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.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Exactly.
The recording industry is now a ‘command economy’. It used to be a free market. And only a free market can efficiently pick out the good from a sea of bad.
The radio stations play what the record companies tell them to play. Case in point: Brooks and Dunn’s album “Hillbilly Delux”. This album had some hits as soon as it was released. But it was out for 6-8 months before the song “Hillbilly Delux” was played and became a hit on radio stations. If it was real the radio stations would have been getting calls to play this song from the get-go. Obviously the recording industry tells the radio stations which songs to play in an effort to make the albums sell over a longer period of months.
In the ‘olden days’, an Elvis or a Loretta Lynn would take a copy of their song to a local radio station. The station would play it and if it was good people would ask for it to be played more. If it was really good other radio stations in other parts of the country would start playing it. This method quickly sends the best songs to the market.
When you have laptops with hundred-gig drives, and high-capacity mp3 players, whenever teens get together they share their music collections. Pretty soon they have everything that's even remotely worth listening to. Then there's library rentals and used CD stores
Threatening, charging and suing “the bad” customers is never a good business plan.
Hey watch out! I'm a guitar player, cut my teeth on Jimi Hendrix covers!!
Melinda Doolittle is proof of your statement. The best singer they ever had on the show got booted by the tweenies.
I hate to say this, but one must wonder if the success of rap was mainly due to the fact that its listener-base was not computer-literate, hence the old business model hung around a little longer -- and made it APPEAR, by comparison, more than it ever was.
Agree that this is another factor in the cascading calamity. I hear something on the radio that I like, but then I can never find out who the artist is, or what was the name of the song.
Impossible to find out = not likely to try and buy it.
The kind of people who like rap would rather steal the CD anyway.
I have not bought a CD since the RIAA started suing individual people. So I don’t feel bad for the industry. As for the individual artists, maybe if former drug dealers and gang bangers stop becoming major recording moguls, and when more than a few artists start supporting our troops instead of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, just maybe I will actually feel bad for them and start buying what they’re selling again.
I never realized Phil Spector was that old...
Well, before that there were other ersatz musicians created by the industry -- try Pat Boone as the man-made Elvis, for one.
bought the LP
bought the cassette
bought the CD
And that was a big part of those huge CD sales --Boomers and Generation Xers replacing all their old LPs. It took years but now that format change has largely been completed. People in their 30s and up have replaced everything they want to own.
Now the medium itself is quickly becoming obsolete as listeners have switched over to iPods that will let you put thousands of songs on a device smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
One thing I don't hear a lot of complaining about is just how crappy these compressed files sound! I was listening to Rush through my buddy's iPod and the recording sounded terrible. It was compressed and distorted! I guess people don't really care that much about sound quality that much anymore.
This is a popular myth that is perpetrated by people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
The fact is that most people who buy iPods already have a decent collection of music on CD. When I bought my iPod, I already had thousands of songs to load on it from my CD collection.
In fact, the iPod has already saved me tons of money and has paid for itself many times over. This is because I no longer have to buy an entire album to get just a couple songs that I like.
When I ripped my CD collection, I ended up with over 25,000 tracks in my iTunes. Want to guess how much of that music ended up on my iPod? About 7,000 tracks. That means that I basically wasted my money on the other 18,000 tracks I had to buy to get the 7,000 I really want.
So taking your logic to the extreme by assuming that over time, I would "fill" my iPod with 10,000 iTunes-purchased tunes for $10,000, that would be the equivalent for me of purchasing some $25,000 worth of CDs.
The sorry fact is that todays songwriters and composers do not know how to write good music. Anyone who believes that rap is nothing more than rotten poetry stitched together with a rhythm section is only fooling themselves. And what passes for good rock bands today would have gotten sneered at thirty, forty years ago. Today’s songwriters should immerse themselves in the greats of classical music and twentieth century american songwriters. Maybe they’d get a clue.
When I hear a song on the radio I really like, I try and remember a line of lyrics and then I type the line into Google. I've used this method countless times to discern the title and artist.
I have that Peter Green CD.
Uh, have you ever heard some of the old Beatles tracks on which Pete Best played drums? There was a reason that he ended up being a baker. :)
Errrr, wouldn't GM actually have to sell some of those trucks (i.e. not be perpetually hovering at the point of bankruptcy) for the ad campaign to be a "success"?
And as part of "doing it right," I have two words for you: Ogg Vorbis. VASTLY superior compressed format to MP3, WMA or Apple's AAC.
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