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 ...
Actually that logic is faulty on several levels. You are assuming that every CD you buy has songs that you would have bought individually on iTunes. The fact is, most people who buy CDs listen to only half of the songs on them. The other half are "throwaways" that recording artists toss on their to round out an album.
It is a rarity in the music business to put out an album that is consistently good from beginning to end. So rare is this that most people have trouble coming up with 10 albums that meet this criteria. Even the majority of "classic" albums have at least a couple of stinkers on them. For example, take U2's most acclaimed album "The Joshua Tree." At least four of those songs are pretty awful.
So you actually get much more bang for your money by cherry picking what is good and paying $1 for the tracks individually. So instead of paying $10 for an album that has 12 or 13 songs, you can pay $10 on iTunes to get the best songs from 3 or 4 different albums (that would have cost $30 to $40 to buy as full CDs).
. I'm not a Dead fan per se, although I do like some of their stuff. As far as recording I've recorded off the radio and was quite satisfied with the end product.
Right, and how did that happen to take over the music business? Well, when you have zero-talent headliners like Madonna making a career out of the visual rather than the musical, you have to fake the musical. Then the faking took over the industry.
What iTunes, downloading, etc., has done is, in a manner of speaking, brought back the single, just not on a 45 RPM piece of vinyl anymore.
Because people are more interested in going to see a show and, in particular, see scantily-clad women flouncing around than they are in going for the music. I know someone who went to see a Britney Spears concert, told me that it was obvious to anyone with an ounce of gray matter between their ears that she was lip-synching the whole thing, but nobody cared because she was half-naked, dripping with sweat and shaking her booty. That’s what they came to see.
You post is all that one would need to see what is happening. There are still a few bands that are bucking all these trends. Wilco comes to mind. It is nothing but product now days. Sell and move one.
With Wilco:
They finish an Album (Yankee Foxtrot Hotel) and deliver it to Reprise Records (Time Warner)
Reprise says it sucks and wants massive changes,
Wilco says no.
Reprise dumps them.
Wilco buys back the Album and shops it.
Nonesuch, (another Time Warner company) buys it for even more money that Reprise could have.
The Album is a huge hit and Critics even love it.
The Short term profit model has infected the world of music and has destroyed it. They can now cry like a baby all they want. They killed the industry.
Music is just another form of media to buy. It is not important to people anymore. No Artists are singing for the current generation. It is all fast food.
It's funny to see this thread this a.m., maybe there's a reason I've been listening to Sinatra all weekend. "Songs For Swinging Lovers" and "Only the Lonely" are definitely NOT fast food, which is the reason they sound absolutely as fresh and vital as they did when they were first released a half-century ago. That stuff has lasted. Little of the present-day stuff will, IMHO.
??? How does THAT fit? Ringo was a better drummer, he wasn't picked for non-musical 'aesthetic' reasons, and the (other) Beatles themselves picked him to sit in, as I understand.
I can't see how the Beatles can come anywhere close to being a fitting subject matter in a discussion about what is WRONG with the music business. They were the high-water mark, by any reasonable measure, of the now-dying industry.
Except that Ronnie Bennett can actually sing!
The music business was a great business back in the day. New companies were springing up as fast as new artists. The music created was revolutionary because there were risks that everyone, artist and record company were willing to take to get thier product out there. The fact that the baby boomer generation helped a great deal as well as the domestic and political turmoil of the 60’s thru the 70’s added to this also. Today it’s not about creating music it’s about image and conglomerate record companies looking for the bottom line. Most of the employee’s working for these companies are musicians themselves who never reached thier goals and are making command decisions on music coming into these companies at the lowest level. So is this a suprise to here? Not really, they have been on the road to suicide since the mid 70’s when disco made it’s debut. Yes, I was a musician back in the late 60’s through the 70’s, frustrated? no, angry ? yes, because I was involved when it was fun, exciting, creative, and rewarding. I guess all good things come to an end. Sorry for the run, it’s an emotional thang!
It's a beautiful thing....I can get on i-tunes and find artists that the labels aren't pushing. Radio is such politics and cash...most great artists never make it to mainstream airwaves. Downloading opens up the world to the vast array of music out there we would have never otherwise heard.
Um... why not from the EMI collection at the iTunes music store?
It's not just for Macs, you know....
- John
I thought itunes were only for macs. Will check it out. Walmart’s loss.
And that's eventually where the state of music will find itself. Recording equipment has become so affordable that bands can record and mix their own songs and then upload them to their myspace page. This will require that at least one band member immerses himself in basic sound engineering. The band will then build a regional following by playing local venues. They won't become multi-millionaires but if they work hard at promoting themselves, they'll have fun, pick up chicks and might earn enough to scrape by.
I think in the next few years we will see an end to the millionaire pop star. There aren't really any bands that have come out in the last decade that can fill a stadium or arena on their own. All the money being made touring is either through festivals where a bunch of small bands play (and share the profits) or older, established acts from the 60s-80s.
There is a difference. The artists who make these CDs are entitled to the preservation of their intellectual property rights. Illegal piracy of their product should not be endorsed by anyone.
Well, the record industry used to be the narrow cultural focal point through which everyone looked to obtain new music - now music can be had everywhere through thousands of independent channels, and Big Music has permanently lost its monopoly. Music isn't taught in schools much any more, so the public lacks the ability it might have collectively had in, say, the Fifties, to discriminate between good and bad.
Predictions of the death of the music industry are premature. I expect we are just undergoing a shift in focus: more bands on the low end able to make money by marketing and selling their recordings and performing live - and far fewer mega-acts raking in millions for the big record companies. It's that latter phenomenon that has Big Music crying in their appletinis. ;)
One trend that has been harmful is the conversion of rock/jazz oriented clubs over to techno/house/hip hop/DJ music - one DJ is cheaper to a club owner than hiring bands, and the format brings in a crowd that buys expensive drinks rahter than the $2 beers rock audiences prefer. Musicians have always made most of their money performing live - the recording is just a commerical for the live performance. Theoretically (Lars Ulrich's protests notwithstanding) a band should be able to make zero money from record sales and still do well from live performance revenues...if they can find any place left to play.
The artists are out there. They probably aren’t the ones the companies want to push.
The radio used to be the means for the cream to rise to the top. All of those old dj’s taking chances and making decisions on what to play when something new came across their desk helped the great unknowns to get their product out.
Lost freedom will ruin any market.
Jamie Cullem and John Mayer are two.
Problem is, their music is sophisticated, so most twenty-somethings (sorry) don't get to hear it.
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