to be the dominant problem, not the internet bogeyman."
fp (Score:5, Insightful)
When The Economist slams a huge industry... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, duh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't buy music (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:fp (Score:5, Insightful)
Reason why I don't buy cds (Score:2, Insightful)
Make a difference? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a real shocker but nice to be higher profile.
Re:When The Economist slams a huge industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Economist just blew away their views on how their little corner of the world works.
I have a feeling that the music industry will claim that this article is nothing more than a conglomoration of Internet forum non-sense and that their business-model is acceptable and will continue. Afterall, they can claim whatever they want, the media/controlled-radio will distribute it, and the public is stupid.
Brick and mortar stores don't serve me (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, the best way for a business to thrive is not to have a radical change of the business model. Instead, incremental changes and continual improvement (hitting singles instead of homers) will get the job done. One incremental change can be to make sure that downloadable music isn't just for young listerners.
But... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, one-quarter to one-third of the sales drop is due to internet piracy? I can see why companies might be worried about this. (And everyone who votes me down because I won't subscribe to their "waaa waaa waaa! I want my music for free!" is a wanker.)
NEWSFLASH!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The drop in sales has fuck all to do with filesharing, and everything to do with the witless commercial pop that saturates the market; everybody except the RIAA knows it!
Let's get one thing clear though... (Score:4, Insightful)
no harm != legitimate in many people's opinions.
people like me quit buying altogether (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the RIAA will rape their artists every which way they possibly can, and cheat them out of their royalties at every chance. Given this, I find it more than a little ironic that the RIAA campaigns against piracy by boldly proclaiming that downloaders are cheating the artists.
Here's to hoping that sales continue to decline until the RIAA crumbles entirely out of the picture.
The War on Piracy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reason why I don't buy cds (Score:3, Insightful)
i never bought this argument. i'm pretty sure in the 90s, we blasted the 90s music as being crappy compared to the 80s. and in the 80s, we blasted the 80s music as being crappy compared to the 70s. and so on.
you may think music now is crappy compared to what you grew up with. what makes this generation so special that the entire consumer base thinks the music is crappy at the same time?
The cell phone killed the CD star (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is true (that the OST CD is worth almost as much as the full DVD is puzzling at best), but missed a more important point.
Two words: Cell phones.
Here in Europe most basic plans cost EUR 40 a month. That's a sizeable share of a teenager's allowance. That's at least 3 CDs a month they won't buy.
I vote poor quality (Score:5, Insightful)
H-H is horrid imo - endless, short, electronic loops of intensely annoying sounds, weak and/or stupid lyrics, bad singing (if they even sing at all), it's overly produced, etc. etc.
Any new CDs I buy now are established artists who've been around for a while and have a new CD out; or I'll just buy some 'classic' stuff.
Once uninventive, regurgitated hip-hop took over, the industry pretty much lost me.
How do you count the effect of quality? (Score:4, Insightful)
Music tastes are extremely subjective. If anything, the objective measures would tend to suggest that the music is getting better, in the sense that it's been focus-grouped to death. Somebody out there is saying, "Yes, we like it. We like it so much we want to copy it off the Internet or from a friend's CD."
It seems likely that in fact the focus-grouping and hit-promoting have lowered the quality of the music to a least common denominator, but I'd love to know how this industry report went about measuring that. In the end that measurement will describe how the music changes from here. The executives who make the decisions aren't artists and don't use artistic judgment to decide what to produce. They look at numbers and poll likely group members to see what will sell. They know that people will only buy what they like, so I'd love to know what measure of "like" they're using for this study that's different from the ones they're already using.
Re:When The Economist slams a huge industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the labels will take notice. Now the people in the recording industry who have wanted to alter the course of industry have something big to point to. They will slowly attract the attention of the executives to alternatives, and eventually, the recording industry will be prepared to handle the current state of technology and science.
Right before the world changes out from under them again.
