You're in good company.
Posted on 05/28/2007 5:23:23 AM PDT by WL-law
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album often cited as the greatest pop recording in music history, received a thoroughly modern 40th-anniversary salute last week...
But off stage, in a sign of the recording industry’s declining fortunes, shareholders of EMI, the music conglomerate that markets “Sgt. Pepper” and a vast trove of other recordings, were weighing a plan to sell the company as its financial performance was weakening.
... Despite costly efforts to build buzz around new talent and thwart piracy, CD sales have plunged more than 20 percent this year, far outweighing any gains made by digital sales at iTunes and similar services. Aram Sinnreich, a media industry consultant at Radar Research in Los Angeles, said the CD format, introduced in the United States 24 years ago, is in its death throes. “Everyone in the industry thinks of this Christmas as the last big holiday season for CD sales,” Mr. Sinnreich said, “and then everything goes kaput.”
... Even as the industry tries to branch out, though, there is no promise of an answer to a potentially more profound predicament: a creative drought and a corresponding lack of artists who ignite consumers’ interest in buying music.
.... that is compounded by the industry’s core structural problem: Its main product is widely available free. More than half of all music acquired by fans last year came from unpaid sources including Internet file sharing and CD burning, according to the market research company NPD Group. The “social” ripping and burning of CDs among friends — which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing efforts — accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing, NPD said.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You got that right. And a lot of promos for concerts. Which will eventually lead to ads - wait and see.
I believe the music industry began its inevitable slide into mediocrity after the deregulation of radio and television stations in the 1990s. Now, all the radio stations in this country are owned by a few giant media conglomerates — which explains why all the music sounds the same. Also, these media giants also own record labels as well — and their radio stations are an ideal venue to “self-promote” their own music. That’s why most radio stations play the same crap repeatedly for weeks/months on end.
Its interesting that you mention the Spice Girls. This is a group that was started about 10 years ago. Everybody has heard of them, but as far as I can recall, they only had one Hit!
“One thing about the Grateful Dead is they were not greedy with their music. They allowed free audio recordings of their long concerts by attendees.”
Exactly. They encouraged trading of show recordings as well. Go to archive.org and you will find hundred’s of Dead shows for free. At first, they did not want the shows out there but gave in after a while.
And GM's "Like a Rock" pickup truck ads -- which use the Bob Seger song with the same name -- has been called the most effective ad campaign in U.S. history.
I agree on that one. I d/l’ed a 2006 sxsw big compilation of free music, 820ish songs from about 775 artists, I have no idea what any of the artists look like besides Nickle Creek and the The Decemberists, and that’s only because those went big sometime after the compilation was released.
torrent (~3.1GB):
http://player.sxsw.com/torrents/SXSW_2007_Showcasing_Artists-Release_1.torrent
and a decent winnowing down of the 700+ songs in that torrent:
http://music.for-robots.com/archives/001906.html
I would think all the enviro-whacko lefties in the music biz would be happy about this. Manufacturing CDs uses resources and is bad for the environment.
The RIAA tried to be a cartel and got their rear ends handed to them because according to the laws of economics, overpricing by a cartel results in a MAJOR incentive to cheat against the cartel members. That's why the original Napster was so successful, and why the iTunes Music Store is doing the same on a legal basis. The RIAA should cut the suggested retail price of an album-length CD to US$10, and at that much lower price the incentive to thwart the system drops drastically.
You're in good company.
I love the advertising boasts of music players these days, that they can hold 10,000 songs. Pardon me, but to fill that thing up would cost $10,000!
I'll pass.
Looking at the big picture, if anything, file-sharing has actually kept the music industry afloat as this is the ONLY way that most people are finding music worth buying these days.
FM radio has become a wasteland of limited playlists handpicked by consultants and focus groups to appeal to the lowest common denominator (so as to drive ratings and ad revenues). This is why the "hits" have a much longer shelf life than before. Radio programmers are so afraid to play something new and different because they are afraid their listeners will tune elsewhere. Hence you have bland songs like "100 Years" by Five for Fighting and the same old songs by Maroon 5 and Coldplay still in heavy rotation 2-3 years after their initial release!
"Play it Safe" is the motto of radio programmers today, leaving it to satellite radio (with their 100+ commercial free stations) to break new songs and artists. But since satellite radio has only penetrated a fraction of the total audience, it is not enough to stop the decline of the music industry.
It used to be that record labels would invest several years in developing new artists, tolerating low sales for the first few albums in exchange for a big payoff later on when the artist finally achieved critical mass. But in todays climate, the record labels would have given up on such artists as Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, REO Speedwagon, The Police, and Bob Dylan (just to name a tiny few bands that didn't sell many of their first records but now sell millions of records a year through their catalog years after their popularity peaked).
It is hard to believe that the "flavor-of-the-month" recording artists record labels are thrusting upon us now will be selling much catalog years from now. Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Clay Aiken, etc. Can anybody imagine people buying their "music" a few years from now?
Online sales had the potential to offset declining CD sales years ago but the music industry decided to hobble this growing market by imposing upon us DRM (Digital RESTRICTIONS Management).
iTunes could be selling TEN TIMES the amount of music they are today had they not been forced to impose digital restrictions management on their music. The vast majority of consumers simply will pay good money for crippled music files when they could easily rip a higher-quality track (with no restrictions) from a CD - either traded on line, bought used or borrowed from a friend or even the library.
It will be very interesting to see how the DRM-free music about to be offered by iTunes (EMI only) fares. I have some issues with the higher price of these DRM-free tracks but my gut feeling is that the music industry will be surprised by how briskly these tracks sell.
Yes, that's a very good example! I hope all of the 'disposable musicians' are smart enough to save their money when they get that big hit, and don't blow it on an extravagant lifestyle, because it isn't going to last. Chances are most of them end up owing much more money than they made. lol
We recorded the cds in our own studio. Around 220 hours of studio time for each CD. Then we paid to have them manufactured. The manufacturing cost including artwork etc was about $1.65 per cd. another 40 cents per cd paying licensing fees on some of the songs we recorded. So we come out just over $2 bucks to produce the CD. I'd guess major producers do it even cheaper than that.
I’m a PC guy. Is there anywhere I can buy songs now at a cheap price without the protection software?
It started with the Monkee's, back in the 60's
Actually, it started with Phil Spector and the Ronettes back in the early '60s.
And also when record execs told the Beatles to ditch Pete Best in favor of Richard Starkey.
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