The music industry : From major to minor

The Economist ^ | Jan 10th 2008

[proxy_user]

“I got a turntable for Christmas and am beyond excited about it. My mom said the salesman told her they had sold three of the same model she got me that day.

Vinyl is a dangerous hobby. Before you know it, you will be looking at $5000 turntables and wondering if one would fit in your rack.

For more info, please join us in the VinylAsylum:

http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/vinyl/bbs.html

I use a different nic there.

[Berosus]

These days I only buy music from eMusic.com. 30 tracks a month for $10. They’ve got mostly indie labels, but as a reggae/world music/new age fan, there’s a good chance I’ll find what I’m looking for there. Moreover, I’m in a city that doesn’t have a top-40 radio station, so I don’t miss the big stars much, nor do I feel much compulsion to keep up with who’s who on the airwaves.

[Spktyr]

I type corrected, then.

But SACD is pretty much dead in the water as well. Twice the cost of a regular CD and it won’t play in most players.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

The problem with downloads are that mp3s are really not high quality facsimiles of what was recorded. And this is having a negative effect on music.

Nonsense.

I recorded a song at a studio in Nashville on Wednesday. The female singer delivered a fabulous performance. The song was recorded digitally.

I e-mailed an mp3 of the recording to several people. It sounds just as great as it did in the recording studio control room.

I ought to know. I was there throughout the entire recording and mixing process.

Most people could never hear a difference in quality.

[proxy_user]

“But SACD is pretty much dead in the water as well. Twice the cost of a regular CD and it won’t play in most players.

Sony’s original idea was dual-layer, with a CD layer and an SACD layer, to ease the conversion. That way, some layer would play in every player.

A surprising number of ‘universal’ players do in fact play the SACD layer. Many of the mass-market chipsets have DSD decoding built in. But in the mass market, no one cares.

[Berosus]

Blu-Ray is already obsolete. This morning I read about an Israeli company named Mempile that has invented a one-terabyte (1 TB, or 1,000 gigs) disk! That is 20 times as much as Blu-Ray can hold.

http://www.mempile.com/

[gunservative]

I see the music industry going in several directions away from the majors.

1. Pay downloads is the present wave. Either a la carte singles or complete albums. Prices will continue to go down while artist royalties go up.

2. Subscription services are a present wave and likely we’ll see more of it in the future. Pay a monthly fee and get everything you want. Rent your music. Artists who get “rented” get a small royalty. This is already happening.

3. Along the same lines as subscriptions, people could pay a monthly or yearly license fee to have immunity from RIAA lawsuits. With a paid license fee, people could download everything they want via Torrent and file-sharing services with impunity. This might be kind of difficult to administer.

4. Giveaways. Prince gave away millions of copies of his latest CD via a British newspaper and got paid a lot of money. Big Head Todd & The Monsters just gave away 500,000 copies of their latest album before a tour. Bruce Hornsby gave away a double album of music via a free download on the web. Unknown artists can give away their music all over the web, iTunes, archive.org, podcasts, etc in order to find an audience naturally.

The major labels are dying a natural death. Britney Spears sold nearly 8 million copies of her CD released in 2000. Her latest album barely sold 550,000 and is falling off the charts. American Idol winner Taylor Hicks sold less than 700,000 copies of his album and was just dropped by his label. Yet many longtime musicians I know have had really good changes in their financial outlooks in the past few years, mostly thanks to independent digital distribution and a renewed interest in their live shows.

[Lancey Howard]

Before the mid-’90s (ie., before widespread digital downloads) there was a monopoly on the selection and promotion of “hit songs” by radio stations, who were largely told what those “hits” were by soldiers for the labels.

There used to be what were called “singles”. “Singles” were originally 45rpm vinyl records, and they contained a ‘b side’ (the flip side of the record) which was usually (though famously, not always) a throwaway song. Incredibly, even in the late ‘90s these archaic terms were still being used by the labels. For an example, go read the Wiki bio about Radiohead and you will read that Radiohead put out “singles” all throughout the ‘90s and even released two EPs of ‘b sides’!

In an era where kids are downloading hundreds or even thousands of songs per week onto their ipods and rarely seem to listen to the same song twice (”The new ‘Smashing Pumpkins’ CD? No thanks... I already heard that.”) there is an entirely new paradigm, and I don’t think anybody has truly figured out what that is. Certainly not the record industry.

Singles? B sides??

No wonder the big labels are dying. They’re still stuck in the ‘60s.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

It occurs to me that artists could record songs and put them on the internet for free. Or even at a cost of 4 or 5 cents a song

This is eventually going to happen, but it will start with smaller band just starting out who will offer for free at first and then the mid sellers will start with four cents or so and then finally the big groups will jump on the bandwagon.

It's happening the other way around. Radiohead did this at the end of 2007 for their latest album, allowing customers to pay whatever they pleased for the download, including nothing. Thom Yorke, the lead singer, is now saying that Radiohead has made more money from the downloads of this album than they have ever received from the labels for all of their other albums combined.

However, Radiohead got to where they are through the marketing and publicity of the major labels - and that's the future for the record labels if they're bright enough to see it: coordinating marketing and publicity efforts for bands on Internet vehicles such as YouTube, MySpace, etc. The profits won't be as high and bands will have far more control over their product, but there will always be a need for marketing of music.

[Yollopoliuhqui]

The problem with indy music is that there is an absolute tsunami of garage bands and other self produced indy rock. Just look at the incredible litany of hair splitting genres that must be waded through. Right now, the genre tag is the only crap strainer we have. Try to listen to a thousand tunes a day to pick the 10 or so you like.

What is desperately needed are Beavis and Butthead sites with popular rating feedback that can handle the zillion chunes that are out there and give the rock surfer the 10% top tunes to check out. You Tube is the new MTV, but even there you don’t have a rating system or the ability to search via genre. Mp3.com used to be THE central location for all self-produced music, then it got bought out and sabotaged by industry operatives. CNET’s music section is trying to take on that role but it’s still small and doesn’t offer the marketing packages that Mp3.com used to. What is needed is another single central clearing house for all indy music or a dedicated music search and rating site that becomes the world standard.

Though distributed lateral connectivity is the defining parameter of the computer age, centralized information wells paradoxically save the surfer time and get him to the quality gig faster.

Yollo

[Jakarta ex-pat]

And at the end of the century, your beliefs will be thrown on the junk heap of history along with the others who bet against America.

I think you miss the point.

America, Europe and "The West" will survive.

But they will be unrecognizable by the turn of the century.

The only "majority" western entity will possibly be Australia.

Possibly.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Downloads are the wave of the PRESENT."

For music, yes, and "home video"---but not "quite" yet for real movies. Soon, though.

[JoJo Gunn]

At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free.

"Free rootkits? No thanks".

[longtermmemmory]

didn’t sony have to PAY a studio to adopt its blue ray format?

The means of physical production is now in the hands of the the consumer.

Even the “theater experience” now has to compete with the living room.

[george76]

Mempile

[KeepUSfree]

Another factor is the advancement in electronics. Our band just bought a recording mixer. It, along with lots of accessories and mics and headphones cost us about $3,000.

We have a dedicated garage and can now record, master, produce and distribute our own high quality music VERY cheaply.

Who needs "the music industry"?? Certainly not musicians.

[3AngelaD]

Maybe, but see post number 20.

[goldstategop]

Mark Steyn talked about it this morning. The music industry has stopped listening to its customers even as RIAA sues them to prop up an obsolete market model.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[TommyDale]

The industry still just doesn’t get it. Stop trying to push the garbage our way.

[Professional Engineer]

Vinyl forever!

Whipersnapper.