Re:fp (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad part is the consumers are being blamed, when the record company execs steal the most. They don't need a promotion everytime an artist successfully go mainstream. If anything they should be fired for the lack of promotion of new artists. So many good artists out there are invisible under the radar unless you sample on iTunes or something.
Re:I vote poor quality (Score:1, Insightful)
"proximate causes for the decline in music sales" (Score:2, Insightful)
Why?
The purpose of pursuing piracy is to gain monopolistic control over *MEDIA* so that only 'the big six' (or is it five now?) can publish music. This will put independent artists out of business, in fact all record companies that aren't universal/warner/bmg/emi/sony. This is because they are trying to madate in law that all media must have digital protection. The protection will be crackable (it always is), but controlled by the RIAA, so they control who publishes.
With the advent of home studios and the digital revolution.. and internet promotion there is less and less need for a bloated recording industry. They know this.
People may pirate eminem but he still sells >10 million copies an album.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point you're missing here is that, apparently, file-sharing isn't the major cause of the downtrend in sales. If the recording companies would focus on the real causes, and embrace the Internet in the way in which their customers demonstrably want it fashioned (as shown by the popularity of the old Napster and other peer-to-peer technologies), then they could stabilize the sales numbers and see a huge profit from opening up a new revenue stream.
The current download facilities, while popular, still fail to address the real issues presented by peer-to-peer. The RIAA already imposes a "CD Tax", why couldn't it have imposed a "Napster Tax"? The issue isn't really about free music, but rather about unfettered access to a wide variety.
Of course, the record companies fear decentralized distribution because it removes some of their current complete power over the industry, which is what this issue is REALLY all about.
No more Boomers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not in Korea (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole concept of copyrighting a recording is very recent (1910's or so.) Before then, you would copyright the sheet music, which was published like any other printed work. The whole idea of controlling the playback of music was originally laughed out of court. (The early litigation centered around the mechanical playback of music by player pianos.) What came out of those legal cases was the concept that merely transposing the musical notation into another form (in this case from sheet music to the punch cards for the piano) was considered copyright infringement.
Not because you copied the music, per se. Because you were selling a copy of the music. After a bit of wrangling congress passed laws dealing with "mechanical recordings" which paved the way later for wave-form playback devices that captured sound directly and played it back.
Then came the radio.
With radio (and recorded playback at public events), we had a dilemma. Radio wasn't technically "selling" a recording of the music. They were selling a performance of the music. After a lot of wrangling the music industry and broadcasters came up with a compromise: compulsery licensing. You purchase a license to play back music in public. The proceeds from the license are redistributed back to the artists and publishers. (The RIAA doesn't make a dime off of Radio, that's ASCAP's bailywick.)
With the Internet we have elements of both case law. On one hand we are publishing "machine recordings" of music. On the other, the mechanism to transfer the files is essentially that of a radio broadcaster.
In the end, we should have to pay for the recording. But do we make the check out to the RIAA (ala record sales) or to ASCAP (ala performance licenses). The RIAA, of course, is hoping that the money comes back to them. In the end though, it will probably be an ASCAP type of organization that deals with distributing music over the internet.
Re:Music Distribution with large retailers (Score:5, Insightful)
But at a much higher cost. Not only do you have to pay for the burner machine, but you also have to deal with issues like what to do about inserts, cases, etc. Also, a listen/burn machine is a serial use item, while shelving is parallel use. Finally maintenance, content updating, etc., all raise the cost even more.
Anyway, it's non-viable when I can just sub in another rack of DVD's at a higher margin. If we end up where DVD's are the only thing available, who cares. People will generally spend their entertainment income on what's promoted and available. Which bits happen to be on the plastic doesn't matter to the retailers. Nor does it matter to the conglomerates who are just as happy (if not more so) to sell a crappy DVD as opposed to a crapy CD.
Is it all relative? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure there are re-releases today still but the numbers dwarf in comparison to the beginning to 90's. This was a point brought up during PBS Frontline "The Way the Music Died" [pbs.org] documentary on the troubles of the music industry. I seem to remember that Frontline pointed out that sales relative to new albums have actually gone up. But the overall sales have gone down because older albums sales have decline greatly. This Economist report doesn't address this point.
