CD sales way down in 2008 compared to 2000, check it out

HeartfeltDawn · January 5, 2009

In this way, maybe those 360 deals aren't such a bad idea (providing the labels can manage it all correctly which is debatable). Get the artists under control, limit their access to the media and their public personas. Turn these artists into people that their fans want to know as much about as possible, and make sure the only way to find out about these artists is to PAY for this information.

...in short return things to the way they were in the 1950's. Jee-zus. How precisely are you going to stop the free flow of information online for this to work?

I'm very happy you're not a major record label head. Wait.. maybe you are.

The traditional major label-band-advance model is {censored}. It's wasteful. All those hundreds of thousands pumped into wanky promo videos. Right now, the record labels have a great opportunity to reorganise the way they promote and sign bands. Instead, it's going more retarded thanks to the Pop Idol 'oversaturate and sell' model. Wall Street got its kick in the ass for wanton greed: one day the major labels will get their ass kicked. Watching a major label follow Lehman Bros would be hilarious.

Songwriter81 · January 5, 2009

Pirated music has brutalized the music industry, but this trend will slowly reverse itself. It won’t go away completely, but it will become manageable.

There won’t be a magic pill. Rather there will be several factors to solution:

- The new Pro-IP bill passed this autumn will make it easier for the government to confiscate and auction off the assets of those facilitating pirated music, without having to find them guilty in a court of law. While this in itself won’t stop the sharing of pirated music, it will make it easy to bring down the bigger, more reputable domestic services quickly, without having to win in court.

- New technologies—like paid subscription services—will whittle off another portion of illegal downloading.

- Greater cooperation between ISP’s and the RIAA will push illegal p2p sharing further underground.

At the end of the day, a determined, tech savy individual will still be able to get a pirated song. But the average individual—like a soccer mom—will have a harder time finding a reputable p2p site she will be willing to trust. Plus, she will have to worry about the consequences—like having her Internet service cut off.

Matximus · January 5, 2009

Don't know about most of you, but I'm glad the CD-driven music business is dying. Because CDs suck!!!! They're over-priced and underwhelming. I remember when CDs started topping out at $18.99 at height of music biz in 2000-2001. That pissed me off. Shelling out $20 bucks for record with three or four good songs on it, at most. And the industry's luckluster response to the digital revolution justifies it's slow death, as far as I'm concerned. The way it laughed at Apple and went crazy suing peer-to-peer fans. {censored} the RIAA and the big four labels. Music will survive. But watching the music biz languish will be one of my few joys in 2009.

Songwriter81 · January 5, 2009

^ When the "music biz languishes" it's the small guys who get hurt the most. The major record labels may lose a percentage of their profits, but it's the engineers, producers, and individual musicians who end up losing their jobs.

HKSblade1 · January 5, 2009

The medium does not matter. It can be vinyl, cd, or flash drive. The medium is only the medium and has no correlation as to VALUE in the music.

Musicians must declare their worth and works. The have to let their music set the bar, not the medium. They have to raise the bar from the audience perspective and stop undermining their value as artists. If you walk in to your boss and say I'm only worth $1 per hour, then received only $1 per hour, WHO is to blame?

We sell ourselves in our professions daily. If we are proven to not be worth what we suggest, it goes without saying what happens to us.

Should musicians have to walk around with "will work for food" signs to show their audience how difficult it is in that competitive business. The audience of pirates and downloaders are not going to feel bad for any of them. They don't appreciate the craft or the arts and are only concerned with filling their Ipod which is just as greedy as the industry they bitch about. Musicians pay the price as always. Only musicians can create the change they require. Status Quo? Mainstream?? Huh? Isn't myspace the same thing? Do your own thing and make your works have value and you will be surprised how many will actual consider your work as WORK, and as ART and have appreciation for your efforts by buying the media.

Put a $0 tag on something and expect the same. It just boggles me to no end that musicians cannot see the forest through the trees.

HKSblade1 · January 5, 2009

Don't know about most of you, but I'm glad the CD-driven music business is dying. Because CDs suck!!!! They're over-priced and underwhelming. I remember when CDs started topping out at $18.99 at height of music biz in 2000-2001. That pissed me off. Shelling out $20 bucks for record with three or four good songs on it, at most. And the industry's luckluster response to the digital revolution justifies it's slow death, as far as I'm concerned. The way it laughed at Apple and went crazy suing peer-to-peer fans. {censored} the RIAA and the big four labels. Music will survive. But watching the music biz languish will be one of my few joys in 2009.

Hmmm- $20 too much? $10 too much? What gives?

Many will pay an avg of 150-200 bucks a weekend on beer and bars and walk away with nothing.

Many will pay $50 for a carton of cigs and find themselves staring at a few smoldering butts.

Musicians that worked their asses off in studios and on the road to even get to the studios deserve NOTHING? WTF?

We'll pay MC' d's and Pizza Hut for what results in POO, but cannot give an artist 99 cents for a song? WTF?

MUSIC industry going BUST? WTF? You happy to see people lose their jobs? Geez thank you. The industry is more than a couple of suits. There are hundreds of thousands of people in that business that provide the final products.

It's senseless comments like this that fuel the fire and create the more drastic measures like lawsuits. Instead of finding the decency to compensate the musicians and their arts, stealing is better? WTF

Again- go work for free and see how you like it. Do you value what you do? How about someone else stealing your property from your home? Consider their feelings about your greed to have a TV and luxuries they may not possess. Come on! Be fair. That is exactly the attitude that brought things this far. Do you steal tickets to see your favorite home team play a professional sport. Those guys earn a bundle and so do the owners but they provide entertainment most are not capable of doing at that level. We waste $50-100 a seat to watch them perform. Win or lose, we gave them value. Why can't musicians earn that same respect or be entitled to that same respect as we have for athletes?

For your information, the recording industry gambles it's ass off on thousands of musicians and groups that never make the grade. Those are huge losses and for every 1 success, there are 100 or more losses they wasted time money and effort in an attempt to make a commodity among any listener.

Look at other products that come out, last a week and fail. Look at others that have longevity. It's how things work. Not everything is for everybody, but stealing items is not the answer. Items that fail usually end up on the $2 bin somewhere. I agree artists have to be the commodity they profess to be and the public decides their prosperity and declares their value as it has with any other product or commodity.

Vito Corleone · January 5, 2009

...in short return things to the way they were in the 1950's.

Isn't that what everyone says they want now? A return to the old days? You can't have it both ways. Musicians whined when big labels monopolized the industry and the little guy couldn't get his music heard. But now that the playing field is wide open and everybody has a MySpace page and an ability to make a decent recording cheaply, they whine that 150 million different bands have diluted the profit potential. Make up your mind.

Jee-zus. How precisely are you going to stop the free flow of information online for this to work?

How about providing it in the form on content that can't be downloaded fpr starters? For Chrissakes, something as simple as having a T-shirt people want to buy is something that can't be downloaded. Come up with a product that can only be consumed during a life performance. Or has un-downloadable packaging that is intricate to the material. Get off your duff and get creative. If the so-called "artists" are so unimaginative that they can't think outside the same box they've been thinking in for the last 100 years, maybe they don't deserve to make any money.

HKSblade1 · January 5, 2009

Once again, avg Joe's Ipod can have 1000 artists on it BUT he most likely will never acquire 1000 tee shirts, stickers or posters. That is all BULLSh!t and another way to justify the scamming and ripping off of what the pirating downloader was really after........... the music

BlueStrat · January 6, 2009

that is very interesting! i would love to read the whole article if you have a link.

-PJ

Ask and ye shall receive!

http://www.newsweek.com/id/123484/page/1

pjrake · January 6, 2009

Hmmm- $20 too much? $10 too much? What gives?

that's so true, especially since a CD doesn't really have a "repeat" value: you buy it once and pretty much that's it (unless it's re-leased in another format... vinyl, then cassette, then CD, etc.)

i remember when they re-released all the Iron Maiden albums on CD's, they were like $20 each ($18.99 plus tax), but because i'm such of fan of theirs, i didn't have any problem buying them again (and i'm not a rich person at all!!!).

and let's say the album is not that good (to those that say why pay money for 2 good songs and a bunch of fillers)... if it's not good, fans will think twice before buying your next album, so it's in the best interest for an artist to put out a good album (product) to the fans (customers).

-PJ

Instrospection · January 6, 2009

True. But how many times are yoiu going to watch that 15 dollar DVD? Once? Twice? 3 times?

I listen to CDs at least a dozen times, more if I really like them. And in most cases the 12 "filler" songs start to grow on me and I end up realizing that what I first considered weak music is in fact better than I though it was.

Yeah, exactly. I still offer "Freebird" and "Stairway To Heaven" as examples of non-single tracks that the public got far enough into an album to choose for themselves that it was the best material that they weren't hearing on the radio by those bands. The idea of those songs functioning as singles now is ironic.....because they weren't singles! History tells us what we need to know, but if we went back then, the audience had to actually listen to that material to decide it for themselves, there was no nostalgia yet for them.

Alot of artists do different things on an album. Gone are the days of diversity, because the heavy music people generally want everything just strictly heavy. If Zeppelin came out today, their record label would FORCE them to put out 1 and 2--the heavy blues-- into eternity. They'd be forced to do "Dazed And Confused" for entire albums. They got alot of heat for 3, but they got the respect for doing their own thing and not just re-writing "You Shook Me" for the next five albums.

We'd certainly never get to 4, because the record company would have sacked them after 3. Nowadays, record labels are in no position to take risks because the industry is holding on by a thread, so the ironic part is that the pop airwaves will be filled with MORE dreck. Even if there is not something good NOW.....there will be LATER. If there's not the money or resources or the perception that an audience will care, they'll shelve things. Look at Cheers and Seinfeld....both classic comedies that did terribly in their first season. Now, they'd get a few weeks, maybe a few months to make an impression, and they'd be canned.

Another way to look at it is that 95 percent of the majors' roster always lost money. Now with less money squeezed from that 5 percent that does make them money, those coffers for new bands is gone. It's ironic that more and more bands are vying to be signed to a label, when they cluelessly don't realize that model doesn't exist anymore.

pjrake · January 6, 2009

Ask and ye shall receive!

http://www.newsweek.com/id/123484/page/1

thank you kind sir!

-PJ

Instrospection · January 6, 2009

Don't know about most of you, but I'm glad the CD-driven music business is dying. Because CDs suck!!!! They're over-priced and underwhelming. I remember when CDs started topping out at $18.99 at height of music biz in 2000-2001. That pissed me off. Shelling out $20 bucks for record with three or four good songs on it, at most. And the industry's luckluster response to the digital revolution justifies it's slow death, as far as I'm concerned. The way it laughed at Apple and went crazy suing peer-to-peer fans. {censored} the RIAA and the big four labels. Music will survive. But watching the music biz languish will be one of my few joys in 2009.

This is a misguided notion, and it is why I post here to make people understand that they are paying for:

1. bands' advances and going into the studio to make a record and get something that sounds great. Now that more and more bands and producers and mixing and mastering engineers are under the gun to compete with the loudness wars, this smashes the dynamics and makes the music date terribly. But people will say, "why is this song not as loud as the others on my IPod". Well, it takes time and money and resources to deviate from what everyone else is doing, because modern production methods are getting to be atrocious (Auto Tune, triggering, perfecting everything so it sounds like it's not even humans making the music anymore).

2. Promotions. Great albums and great bands don't arrive at your ears by magic. Word of mouth on a DIY level can do great things, but pick up your local newspaper and look through the bar scene and how many local bands you haven't heard of. These bands are playing in your community, yet you still wouldn't have heard of most of them. Are alot of them bad or mediocre? Sure. But the 5 percent that's truly great in this world doesn't always have the money or the budgets to promote it and have the time that it takes to get you to hear about it, from a review, an interview, word of mouth or the sort of buzz that it truly deserves.

When a label has to promo things and spend thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars so that YOU don't have to comb MySpace for hours or days to try to find something worthwhile, I believe that you are seeing the high cost of PROMO that you end up PAYING for in the cd. This is a cost that isn't separate from the cd.....you don't get the option to pay "promo levy" on top of the cd price. Labels and industry people have to price them so that you can continue to receive this priority of service for your favorite acts.

3. Pressing. Sure a cd may cost 25 cents to manufacture, but you're paying for art design, producer's fee, engineer's fee, mixing engineer's fee, mastering engineer's fee, A&R guy, manager, label PER EACH COPY SOLD. You don't start clearing profits until the release sells enough, so a better way to look at cds is that they represent a loan for services already paid, because everyone but the band and label is already paid...until the record sells.

All those people have to get paid to help the band concentrate on music, instead of extraneous things that they do "okay" or not good, or maybe even "great", but takes away their time. For example, that manager for a small indie band, you're inadvertently paying for his salary, because he's answering phones and taking heat off of them. Do you want to be paying for that manager? Surely not. None of us really do. But like any business that takes off, you need additional staff to take on the burden of what you can no longer look after. That is one of the most basic principles of expansion--the need to pay others, and with that comes overhead. These guys don't do it for free, they've got bills to pay, a house or car to pay for just like we all do.

Even if you factor out the "A&R guy, manager, label" as the bad guys, that still leaves you having to pay for the technical end of transferring the art in such a way in that you end up being moved on a subliminal level. I keep hearing that people only like the music--and it certainly does matter--but when's the last time a 4 track cassette demo lit up the charts? When's the last time a 4 track cassette demo or ghettoblaster recording even did well on the indie charts? All the top albums of 2008 lists that i've read from indie/ underground publications, look at the labels--SubPop. Matador. Kranky. Relapse. Anti. These labels can all afford to shell out for good recordings. I don't care what anyone says, the truly great artists shell out for good productions. Even Bob Pollard got sick of the 4 track recordings, and he's flourished with better gear and better engineers than he, when he was getting tape dropouts and tape hiss on those early recordings.

Right now, we're seeing what happens when bands are doing more themselves and overextending themselves. If you can't pay someone else to make it worth their time, you'd better be able to do it WELL. Otherwise, we're back at square one.....band needs to get their art out there, but it's not getting out there or not getting out there great, because they can't pay someone to do it better than they can otherwise do themselves.

To tell you the truth, I hate the "good enough" approach. I think that most acts settle for something "good enough". Why not awesome? Why not transcendent? Elevational? Visceral? