A Bleak Future For Physical Media Purchases? 269
KevReedUK writes "The folks at ZDNet are eulogising over the upcoming death of physical media music sales. They refer to the noticeable drop in physical sales of albums whilst digital sales continue climbing (albeit at a reduced rate). Their central argument is that 'the music industry was pillaged by piracy and competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games ... [2007] marked the lowest tally and the steepest decline since Nielsen began publishing estimates based on point-of-sales data in 1993, a Nielsen representative said. The peak year in that time was 2000, when sales reached 785 million units.'"
Decesions, decesions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Decesions, decesions (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the real cause for the drop in sales is that the music stinks and the same artists keep pumping out the same crud.
Re:Decesions, decesions (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ya'd think they would drop the price to something reasonable, like $9.99. The cost of the disk is almost nothing."
As I covered in another post, the going rate for CDs is about $9.99. Prices have indeed dropped. They were in the $18 range about five years ago, but due to piracy, competition from other forms of entertainment, etc. etc. they've dropped significantly.
Despite material costs being below $1.50, it's still the case that record companies make pretty thin margins on CD sales relative to margins in other industries. I know this will probably boggle many people who read this, but there's a huge gulf between BOM cost and cost of sale. All of the record companies' expenses (salaries, promotions, overhead, etc. etc.) must come out of the sale of that CD. The biggest piece of the pie, believe it or not, is usually the royalties.
There are plenty of reasons to justify piracy. Actually, it's my long-held belief that you need no justification... if you'd rather have something for free than pay for it, then go for it. It's not like you need to make somebody else a bad guy to justify your actions. But "CDs cost $18" certainly isn't a good justification (as it is a lie), nor is "a CD costs almost nothing to produce" -- another lie. As covered in my other post, we don't like it when the record companies lie about pirates to demonize their behavior... so why stoop to their level?
"I think the real cause for the drop in sales is that the music stinks and the same artists keep pumping out the same crud."
Another common belief, but the sad reality is that most music has always stunk. Browsing the historical Billboard charts will quickly reveal this. Record companies have always pushed what will sell, with actual quality being an afterthought. The big difference between today and, say, 1973 (when the year's #1 single was Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Tie A Yellow Ribbon") is that today, with just a few clicks, we can get just about anything we want for free.
The top five most pirated tracks last week were from Alicia Keys, Fergie, Soulja Boy, Daughtry and somebody called "Baby Bash." The ability to get music for free has not improved our collective taste in music -- we still want that cruddy music; the difference is that we no longer have to pay for it.
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I don't typically buy music online or in physical stores as what I listen to (for the most part) is available for free online (Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic, String Cheese Incident, etc, etc, etc, etc) but I have been using Amazon's MP3 store for other shit that's Indie like Blonde Redhead's album
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"So I really want to know where these $19 CDs are and why I can't find them -- do they really exist or are Slashbotters just making that number up to cement their idea that RIAA sponsored music is horrid (like we didn't know already)?"
I think you may have meant to reply to the GP, not my post (I, too, corrected the GP on his assertation that CDs are $18.99).
Disproving it is easy -- just browse the Amazon Top 100 or take a look at prices at a major retailer. I think that "CDs are $20" is just one of th
prices of music (Score:3, Informative)
So I really want to know where these $19 CDs are and why I can't find them
Out of curiosity, it's been years since I last bought any music (and I don't pirate music either, I just don't listen to music much anymore), I searched Amazon music for Norah Jones [amazon.com]. On the first of three pages there are two albums, vinyl LP records, that are $30. Barnes and Noble has the list price of her "Come Away With Me" [barnesandnoble.com] as $19, as is "Not Too Late" [barnesandnoble.com], and The Little Willies" [barnesandnoble.com].
I picked Norah Jones because the last CDs I bou
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"I download off torrents because CDs just keep getting more expensive and it's not fair!" = Justification flying in the face of the facts. By my reckoning CDs are nearly 30% cheaper than 10 years ago.
"CDs cost nothing to produce and are cheaper to make than ever." = Justification flying in the face of facts. Not to mention pretty irrelevant. CDs are priced according to the market dynamics, just like any other commodity. H
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We had a three hour drive back home from grandma/grandpas. I've got an RCA car DVD player (Kind you strap on the head restraint of the front seats so the kids in the back can watch it.) - It would not play EITHER ONE. It plays older DVDs just fine, bu
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We don't even have the shipping excuse that European imports from the US have (crossing an ocean). There is absolutely no logical reason for prices to be higher in Canada anymore except, perhaps, for increased costs due to border crossings. Which, while the costs are real, is still bullshit since those borders are entirely territorial (ie: line of chal
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Except the really obvious one.