Re:Lets separate fact and fiction (Score:4, Insightful)
It wasn't just any study. It was made by one of the major music publishers. Not by an pro-consumer group or the lobbying arm of the consumer electronics manufacturers, but by the VERY people, who have been claiming Napster killed the CD star.
Re:Price did it for me. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a good point. I know I started to lose interest in the "music scene" around my early to mid thirties, settled down, quit my band, got married, etcetera.
Has anyone charted the baby boomers' ages in regards to music purchases? Maybe there's just a lot of people getting older who just don't give a fuck about new music anymore.
Quality (Score:3, Insightful)
I like that old time a-rock 'n' roll
MPAA / RIAA biggest fear (Score:5, Insightful)
it's not p2p or theft or piracy or even used CD/DVD sales.
their biggest fear is that you tune out and stop watching/listening altogether. that would mean not only no sales, but no advertising revenue either.
if this happens on any scale, i expect the mpaa/riaa to push through 1984/maxheadroom style legislation requiring a TV in every house turned on 24/7, and make it illegal to turn them off.
simple (Score:2, Insightful)
That's real smart marketing. Price your products to the point where your biggest market can't afford them, do anything to stop them from having them, play shi*t on the radio, do nothing for the little bands, and then complain your market share is down.
Re:fp (Score:5, Insightful)
It could also suggest that you no longer are interested in stuff that you don't like right away. Looking back at all my CDs, I find that it is very common for my favorite tracks to be ones that I initially did not think much of. They grew on my after many listens, as I came to appreciate things I hadn't noticed on the first listen.
Re:I vote poor quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not in Korea (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if I can find the artist I'm looking for, all they have is their "Greatest Hits" album. Now, If I'm looking for a (c)Rap album, I can find 8 different mixes of the same album. But trying to find Devo, The Beloved, or even The Beatles and the Doors is a futile effort.
(He writes with a track from Abba that was downloaded off of iTunes playing in the background. Wait, now it's Berlin...)
Re:Reason why I don't buy cds (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, I think the early 90s were a great era for mainstream music, with artists from Dre and Snoop Dogg to Nirvana that produced not only commercial success but also lasting music with merit (whether or not it's all to your tastes). The late 90s produced boy bands like Backstreet Boys, which will be pretty much crappy music in any era. The 80s were a bit of a mixed bag, but I think a lot of it sucked, not comparable to the stuff from the 60s and 70s at all, even with a few gems in the rough.
Today's mainstream music seems to be, more than ever, produced for younger teens. I fail to see how anybody past the age of 16 could think a lot of the current top 40 stuff is even decent music (let's forget about whether it's good, let alone great). Maybe my aesthetic tastes are just stuck where they were 8 or 10 years ago, I'm not sure. But I'd like to think if I were 16 or 17 now (I'm 25), I'd hate a lot of this crap too.
Re:I vote poor quality (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I vote poor quality (Score:1, Insightful)
Friend, you are too old to be interested in new sounds and genres.
Satellite radio effects (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't know what the net effect of growth is. As a one-year XM subscriber, I listen to CDs less, but have purchased a couple a CDs from artists I never would have discovered without satellite radio.
"Facts" are unimportant (Score:2, Insightful)
We already know the facts.. having the 'economist' restate them is nice, but of no practical value...
Let's hope one day that Open Source Music is... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:fp (Score:4, Insightful)
That's very true with me. I will buy a CD for one or two songs, then over the course of listening to it, I will grow to love other tracks on the CD that I didn't pay much attention to at first.
That's why when I hear something new that I like, I will download a few tracks by the artist, and if I like him/her, I will buy their CD. I will first look at my used store for it though. I'd happily buy it new from Streetside if the RIAA weren't being such assholes about suing people who share music. If the RIAA would just leave file sharers alone they'd see their sales increase [harvard.edu] rather than decrease.
