This past weekend, Charles Blow opined in the New York Times that “the music industry’s deathwatch kicked off about a decade ago, but it seems the vigil could soon be over.”
Over?
Over!
What will we talk about at music industry conferences now? Wait, what? No music industry conferences! Not even cocktails?
I particularly liked the scary graphic, which I can’t quite figure out how to read, but it certainly seems like a vision of Doom!
Commenter Ladislav Nemec of California responded to Blow’s article by offering up a “Let them eat cake” solution: Sell only classical music. “I used to buy only ‘classical music’ written, for the most part by Very Dead White Men….Blow does not speculate what the future holds. It seems to be just wonderful: the Stars of Pop Music will get much, much less money, will not be able to build Neverlands and, possibly, will use fewer drugs.”
I’m not sure that is exactly how it will play out. It may be the “anyone can make a record and distribute it online” age, but it still takes cash and/or the talent/skill/equipment equivalent to make a great recording. And if recording still costs, it’s the performers already making bank on their live shows who are going to have the discretionary cash to keep putting record after record out into the marketplace. No, I worry about the folks who hustle and hustle and finally make a record, maybe even make a (relatively) big splash record and get to be interviewed on NPR and have nice things blogged about them. And then only a handful of people buy it. And then everyone goes home, on to the next thing, and the artist is left with a closet full of unsold cds and a creative hangover.
So the supply and demand balance is off. The delivery methods aren’t attractive enough to consumers to close the deal. We don’t trust the major labels and there are too many indie ones for a consumer to track. Journalists and the music mags that once employed them are riding their very own personal downward spiral in the wake of the great, voracious, unharnessable maw that is internet chatter. And actually that’s the state of the music industry that I know, and it’s a crueler picture than any pie chart could present.
I don’t know, that graph looks pretty scary. If there is an upside, it’s that digital sales look like they’re at least increasing, though not at the rate the chart shows CD sales increasing at the beginning.
The key finding here is that people are going from an “acquisition model” to an “access model”.
And why not? Record companies are suing their customers over illicit downloading, bigtime. And even if you buy a digital tune, you don’t really own it – because you can’t sell it. What you “own” is the chance to hear the file whenever you want.
The model for music will eventually be like the stuff on YouTube: all you really need to know is where the link is – the file will be there anytime you want it. Search engines will provide the key to access. There will be no point in collecting music and then cluttering up your hard drive with a bunch of files.
Total access via Internet of all music all the time will eventually kill what used to be called the record business.
There is a small caption near the bottom of that chart that is very important: “Source: Recording Industry Association of America”. I have seen their figures numerous times (in fact I analysed them in depth in my PhD thesis), and the problem with the “DOOM! CRISIS!” cries that the figures inevitably attract is that they don’t actually speak for anything like the whole music recording industry.
The RIAA figures are mainly from 4 big record companies (EMI, Sony BMG, Universal, Warner). These companies have been slow to adapt to new technology: not merely downloads via the web, but the ease with which anyone half-serious can record, produce, and manufacture CDs to a high quality – and the sell them easily via the web or at live events. It is difficult to measure just how many CDs are sold this way, but it’s a large number.
To list a few examples of organisations who’ve started their own record labels, the sales of which are NOT in these RIAA figures:
John Eliot Gardiner: Soli Deo Gloria
London Symphony Orchestra: LSO Live
Wigmore Hall
Brodsky Quartet
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Hallé Orchestra
Michael Nyman
I am in the UK of course, and speaking from the point of view of classical music, which is my field. And the biggest seller of classical music CDs? Step forward Naxos – not a member of the RIAA (or the UK equivalent, the BPI), and you won’t find their sales figures in the “doom” chart.
But outside of classical music we can also look at examples such as Radiohead for successful CD sales outside of the “big-four”.
So – yes, it’s bad if you are the CEO of a big four record company, but if you’re a regular consumer of music, then things have never really been better. Not only do we have an infinity of downloads to choose from (quite often at much better quality than the barely adequate 128kbps), but we have a huge variety of CD recordings which are both easy to locate (Google, Amazon etc) but are very reasonably priced and often of excellent quality.
Therefore I disagree with the point you’re making there at the end – that the “supply and demand balance is off” – “supply” is much better than it’s ever been, and I’d be willing to bet (I’ve got statistics too…) that demand outside the big four is also extremely healthy too.
I mean seriously, applying common sense to it, all you need to do is think “I want to buy a recording of XYZ obscure composer / work” and you can 99% of the time have the CD landing on your doormat the next morning! (or you can often simply download it immediately from a variety of sources, if that’s how you like your music). How can that be the work of a dead industry?
Molly adds: Tim, thanks for pointing out the bias in those numbers and your other insightful observations.
And just to clarify, in my supply and demand concern, I was not thinking about the consumer so much–though the glut of too much choice is its own beastly battle in my experience–but the fact that this system breaks down on the creator employment side. That long tail approach may work out eventually, but that “each artists for him/herself” has shaken things so hard, is it even possible for the consumer to ID much cream as it floats by?
I thought you might enjoy this article, which takes the same basic statistics and draws different conclusions:
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/dont-believe-the-hype-music-is-doing-better-than-ever/?referrer=email