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Money for Nothing and Music for Free (Score:2, Interesting)
is that today, with just a few clicks, we can get just about anything we want for free.
While free certainly does have its appeal, I think removing the word free tells an even more important story.
Doing research on exactly what songs you want takes time. Creating play lists, ripping to an audio format, and then storing them on a media player takes time. If a record label is going to give people a mechanism to get exactly what people want rather than what people want plus 6-8 songs people don't, then most people are going to go the single song route.
I can think of at least two reasons to
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I don't collec
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I've not listened to a lot of pop music lately, but it seems to me that album concepts are fewer and fewer. There were advantages to getting Alan Parson's Project I, Robot, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Are there any albums concepts being sold today (regardless of whether you like the music listed above)?
While a couple of years old, I would suggest Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age. In addition to songs there is audio on the album that would make you think you are in the car listening to the radio and flipping channels. While I could listen to most of those songs stand alone, I do like to hear the complete album with the little extras.
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5 years ago (that would be around the end of high school) my list of favorite bands was something along the lines of Linkin Park, System of a Down, CKY, Green Day, RHCP and so on. Mainstream stuff. Today it's more like Red Sparowes, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Cloud Cult, Built to Spill, The Weakerthans, Emily Haines, Chk Chk Chk, King
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Your taste has changed because you're 5 years older, just like everyone listens to different stuff than they did when they were in their mid-teens. MP3s, file-sharing and google haven't made the slightest difference to this.
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the music I was listening to (Iron Butterfly) was (Score:2)
art
Oh, especially the drum solo "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".
FalconRe:Decesions, decesions (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with this. I personally tend to listen to a lot of older music (early 90s and before). I'm 18 so nobody can claim it's because I'm just being nostalgic. I have a firmly held belief that what makes modern music so unpalatable to older listeners used to listening in the 70s and 80s is NOT the quality of the actual music itself. The difference lies in the way the music is produced.
If you used to listen to a lot of older music in the 70s and 80s (and sometimes early 90s) you will probably find modern music fatiguing to listen to. It might sound like a wall of noise, with little to no dynamic range or variation - A BLAND SOUND THAT IS JUST A CONTINUOUS ASSAULT ON THE EARS WITH NO BREAKS. This isn't just your imagination - this is due to an actual phenomenon:
Enter the loudness war. Modern music when produced tends to be subjected to the producers desire to make it just as loud or louder than all the other songs on the radio, CD changer or itunes music collection. Human hearing determines loudness by the root mean square value of the sound's power. The PCM format (used in CDs and any music ripped from CDs) has hard limits on how loud a sound can be. Within these limits, the absolute loudest sound you can produce is a square wave. As sound engineers are pushed to master cds at higher and higher volumes, they are forced to resort to using extremely aggressive volume compression and hard clipping techniques to get the perceived volume up. This results in a waveform that starts to approximate a square wave the harder it is pushed. IT IS THE EQUIVALENT OF CONTINUOUSLY BEING SHOUTED AT BY SOMEBODY WITH A MONOTONIC VOICE OF CONSTANT VOLUME THAT DOESN'T NEED TO TAKE ANY BREATHS.
This youtube video can demonstrate the process far better than I can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ [youtube.com]
Unfortunately this technique is rampant in the music production industry - virtually all modern music sounds like this. A lot of younger people just accept that this is the way music always sounds, and when an older or better produced cd comes on they might tend to think that because it sounds much quieter, there is something wrong with it. I think that if the music industry stopped putting so much pressure on sound engineers to MAKE THEIR CDS SO LOUD then they people might actually enjoy listening to the music more, and cd sales might just increase.
Sam
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Now, where's my hammer and where's the baby?
Re:Decesions, decesions (Score:5, Insightful)
"While that might be true, I feel it's unfortunate that consumers are bearing the blunt of the bloat that exists in the record industry. It seems to me as if record industry executives are getting wealthy off of content that they, frankly, do not create. Having read about how the industry actually works, it strikes me as a system where everyone's taking a cut away from the artists, leaving the consumer to suffer due to higher prices. Is it unreasonable to hope that the industry can find a business model where artists can make more while consumers lose less?"
The big record labels will never be able to do it. The more overhead, the more hands there are grabbing at the money. I've met a few folks who've run indie labels who've told me that they pay their artists higher royalties than the big labels. So, artists can choose to sign with smaller labels and potentially get a larger piece of a smaller pie. Or, go the self-distribution route and get all of the pie... minus the part they have to give to the bank.
