The Decline of the Music Industry
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music /. has an op-ed piece about a NY Times article that outlines the decline of the music industry. It was such a tasty read, I felt it should be here as well.
With all the newspapers, including the AP, going DRM, and demanding people pay for their news, I figured I could sneak this one in before they sued. (The graphic on the right is Copyright 2009, New York Times Company).
Charles M. Blow has a great article in the New York Times;
The music industry`s deathwatch kicked off about a decade ago, but it seems the vigil could soon be over.
According to data from the Recording Industry Association of America, since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna`s 60th birthday.
The speed at which this industry is coming undone is utterly breathtaking.
First, piracy punched a big hole in it. Now music streaming â music available on demand over the Internet, free and legal â is poised to seal the deal.
The problem is that if people can get the music they want for free, why would they ever buy it, or even steal it? They won`t. According to a March study by the NPD Group, a market research group for the entertainment industry, 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent.
And a survey of British music fans, conducted by the Leading Question/Music Ally and released last month, found that the percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music regularly and nearly a third listen to it every day.
This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They`re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.
Even if they choose to buy the music, the industry has handicapped its ability to capitalize on that purchase by allowing all songs to be bought individually, apart from their albums. This once seemed like a blessing. Now it looks more like a curse.
In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good. You may have only wanted two or three songs, but you had to buy the whole 8-track, cassette or CD to get them. So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones. The resulting revenue provided a cushion for the artists and record companies to take chances and make mistakes. Single song downloads helped to kill that.
Thanks Chuck, for putting such a delicious article out there to read..
The music industry, namely the RIAA is running their business into the ground at breakneck speed. While the music community continues to grow exponentially with new bands, indies, and the like, the RIAA has been ignoring them for a decade, at their own expense.
If there was ever a time that the RIAA’s version of the music industry needed to vanish, the time is now.
Being a customer, I focus on customer centric ideals, and stifiling newcomers, indies, and alternatives is only hurting the customer and these new bands, who really cares about the RIAA, other than they are the hinderance between those new sounds, and me.
RIP RIAA, you are obsolete and a serious impediment to the music community, please crawl off and die somewhere, quietly…
(NOT that I am promoting violence or anything 
)
[^^ Perish the thought! In case you're wondering, Blow is the current visual OpEd columnist for the New York Times - Jon]
surfer
Share The Wealth!
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
New York Times – Swan Songs?
Slashdot The Music Crisis Writ Large
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:09 am
According to the American Business Association we are not customers… we are consumers… and they are responsible to their shareholders, not to us who buy their products and make it worth something. See this is what they don’t understand, their products are worthless until we the people buys is and starts recommending it to friends and families, that is when the value kicks in, sales goes up, shareprices goes up and everyone is happy. As long as old-fart fat-pigs in suits are speculating in tentative sales and prognosed income their business model won’t work.
I cannot wait for the day when we have nationwide boycott of the Maffia’s products…
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Well said, Wilmer!
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
To understand the RIAA, one should take a look at another company, SCO. SCO has the rights to UNIX; no one was buying it from them. Their solution to this was to start suing big companies that were using Linux, claiming linux shared source code with UNIX. As it turns out, they really didn’t have much of a case, but some companies paid them just to avoid an expensive lawsuit. Most of their income recently has been from lawsuit money, not UNIX sales. They became hated by almost everyone in the software industry but that in no way discouraged the lawsuit policy. The RIAA is exactly the same, they don’t care who hates them, as most people sued settle out of court for about 2K-4K.
August 3rd, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Well really, isn’t that exactly what intellectual property is? You create something, claim exlusive reproduction, distribution and performance rights, and the only way to make any money off it is to charge royalties to anyone wanting to use it, and suing those who refuse to pay. Problem is, it’s a business model that only works if people are actually interested in what you’re producing. If it’s crap, nobody will want it, even if they can get it for free.
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Wait. NOW we are believing RIAA statistics? Or is that graphic just to poke fun at?
August 4th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Single track sales aren’t the only means by which they are hurting themselves. There are also the “Best Of” compilations that inevitably come out. You can save yourself on the order of hundreds of dollars with the more prolific bands provided you have some patience. Finding such CD’s used is even better.
Thank you RIAA for helping us help you commit suicide!