At Atlantic Records, Digital Sales Surpass CDs 273
The NYTimes reports that Atlantic is the first major label to report getting a majority of its revenue from digital sales, not CDs. Analysts say that Atlantic is out in front — the industry as a whole isn't expected to hit the 50% mark until 2011. By 2013, music industry revenues will be 37% down from their 1999 levels (when Napster arrived on the scene), according to Forrester. "'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,' said John Rose, a former executive at EMI ... Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. ... In virtually all... corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal's chief executive ... has described as 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies.'"
Waah (Score:1, Informative)
Waah, my business model is still outdated, Waah.
Poor f'ing babies.
amazon (Score:5, Informative)
It's strange that nobody ever talks about Amazon. You can buy MP3's on Amazon for 89-99 cents per track, complete albums typically for about $8. I ripped all my CDs to mp3 this year, tossed the CDs in a dumpster, and am now buying music only on Amazon. I love not having piles of CDs lying around and making my house messy. Amazon sells music with no DRM. It works on any OS that can run a web browser.
iTunes, on the other hand ... yeesh. It's a completely proprietary system, and it doesn't run on my OS. It's also got DRM (although the DRM is fairly easy to circumvent).
Atlantic Records are bad guys (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How Music Used to Be (Score:2, Informative)
I simply don't like the music produced right now, and I don't think I'm alone. In the 60's through the 90's, the defining part of each piece of music was typically the melody. We listened to things that had beautiful sounds and chords. We had thought provoking lyrics that read like poetry, or lyrics that one could simply associate with.
Oh, that music is still being produced, just (mostly) not by the big recording companies.
Re:Can someone help me figure out the ethics of th (Score:3, Informative)
Piracy has referred to plagiarism for centuries. 'Meaning "one who takes another's work without permission" first recorded 1701;' [etymonline.com] Get with the times.
Re:Tough shit. (Score:1, Informative)
I so wish they'd get more into the Long Tail. Imagine record companies reissing their back catalogues as FLAC or Apple Lossless. They could sell them for a couple of bucks under the CD price and market it to record nerds who want obscurities it's infeasible to distribute physically.
Universal has started doing this with it's classical label Deutsche Grammophon. A year ago they started selling their recordings in DRM-free (!) mp3 format (320 kbps - no vbr, though, ): http://www.dgwebshop.com/ [dgwebshop.com] The store's selection also includes 600 out-of-print cds. A Regular album costs US$11.99/EUR11,99 which is a bit too expensive, but they've started to lower their prices on some recordings since the store was launched. It's not perfect, but it's a start.
IIRC, this was touted as an experiment for Universal. There's even an interview with one of the marketing/distribution/whatever head honchos from Universal saying that they had plans to release selected recordings in "better-than-CD-quality" in the future.
What profits have big record companies //earned//? (Score:5, Informative)
The technology for "cloud" media distribution was developed and bug-fixed by the likes of Napster, not them. the whole MP3 infrastructure seems to have been put together by independent companies, research institutions and computer companies, with a notable absence of any record companies being obviously involved. Online music stores seem to be mostly developed by external companies. I'm not aware of any record companies behind the growth of the ringtone market. If you want to access databases of what's on your CDs, you don't go to the record company, you go to a database run by an independent company where the information is entered and corrected and maintained by volunteer end-users. Hell, Microsoft probably run a more reliable public back-catalogue for BMG than BMG do.
When's the last time that any of us visited a record company website to find out a major artists back-catalogue? These guys are no good at websites. They'll pay someone big money to do a glitzy "promo" site that doesn't contain any useful reference information, and pull the plug on it a couple of years later.
The big record companies say that they need to make big profits in order to find and invest in the next generation of talent, but the artists being found and nurtured by "the industry" seem to be supported by other industry "players". The big development recently has been TV talent shows, where there's a lot of money being made from tv broadcasting and pay-per-vote ... but the big record companies missed out on that money because it wasn't them that did it.
What they are trying to do now, is to have contracts that give them a slice of things like tour money. They're trying to grab someone else's historic market share to supplement their income, by awarding themselves those rights in the recording contract. Again, this is a market where the big record companies haven't invested in the past - the gigging circuit has been kept alive by bands and promoters who recognised that gigging was essential to keep part of the customer-base interested in music. The big record companies essentially left big live venues to die, leaving it to others, like the mobile phone companies, to sponsor them.
So if they're asking for a "fair slice" of the profits from music, they should be careful what they ask for. A lot of people think that their current profits represent way more than a fair slice.