Re:I vote poor quality (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider plain old rock music. During the 80s the metal scene was where it was at, it was all about big hair and exorbant costumes and songs about partying all night with hot ladies.
Along comes Nirvana and the rest of the "grunge" scene, dressed in plaid, greasy matted hair, whining about how crappy the world is.
Now, for me, the grunge stuff (for the most part, theres some I like) fell into the "music I dislike" category. I liked the upbeat party-till-you-puke atmosphere of a Slayer concert over the mope-till-mom-picks-you-up atmosphere of Pearl Jam. I don't consider them to be different genres either, musically, they're pretty much identical.
But the major labels are the choking point. They get to decide, not me. And they decided, overnight, that metal was dead, and it was all about the grunge scene.
Now, there was still plenty of metal out there to listen to, but it no longer gets any exposure. No play time on top 40 radio, and the only time it's mentioned on MTV is as something to be mocked, "Ha ha those 80s guys all they wanted to do was party and fuck hot chicks! What a bunch of idiots! They're so not emo like us!"
Those same people have decided that black people like rap. Not R&B, soul, jazz, or anything else. And not just any rap, they like looping beats and some thug talking about shooting up bitchez while he macs on his waddle wizzle. Watch BET, see if they ever air anything else. No, industry has decided. Black people like gangsta rap.
My point is, so long as that choking point exists, and someone decides "people like X, and dont like Y", they're going to alienate a certain group of people that like Y and dont like X.
So I do see how many percieve that music is just getting worse. It's not, theres plenty out there to like, they just aren't being exposed to it by the mainstream media.
Re:How come.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it's tough to find their good old albums because the stores only stock the sucky one-hit wonder album. Seems that the older stuff just doesn't fit the band's image anymore.
Irony is lost in the free market.
It's getting better. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
We are experiencing a Renaissance of locally-produced music, from street performers to small bands. Music is no longer the exclusive domain of a handful of mega-conglomerates, but is being taken back and revitalized on the micro scale. Seattle/Portland (near me) support a thriving community of small indepenent musicans producing truly excellent music. It's like the 60's all over again. Not so much "new" sounds, but new takes on the folk/rock/celtic traditions and a resurgence of interest in vocals and acoustic instrumentation rather than synthesized, reprocessed top-40. Complex, muti-layered arrangements that depend on real musicians, not 20 year old pinups with digitally-enhanced vocals supporting their silicon-enhanced figures.
Personnally, I'm excited by the trend, and am actively building a large and varied CD collection with very little help from the RIAA.
Empty meaningless music..... (Score:1, Insightful)
Music can either have a very broad appeal (inoffensive and acceptable to a wide audience) or have great depth (the music has a personal meaning to the artist and the audience), but very rarely does it have both qualities.
If the music has broad appeal but very little depth, the audience will drop the artist for the next "flavor of the month" because the music does not really mean anything to them.
If the music has depth, the audience will listen to the music years and years later because it speaks to them.
Many of the top selling artists today (as pushed by the major recording labels) are of the variety that have broad appeal, but no depth.
The artists that have depth in their music, are not well supported by the record labels because, well, their sales aren't very good.
Re:Price did it for me. (Score:2, Insightful)
I have noticed a distinct change in the kind of music that gets radio airplay. I still listened to pop radio despite being "too old" for it, up until about the year 2000 - that's when it really got intolerably bad, and that's also about the time Clearchannel had taken over all the local stations. I don't think this is a coincidence.
When I was growing up, there were multiple genres of NEW music on the radio. Not everybody liked pop, but you could find another station playing rap, or another station playing heavy metal, or another station playing oddball new wave stuff. And these were all targetted at the SAME age group. Now it seems like there is only one new genre and it's pop. For any deviation from that genre, you have to listen to older stuff.
Re:Um, duh? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's one thing to run your mouth on a tech related web site claiming something. It's an entirely different (and more credible) thing to have a major business publication say you're right.
Re:fp (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing it, but it seems like more and more albums are just a collection of random songs -not a group of songs that were made to go together.
OTOH, I wonder how many here are old enough to remember buying music before the LP? The music industry seems to have forgotten that they used to sell just singles in the form of the '45. Yes, it had a "B" side, but everyone understood you were basically buying singles. Now the music industry in a tizzy because people only want to buy singles and they couldn't possibly survive if people only bought singles.
Just wait, in another 10 years the album will be back in style.
Re:Price did it for me. (Score:1, Insightful)
I've been listening to music since the 50s, and every decade has its crap and its treasure. There IS good new music out there today, but you won't find it on MTV. You'll have to visit small venues, seek out independent bands... put a little effort into it.
If you sit at home waiting for TV and radio to drop something great in your lap, you're going to go unfulfilled.
My daughter is a musician in a small indie band, so I get to see a lot of local talent live. Trust me, it's there. But it's not going to seek YOU out.
Re:fp (Score:1, Insightful)
Evil Economics (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.summerblue.net/missives/copyright.ht
The major distributors are now in a situation where their product is having to compete with a free rival (P2P). It's hard to compete with free. In fact, all the major distributors have to offer are ease of access, breadth of catalogue and guaranteed quality. This is not worth 15 UKP a CD and 25 UKP a DVD! this painful adjustment is currently what the major distributors are in denial about, and have attempted to perform a minimum-effort resolution, lawsuits, and via DRM.
Our culture is accustomed to copying, because of the VCR, and it is not possible, a la prohibition, to legislate out of existance an act which is widely culturally accepted.
DRM is a brittle solution, since the P2P networks provide immediate and universal distribution of material; if a DRMed product is broken *just once*, then it's gone - it goes public, and that's that. Since DRM is a major investment, and since these companies have a long habit of choosing proprietory security implimentations, I think they're on a burning plane with no parachutes.
All in all, I think the heyday of the major distributors is over.
--
Toby
Except... (Score:4, Insightful)
In such a scenario, that copy has already benefitted the artist as much as it was designed to.
What about internet radio? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm willing to bet that the same people that are buying satellite would listen to internet radio. I think that all the 15 mins of music with 30 mins of comercials really puts off a lot of tradional radio listeners these days. These people are turning to internet and satellite to avoid all this BS. You only need to listen to commerical radio once a month to memorize the playlist.
Turn on internet and satellite and you'll have to listen a whole month to hear the same song again, if it really does play again. Plus with internet radio you can get an artists name (not sure how this works with satellite).
My point is that if it weren't for these new technologies I probably wouldn't have found anything new.
That and AllMusic [allmusic.com] which is a great resource for researching a genre or even an artist that you like.
Wonder no longer! (Score:3, Insightful)
It can be argued that music is continually evolving and I agree with that except that the previous few decades have shown far more music innovation that has arguably happened for thousands of years. The presentation of recorded music, ways of recording it, and whole new instruments fueled a lot of original material - stuff you could honestly say didn't sound like anything before it. Maybe I'm old, but I'm not hearing what THIS generation's music is doing to be different.
Just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean the music itself has changed much. For instance, there were similarities in New Wave to the preceeding Disco era, but there were extremely distinctive differences (mostly in instrumentation). I'm not sure mating a grunge band with a DJ is all that innovative, but for the sake of argument, I'll bite on that one.
But again, that was soooo... Last decade.
Re:fp (Score:5, Insightful)
New music (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:fp (Score:5, Insightful)
Now there's a surprise
No, music is pretty much for shit these days.
And this is different from when my parents told me the same thing 15 years ago how? Adults never like the popular stuff of the time, but then they're not the target market.
I don't like much "pop" these days either, but then to be fair I never did. But it's a huge mistake to infer from this that there's no good music being made right now. There's loads. Music is a huge part of my life and there's plenty of good stuff around...you just have to look beyond your local "all hits, all the time" radio station.
