Music Sales Continue to Plummet for Albums and Digital Downloads
variety.com
variety.com
Expecting them to have lifespan and protection of the property under one's house, or to even be analogous to that property, is delusional.
That will disadvantage more produced, machine-assisted music that is hard to recreate live (or unconvincing when played at a moderate volume), but if there's anything the internet has taught me, it's that people will make that stuff for free, extremely well.
I'm doing a summer internship in San Francisco and one of my favorite parts of living here is being able to see fantastic local music in small venues. I've been going to a cafe in the Mission where I can just hang out after work and listen to a jazz group play from around 8:30 until midnight.
I noticed that as a result of seeing live music in my spare time, my consumption of recorded music has dropped dramatically. I pretty much only put on my headphones when I go for a run (I will occasionally listen to an album while I'm programming, but I prefer not to).
Recorded performances enable 0.0001% of professional and "semi-pro" musicians to earn a living from recorded performances. For everyone else, life is as it was before recorded performances: You perform live, and you may have a day job, maybe teaching music, maybe something unrelated to music.
If the money from recorded performances goes away, the impact on music as an artform will be nil.
Why do you think a recorded performance of a work should be protectable under copyright? It's NOT an original work of the intellect. It's a performance of what is often someone else's work. Just because it is recorded, should it be protected? Does the technological innovation of recording make it protect-able? And, if so, shouldn't the technological innovation of infinite copies at zero marginal cost make performances un-protectable?
I don't see any difference in a book and an original music recording in terms of why one should be subject to copyright and one not.
Whether recordings or books are protectable in practice is another matter, as it is very easy to make digital copies of both.
But if one takes the stand that an author of a book (be it an e-book or a printed one) has the right to set a price for a copy for her work, and benefit from protection by copyright if she so chooses to, I don't see how a recording of an original piece of music is any different.
But a quality reference book doesn't really have an analogue in music. That book can be a key tool to someone performing their profession. This applies even in a digital medium.
Whether the book or recording is digital or not doesn't really matter
Or, more directly: I have a disk with literally terabytes of media on it. It is still more convenient for me to find stuff on YouTube and play it from there.
People like making stuff and putting it up. Witness DeviantArt, which is >90% unspeakable shit the perpetrators of which should have their hands cut off to stop them abusing pencils ever again, with a small percentage of actually goddamn brilliant artists whose presence justifies the whole enterprise.
(COI: I'm shacked up with one of said decent artists.)
The first main issue is that without an functioning ecosystem artists are forced to do everything themselves. When there were profits to be made off of recorded music all sorts of middle-men would take it upon themselves to make money for themselves while generating enough income for people to have music creation be a profession. These days you won't find as many band managers because there isn't very much in the way of profits. This goes for everything else in the ecosystem.
Part of this is due to losing the main way that musicians have profited, that is by selling records and by playing live music. Live music has been under assault since the beginning of the recorded music era. By the peak of the recording industry touring music was mainly looked at as a loss leader and were basically seen as just a way to drum up publicity for record sales. Most people did and continue to stay home and listen to recorded music instead of going to live music. At one point in the time the only way to hear music was by being around while it was performed.
The god's honest truth is that most intelligent and talented people are going in to other creative industries and contemporary music is suffering. I see more naturally talented musicians writing code than I see playing music and the main reason is because smart people won't work towards a career in an industry that is caught in a death spiral.
The tools aren't what matter. Music made with little training, experience, and passion is still shitty music even if it has sonic characteristics that were incredibly expensive just 20 years ago.
Good music is intelligent and aware of it's purpose. Good music is carefully constructed and performed with trained expression. Good music communicates intent and satisfies the needs of an audience.
The amateurs are not good enough for the public and so the public is ignoring them and instead listening to the professional music of the very recent past that still has a message and form that continues to make sense.
Pretty soon society will move far enough from this era that new stories and new modes of expression will be demanded and a new crop of artists will be happy to supply it. Hopefully a viable economic ecosystem will support their efforts.
It's something I built for myself and I didn't expect to make anything, but it's still been entertaining to have the expectation confirmed.
The site has seen some okay traffic but hasn't made enough to buy me a half of Tennent's.
add pandora, spotify, etc. and you don't need to purchase music, at all, anymore.
This is not entirely unexpected given how cable operators operate TV packages, but it does open up for more competition and it is that competition that makes the private sector model work for the consumer.
This all said, I can often get a CD cheaper than the online equivalent, more so if a bit older and you shop about. Aspect of old stock taking up space does play more for the physical store offerings, unlike digital versions.
Very few of my friends share this feeling, which makes me concerned for the future of ownable music. On the other hand, I'm enjoying the rise in popularity of vinyl. I've been buying albums and downloading the digital copies that they come with—best of both worlds.
The issue of portability globally with subscription streaming services. The World is getting smaller and more people travel further than before and with that.
Are streaming services all equal, do they lock you down to certain countries and with that do any offer true comparable global reach that a physical object affords you.
I see this as something that will become more of an issue as time goes on and also somewhat worrying. Bad enough planning a local SIM card for a phone as cheaper than roaming. Will streaming services start to add roaming charges too later on? I do wonder and suspect they may very well end up doing that.
You lost me here.
$10 on iTunes vs. $18 in a store? iTunes it is.
In many cases the iTunes package is better, it includes music videos, a full brochure, commentary from the artist. None of this comes with the basic CD package, you'd have to pay even more.
Ripping CDs: Not fun.
USB backup drive: Too easy.
Though unless current release I often find the CD option cheaper and many do have extra's.
Though I have yet to take advantage of a old CD that has CD+G, not a standard that took off. But still do not get that on the digital version, which is more expensive, still :|. (Alphaville album)
Still the transition from records to CD was often tainted with the same aspects of lost album art and other choice aspects. Recall a Bowie album with a zip in the front, just do not get that on CD, and no way digitally. not that it is much use, just different.
To me the shift away from purchasing music is because the constant availability of music. If I really want to hear that one old song, I can pull it up on youtube without having to build a library. My music tastes are easily satisfied with Creative Commons music or free streaming, even without subscribing. There is such a surplus of music available with how cheap it has gotten to produce. Music labels are in big trouble as they have to compete with hobbyists. They're being marginalized both in the production and distribution end.
But I don't see that same level of hobbyist quality TV. The business has changed a lot of TV, but only in distribution, not the production. Red vs Blue was a decade ago and little has built on that model since. Maybe Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog could be considered a hobby project, but it was done by big name stars. The only real hobby video we have now is just game-streaming and sketch comedy skits.
If a company can provide that service, for a fee, that company will succeed.
The older and slower to move companies, will not understand. Those old and slow to act companies will fail.
People don't want to own music. People want to listen to music.
Actually music fans used to want to own their music -- and took pride in their collections.
The current decline is a combination of two things:
1) for the younger generations music (pop/rock/whatever) is not as important as it was up until the eighties and slightly into the nineties.
Pop/Rock music thrived in an era when it was a major escape into a fantasy world. Nowadays there are 100 other diversions, from video games, to YouTube, to 9gag, to anime, 200 tv series, etc etc.
2) the remaining (but not that culturally important anymore) music fans, can listen to anything they want in several different ways, none of which involves paying for the music ("radio" streaming, youtube, torrents, etc).
(Btw, "concerts" and "merchandise" is not the answer for musicians. Band merchanidise is a non-musical gimmick for teenagers and immature 20-somethings, and concerts were traditionally a loss-leader for album sales, except for bigger bands. Plus concert attendance is even on the decline on the younger demographics).
>If a company can provide that service, for a fee, that company will succeed.
Bah,, it will just be a company with razor-thin margins in a declining market. They might make some profit, but they wont "succeed" the way music industry of the past had, especially when it starts charging a fee. With ads they might do better, but still not that great.
> Actually music fans used to want to own their music -- and took pride in their collections.
It used to be that owning your own music was the only way to listen to what you want, when you want, since if you didn't own it, you couldn't play it on demand.
Now, those two things are separate, and the demand for ownership has dropped. That may be a change in desire for ownership or other priority changes of the type you suggest, but the simpler explanation is that the ownership wasn't desired as an end in itself, it was desired as a means to the end of listening to what you want, when you want, and when the available means to acheive that changed, the desire for ownership of music was reduced because there were now alternative means to the ends.
by around 2010 I had TB of music and it's just not practical to carry that around. However with 3G/4G I can access almost any song I want via Spotify without ads and without sacrificing any space on my device. Just for paying a small fee each month.
I still pay for my music, but I don't own anything anymore.
In real life, of my 30+ friends, few and very rarely bother to buy anything from the artists the like anymore, they just torrent it. And they almost never see them in concert either -- since most rarely visit my country.
So a band that used to sell 100.000 and 300.000 records here (say U2), now sells around 10.000-20.000 or so (on a lucky day).
That is, I don't know how many folks that torrent stuff do buy stuff. Anecdotally, I actually just don't know that many folks that torrent. Of the few I suspect do torrent, they wouldn't be buying anything anyway. At worst, they would have been fine with crappy taped copies from the radio. Or music videos on VHS. (Heck, as a kid I probably watched more VHS stuff than anything else, and we bought videos.)
So, my hypothesis is that the amount of money and effort that is extracted from and goes into fighting music torrenting eclipses any supposed money that was lost in the crime.
I'm definitely game for any links. Or ideas on how to explore this hypothesis.
I think that part if it is to create a legal environment that is hostile to making torrenting more mainstream than it currently is.
Music producers are also getting paid, Andy Samberg used to buy his SNL shorts music and Lonely Island beats from producers on twitter selling and leasing their songs directly.