It's like that in any industry. Work for a big company and you'll just be a cog in a wheel -- you might have a higher level of job security and other benefits. But if you go to work for that startup, it might be a hell of a ride, but you'll have a bigger share of the company's success.
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Sorry, but that's the same argument made over and over that comes across as nothing more than a self-justification for pirating music. Did Hiroshi Okuda personally build Toyota cars? Did he design them? Doubtful, yet he made a huge salary when Toyota's profits climbed to their highest ever. Think IBM's Palmisano writes code or personally oversees the production of each PC? Not likely, bu
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"Spend $18.99 on a cd or spend all of 18 minutes on bittorrent. Hmmm wonder what a young person of today would choose?"
CDs haven't been $18.99 for a while now, except for the odd special version. The Amazon Top Ten presently has four at $7.99, one at $8.99, three at $9.99 and only and only two at $11.99. Prices at Target and Wal-Mart are similar, and, of course, on iTunes they're typically around $10 for a download.
Your point is well taken -- some people would rather get something for free than pay fo
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Bleak futures. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Rewarding thugs? (Score:2)
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And if PC Mag did not exaggerate piracy... (Score:4, Insightful)
But back to the main subject: there is a genuine problem caused by this continued exaggeration of the real damage done by piracy. Piracy is only a symptom. The music and movie industries have not been keeping up with technology and social change, and so have consistently failed to deliver quality goods at what consumers feel is a reasonable price. THAT is the true problem.
Blaming their failing business model on piracy is like blaming the blood from your cut for causing the pain...
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Do I think that is bad, nah, not really, they are better off spending what little money they have on food, lodging, clothing, transportation and their health, better that the rich become
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Let me correct that for you (Score:5, Insightful)
2 other reasons the CD is becoming extinct (Score:2, Interesting)
2) Most new popular music today is disposable and no one wants to pay for this crap. (Now get off my lawn.)
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"CDs are overpriced. Here in Vancouver, CDs usually cost between $15.99 and $24.99. (Yes, you read that right. No, these are not special edition or imports.) If CDs sold for around $5, not as many people would bother illegally downloading music."
Yeah, Canadians get screwed at retail on a lot of things. Back when the Canadian dollar worth $0.80 US, US companies (including the ones I've worked for) would jack the Canadian retail prices up by 20% or so to accomodate. But now that the Canadian and US dollar
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2. Canadians are definitely
Any other factors than piracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
And they blithely put it down to piracy and competition from other entertainments. Don't you think that maybe.. Just maybe.. The fact that people don't have the money to spend on fripperies, and are actually worried about their ability to keep roof over head is also a factor in this?
Re:Any other factors than piracy? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Any other factors than piracy? (Score:5, Funny)
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You are on the right track. People are looking at the options and cutting back. And CDs isn't the only one, lets look at Starbuck's stock price [yahoo.com]
But there are a lot of factors, including your insight:
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By comparison, they say sales peaked at the year 2000. Wasn't that also about when Napster peaked?
Duh (Score:2)
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It was mentioned on Slashdot yesterday, and I bought it [slashdot.org], but really should have listened to it first!
It's $5 (£2.52 for me) for 427MB of FLAC -- that's an excellent price! Equivalent to a couple of beers somewhere cheap, or single double-spirit+mixer somewhere cheap in London.
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What? (Score:2)
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In the paper yesterday, it said that although a lot of singles were downloaded, 95% of all album sales in the UK were physical CDs.
Considering that for a whole album, iTunes often costs *more* than a CD- at least in the UK- that's hardly surprising. Maybe other places are cheaper, but I doubt it.
Point is that iTunes is great if you only want one or two songs, and don't want to buy the whole album (they're still much cheaper than CD singles- even though those don't seem to be as overpriced as they used to be- and you aren't restricted to the charts or even what's released as a single). But iTunes for albums? Overpriced.
They might have
Of course... (Score:2)
Unconfirmed rumors on the Internet (Score:2)
And not a peep out of Netcraft? I'm waiting.
getting older (Score:2)
Stop this "digital" nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
This nonsense of describing downloaded music as "digital" to distinguish it from that on CDs needs to stop.
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Album sales dropping like rocks. (Score:2)
And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
...I've bought more CDs this year than in any year before. As I did last year, and the year before that.
It's just, they've all been bought straight from independent artists. No tally will catch them. But that doesn't mean the physical media goes away; just that the control over them is finally returning to those who it belongs to.
I buy what I like, not what they think I should (Score:3, Interesting)
Nowadays I am more often buying mp3s from amazon as I can get the odd track that has either no longer on the shelf or is only available with a bunch of other tracks I already have/don't want.
Would I buy more stuff off the shelves? If what I like were available. Borders and FYE have been the best of getting album sales from me lately.
As always, blame piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It's all crap.
2. I refuse to do business with anyone who considers my fair use as criminal.
Yes, I ripped all my CDs. I do so so I can download tracks onto my digital player. I also have a web interface to access all my music from anywhere I have computer access, but the web page is password protected and I don't give access to anyone. The music industry, however, doesn't want me to do that because they see it as a loss of a dollar for every single track. At the moment I have 1400 tracks on my server. The music industry sees that as over a thousand dollars of lost revenue -- even though I've already paid for every bit of music I possess!
How many times must I buy an album before I can use it as I please? Let's take one example, Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". I went through three vinyl albums way back before digital music was invented. I also owned a cassette of it (store bought, not copied). I might even have owned an eight-track version of it during a brief period of insanity. At the moment, I own two CD copies, the regular version and a "special remastered" version. That's seven copies of one album I have paid for. And you want to sue me because I ripped the CD onto my computer? FUCK YOU!
I know what the problem is. The music industry is very unhappy with CDs because they never wear out. Back during vinyl days you had to repurchase an album because they wore out, no matter how careful you were. They weren't too pleased with cassettes because you could record an album onto it and greatly extend the life of your music, but even cassettes wore out and pre-recoreded cassettes were purposely made cheaper to shorten their lifespan. These days, CDs don't wear out so replacement revenue is from the rare event of physical damage. And digital music never wears out.
So the music industry has seen their revenue from replacement purchases completely disappear. This leaves only one option to them, make the consumer purchase a different copy for every single device, but we're not going along with their plan, and they're now in panic mode. A panicked animal attacks anything and everything within reach, without thought, the music industry is no different. So they attack what is most convenient, their customers. We just need to stay out of reach until they bleed to death.
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I take it none of your CDs are more than 5 years old?
Several of my older CDs have deteriorated substantially, in one case with a sizable hole right through the metal layer in the audio tracks, in other cases with oxidation eating into the metal layer from the edges. Fortunately, thanks to error correction, they're still all playable so far... but they won't be forever.
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"The Compact Disc Digital Audio System offers the best possible sound reproduction - on a small, convenient disc. Its remarkable performance is the result of a unique combination of digital storage and laser optics. For best results, you should apply the same care in storing and handling the Compact Disc as you would with conventional records. No cleaning is necessary if the Compact Disc is always held by its edges and is replaced in its case directly after playin
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I don't think anyone has bothered to consider the retrospective view of the industry that is currently suing people from behind the RIAA. Thank you. I didn't think about how vinyl wears out - I never owned enough LP's for long enough to really notice. However, I have had plenty of tapes get munched and snapped by cheap walkmen and in-car decks. Ironically, this was *exactly* the reason why I made mix tapes: because the medium itself was too fragile and repl
Death of the RIAA monopoly, not the physical media (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped buying CDs because I refuse to patronize a greedy industry that was convicted of selling overpriced media, that maintains an iron grip on their distribution channels and seeks to eliminate any threat to that control, that uses "Hollywood accounting" to defer royalty payments to their artists, that litigates against their customers using shoddy legal practices and bypasses required steps in the legal process, that uses endentured slavery contracts to strip profits from their artists and enslaves them to provide content, that exploits their political connections to force alternate distribution channels (IE internet radio) out of business through retroactive copyright fees, and lastly fails to provide decent value for our dollar due to poor content ratio - one good song, the other nineteen disposable.
When the RIAA cartel collapses, then the distribution channels may finally open to better music from better talent.
If they hadn't cocked up the transition to SACD... (Score:2)
I can't help but think that Microsoft are hoping for the same thing to happen with the HD video formats so their Live-based download service benefits lik
Corporate Greed (Score:2, Insightful)
Get off my lawn! (Score:4, Interesting)
Distribution of content (music in this case) over the internet, definitely has its advantages from the point of view of the consumer, such as no time wasted going to the store or waiting for goods to arrive, and also a myriad of advantages from the point of view of the content producer.
That being said, there are several tradeoffs that I, personally, am just not ready to make unless I'm forced to by the discontinuation of CDs or by a change in the distribution model. Here are the things we are losing as we move way from CDs:
I'm willing to overlook the last one if they tweak the distribution model to address the first two as they are the real deal breakers for me. Especially the absence of a used market.
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Second, a digital file never wears
Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
Do what Movie Studios do - HD and master editions (Score:2)
Re:Do what Movie Studios do - HD and master editio (Score:2)
Led Zeppelin (Score:2)
Modern music sucks.
I for 0's and 1's (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for 0's and 1's (Score:5, Funny)
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The first step I do when I get a CD is rip it to MP3 and then the last is put the CD in a storage container. I might look at the artwork in between, but the nostalgia of music has been lost on me lately.
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Even with bands I know and care about, I prefer to buy their music digitally. If it isn't available that way, I'll go ahead and bu
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When iTunes/Amazon/etc can assure me that my purchases will still be accessible "forever" (or at least my lifetime, and my spouse's lifetime too), then they'll have my attention. Till then, not so much.
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Too bad Apple doesn't let you do the same with iTunes.
That said, there's ALSO a need for support outside of your seller. Take a look at the people who purchased digital movies from Wal-Mart. Those people are now out of luck, as their content is only as good as the system on which it was downloaded.
When that dies. Poof.
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What's more likely to be playable in 400 years? A Blu-ray disc of Star Wars with copy protection, or a pirated h.264 file of the same movie, when the source for the h.264 codec is available?
Gee, I wonder.
Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
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I felt that way about my guy too.
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Assuming you are running Vista, and you have yet to have something go wrong where you "cannot get to your files", then you do have your CD.
I did find one Vista install that did just that, but the owner reported to me that using my knoppix remaster (see screenshots below) to recover the Quicken files, and others, and save them to a USB stick took a long time.
I suppose the stick was formatted for either XP or Vista use, so that may be the cause. The emergency backup was succ
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That said, physical media is worth having for archival purposes if nothing else.
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Aside the case artwork and such, what's the significance of having a "physical copy" in your possession?
The originally post stated "Because I like to have it physically in my collection."
People collect things. This person likes to collect CDs, possibly for a number of reasons (the aforementioned "artwork and such", showing off what he has to his friends, a hobby that gives him some pleasure, a sense of accomplishment (as silly as that may seem to other), etc.)
I know a guy that buys CDs just to have them. He doesn't even listen to some of them! He just wants to "own" an organized library of music. Why?
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Re:I, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care about the case artwork or the liner notes. I buy CDs because:
It's just a lot more flexible IMO. If I'm going to pay for something, I have to get my money's worth, and I just don't with digital music.
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Plus if an MP3 of something gives me a headache as it sometimes does, I am screwed, but if I have the CD, I can rip it to FLAC or ogg.
Also, I like collec
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If I have a broken CD and I go to court, I can make a good case that I should be able to make a replacement CD.
If all I have is the server record, stored on some company, then I need to subpoena them and hope they exist if I want to prove that I really paid for the actual music I have.
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Digital copies are pretty much free after you take the bandwidth which you've already paid for and th
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Normally, there also would be their morals, their inner sense of right and wrong and/or their fellow citizens. Obviously, their morals, their sense of right and wrong and their fellow citizens tell them that its neither immoral nor wrong to copy a file for private, non-commercial use. No one, really no one will ever sanction private, non-commercial copying but the state and people trying to profit from copying prohibi
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Well, there's a bit of history behind it. Various 'X considered harmful' articles. 'Evil' also gets heavy usage in the hacker vocabulary, and that moves up into more mainstream IT-speak, and also into non-IT language. Notice how 'parse' has come into common use over the past few years? Ten years ago, I very seldom heard that word in other than a software context.
Language evolves, and I've completely f
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A quick trip to m-w.com gives me this as the 3rd entry for "deprecate":
"play down : make little of 'speaks five languages...but deprecates this facility' -- Time"
That's the usage IT has taken on; when features are still around but not recommended (are played d
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Amusing? That was almost coffee-through-the-nose.
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Hell, even some of the really true 'pop' has some high points, I personally enjoy Train and the Fray much more than my more indie friends would ever appr
Re:it's the music (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, though, the music industry's woes can be summed up in the following:
"Gee, I've got $50 in my pocket - will I buy three CDs with one decent song each totalling maybe 20 minutes of entertainment, a couple of DVDs featuing movies and features I'll watch all the way through, or a video game I'll play for hours? Hm...."
It's all about value for money spent, and most of the major labels' output just ain't got it, when compared to the other stuff that's competing for the dwindling supply of disposable cash.
Plus, this is an industry that:
- insists on treating its customers as criminals rather than trying to figure out what they need to do "right" in order to give their business a future.
- insists on treating its contributors as mere cogs in the machine, rather than its actual driving force...and those cogs are catching on. The industry's been in overdrive trying to spin Radiohead's online release of "In Rainbows" as a boneheaded move, when in fact it's very much the opposite.
Even investor reports are now coming to the conclusion that giving the music industry another leg to stand on only gives them another foot to shoot themselves in.
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