Re:fp (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you telling me that this makes any sort of sense? If it does, I am off to my accountant, I am going to register a few corporations as a musician, then I am going to produce some crap I will call music (noone has to like it, or buy it even,) and then I will be waiting for my check from the government, who is collecting those taxes for me.
Now how does that sound?
Re:fp (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:fp (Score:2, Insightful)
But let me say this: You're taxes are an investment in the future of America (or Canada in your case). You never know when the doctor who performs your surgery is a graduate of the public school system, if the person who takes care of your finances is a graduate of the public school system, or if the person who defends you in court of law is a graduate of the public school system. In any of those cases, I would want that person to have had the best education possible. That's why I don't, and will not mind paying taxes for a public school system.
Re:fp (Score:4, Insightful)
And as long as I am paying for it, I might as well reap the legal benefits. - and I am not going to do that because again, I don't listen to music anymore. Too bad for me, I guess, I see no benefit from these subsidies whatsoever ever in any shape or form.
As to your plan of creating a 'fake' music corporation, that's abuse of the system and it doesn't count as an example. - oh, the harsh words - 'abuse'. I feel abused by the system already, this just maybe my way of getting back at the system and taking away the money they take away from me. Sure sure, two wrongs don't a right make
Re:fp (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not actually serious, are you?
Yes, I did get a copy without directly compensating the copyright holder. Someone else no longer has the copy for which they already paid the copyright holder.
There originally existed one copy, for which royalties were duly paid. There still remains one and only one copy. Unauthorized file sharing, on the other hand, can produce an unlimited number of copies without payment of royalties.
How can you equate the two? And did you study economics at an RIAA-sponsored institution?
Does Ford deserve a royalty payment if someone sells a used car? No, because the original owner no longer has the use of the property. Sheesh.
Re:fp (Score:2, Insightful)
Care to substantiate this?
You don't remember all the crappy movies that were released in the '70s, because they were crappy and forgettable.
"It's the business model, stupid" (Score:3, Insightful)
positioning on radio (Score:3, Insightful)
iTunes and its ilk have made purchasing new music a bit more viable for me now - the previews are good (I'd buy half the tracks on every Cake album out there, and discard the rest) and I appreciate the "people who bought X also bought Y" references - it turns me onto some tunes and bands I hadn't heard of before.
Similarly, the in-store preview audio systems like RedDot in Barnes & Noble and Borders are pretty useful also.
Corporations need to get over the whole physical media thing, plus make radio a useful method of getting new music out there (why they play the same 50 songs all day long blows my mind - no request mechanisms, no way to throw out new music to expose potential big sellers - it's music by committee)..
sloth jr
Nothing new here? (Score:5, Insightful)
He talked about how at some point the tone and attitude of big music changed from being supportive and developing of young talent for the long term to being adverserial and short term profit minded.
I think this economist article is the conclusion and proof of what he was talking about, his thoughts were mostly anecdotal without concrete evidence. From the interview:
"When it all started, record companies -- and there were many of them, and this was a good thing -- were run by people who loved records," he says. "Now record companies are run by lawyers and accountants.
SRC: PBS Frontline [pbs.org]
The result of this commercialization and 'selling out' resulted in companies the likes of Sony, BMG, EMI, etc. run by lawyers and accountants. Of course, their first instinct when faced with new technology and a threat is to sue the pants of grandmas and 12 year olds. Way to go corporate America!!!
I'm gonna apologize for my attitude, for this next part but... I got karma to burn.
Evidently, having some lawyer or accountant run a business may just well run it into the ground. There is apparently no substitute, no matter how ivy or expensive your degree may be, for heart and really appreciating the business you work with or work in. Being in it for money will eventually sink the ship. It's love of music that brings out the great music, and brings it to the people, not lawsuits, not cheap thrills turned into overnight successes with the help of Payola (to radio stations -- ahem Clear Channel), over promotion and slick advertising (ahem -- MTV).
I hope Elliot Spitzer rips these companies and the lawyers who run them a new one with his Payola investigation.
M