To the RIAA, the Music Industry really is collapsing. They are used to the Music Industry being one entity that they have control over. But the music industry is just changing, and now many indie artists and producers are able to release music to a huge audience without using the distribution channels that the RIAA sought to protect. So, the Music Industry as it was known 10+ years ago is collapsing. However, in it's place is a new music industry with a vastly different business model. And the RIAA will either realize the world has changed and try to grab some market share before it's all gone, or they will cease to exist.
Monopolists (oligopoly I guess, technically), particularly those who've been in a monopoly position for a long time are only the dried up husks of capitalists.
It comes as no surprise that competition is a completely foreign concept to them, IMHO.
It's a new music industry that very well may have less revenue and less profitability. There isn't much elasticity for concert ticket prices to go up much more, but there's a lot of room for record sales to fall, which means turning them into a loss leader just means losing money.
I quite frankly, disagree. The artist, who embraced and grew up on the new fora, earns more than what he/she could have ever done via label-sponsor-plastic route.
In fact some of the well known artists of today are artists only because of the new fora. It's no more like Joe needs to know the big-daddy before he/she could even release some good music.
This concern is only even possibly valid if you limit your conception of "the industry" to the bubble-gum pop music industry. In classical music, in jazz, in various more creative fields of music which have more readily and flexibly adopted new models of promotion and distribution, the market is definitely still out there for great artists to succeed.
If you're "a band" and hoping for one of the five^H^H^H^Hfour^H^H^H^Hthree remaining big labels to hand you a career on a silver platter like in the 80s, then yeah, you might be fucked.
I believe this is how it should be. Most popular music today is mass produced by rather untalented people. I wouldn't even call them artists. They assemble components into something that works. Much like a programmer. But are programmers labelled as artists?
Music from an artist is generally produced from an internal artistic drive. These mass produced tracks are simply made to make money. They cause the industry to be inflated because they probably wouldn't have become successful or even have been made without huge amounts of backing capital.
In other words, if the value of the industry was based on artistic merits, how much do you think it would be valued at?
I don't think cultural elitism or musical hipsterdom is a useful response. There's major label music that easily matches the artistic merit of anything you could name, and while it largely would have existed with or without major label support, it would not have reached as many people or received the same production values.
>cultural elitism or musical hipsterdom is a useful response
I think you've misinterpreted me. Unless you're telling me that people who can't even sing a live concert should be paid millions to sing. These are people that are generally considered musicians but often can't play an instrument, write their own songs, or even sing without software assistance. If we pared down the people who get paid to be musicians to the ones that do one of the above, how many would be left?
Most of them, easily. Don't take tired stereotypes of pop singers like Britney Spears or Justin Bieber and assume they're 90% of the major label output, or even 90% of the artists who get paid well.
I never said that Pop is 90% of sales, but you call me an elitist and then refuse to look up facts. I think you're lying to your self about the quality of music in the industry.
TOP TEN SELLING DIGITAL ARTISTS
(Based on Digital Track sales from 7/04/2004-1/02/2011)
Artist
Units Sold
1 Taylor Swift 34,269,000
2 Black Eyed Peas 33,831,000
3 Rihanna 33,673,000
4 Eminem 33,279,000
5 Lady Gaga 29,311,000
6 Kanye West 25,343,000
7 Beyonce 25,136,000
8 Nickelback 23,919,000
9 Michael Jackson 23,218,000
10. Katy Perry 22,574,000
Do we necessarily care about the overall size of the industry? When I listen to music, I care more about the composer and musicians than the guy who writes the contracts. If more artists are able to make money producing good quality music sold at a reasonable price to the consumer, then the music industry as a whole has done a good job, whether the industry comprises 100% artists or not.
Well, there's the producers and the engineers and record studios and studio equipment manufacturers, and they all provide something of value, indirectly, in producing good quality music.
You know what, I'm totally new to this party in that this is my first ever written comment on the situation. But I have to admit, I'm starting to get pretty pissed.
The thing that really gets me, and the thing that has recently dawned on me is that file sharing isn't the only thing that is eating away at "sales" - I realized just yesterday I have never paid for a CD, or bought a DVD. In my younger years I "acquired" content in the common, frowned upon, ways but in the last 4+ years I can say the same for my content purchasing habits - I just don't do it.
I just don't have to buy content any more because I can pay ALL of these guys and get pretty much all the content I can watch. I genuinely haven't opened a torrent app or downloaded from a file locker for longer than I can remember and I am what you'd imagine is that kind of guy.
Just today I got a phonecall from LoveFilm telling me about their new "stream only" packages, and that they're now owned by Amazon so their streaming tech is much better than it used to be.
Not only that, but I'm sure maybe even yesterday I read an article about Katy Perry's (Mmm) millions (if not tens of) plays on Spotify earning her next to nothing.
Now look, I know a lotta guys do fileshare but file-sharing is not the only reason the industry(s) are on their arse, it infuriates me that this whole charade is still going, I know I don't need to tell you guys how ridiculous this is.
This isn't even to mention everything else that us guys read daily about what the industry should be doing differently, or how to improve this and that. This is a set of commercial deals they have in place that give me an extra option in addition to "download illegally", or "buy download/CD".
So I'm of the opinion that if you took file-sharing out of the equation, they still have nobody but themselves to blame.
Once I saw that, I knew pirating was going to go mainstream. It has to. People like movies too much, pirating is so easy, and everything else is hard and is a shitty service.
I have an hbo account through verizon fios, and typically watch shows through hbo go. Its hbo's streaming answer to being able to view the content you already pay for. The service is terrible, it constantly stops buffering and looses its place in the show / movie and you have to restart the player constantly. This can't be due to my connection because speed tests report everything as fine and dandy.
Basically: I wanted to buy a song. It wasn't available. I ended up pirating it and donating money directly to the lead singer of the band.
Or in other words: windowing strategies cause others to make up for the deficiencies of the market reach. If you don't offer a free or paid option, someone is just going to infill it.
If lots of people are more than happy to do something for free, then just how important is it for those people to get paid to do that activity.
This isn't metal mining or oil drilling, making music is something humans do because they enjoy it. I would assume that 99% of music makers/creators/producers not only make no money from it, but pay money to do it. Thus, we could argue that when that 1% ceases to make money from the activity society, as a whole, is better off because that capital is now re-allocated somewhere else -- be it another leisure activity, healthcare, food, investment, etc.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Music industry should die for what it's trying to do with our liberties.
"Don't worry about sales. Make your money by touring."
If I were a musician, I'd be the studio based type. (Mike Oldfield, et al.) Re-taking and re-mixing until the recording is just right.
For someone like that hypothetical me, going on tour would be to expect people to pay to watch a substandard live performance or to watch me mime to a recording. I'd find both rather dishonest.
Its a good job I'm a software engineer. My customers expect me to test my work before delivery.
Couldn't hypothetical you just do a really polished tour? I mean, take electronic music for instance. Their performances are them moving sliders around and stuff, on things they've already spent a LOT of time creating and mixing.
