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 ...
I don’t get it...doesn’t everybody want to buy CD’s of the latest Rap and Hip-Hop artists?
Most of the new talent just plain sucks.Add to that gas prices and young folks just don’t have them money.
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 Paleologus
I hate to admitit ,but I like it too.
After all their efforts to jail or sue people who downloaded their crap this is their reward. I think its great.
When your music is around and people are downloading it free, others are buying. When the kids cant get it free ,it gets no play. No play. small sales.
I haven’t purchased a CD in almost 10 years, but that doesn’t make me a criminal. Gifts, legal music downloads and loaned CDs still make up parts of my library. That’s not to say I don’t want these vermin to be flushed as they deserve.
I’ll gladly support artists, and being an avid concert-goer, I do. They get MUCH more than my fair share of money from the swag I buy from tickets to t-shirts and stickers. The artists are a smart bunch of folks, and I think they’ve wised up to the dinosaur recording industry’s extortion.
Only time I buy a whole CD is when I can’t find what I want to download off iTunes. iTunes selection of classical music is somewhat limited.
What happened to the music biz is very similar what is happening to the news biz. They don’t control the distribution system anymore. Much as the newspapers don’t have a monopoly on the printing press, the music biz doesn’t have a monopoly on music recorders.
You'll see more and more artists selling their music song by song from their websites.
Man, you got that right!
Figure it out bozo's, and stop bitchin!
The gravy train is changing tracks!
American Idol is taking the wind out of these other companies’ sales.
Yup, you hit the nail on the head.
This isn’t just about piracy either. The market for promotion services have now become commodities that don’t lend themselves to hierarchical business models. The cost of entry has dropped to the point where anyone who applies for all their junk mail credit card applications will have enough credit to cut and promote tracks. Musicians win back their artistic and career freedom by taking back control of their business plans. Down with record reps!
Independent CD/DAT mastering studios are charging less now than they did 5 years ago. CD pressing now costs less than US$.75 a wrapped disk if bought in quantity. It’s gotten so cheap large numbers of baby boomers are pressing their own CD’s, oh god some of them are horrible, but it’s a cheap hobby relatively.
So many things are falling apart in the industry, the lawyers who had sway and went for the resist and litigate route put the final nails in the coffins.
Not only that, but the artists don't stick around very long anymore. The kids just turn on VH1 for music. Short attention span and short shelf life music, a marriage made in heaven.
attn: people buying CD’s
Everyone is laughing at you.
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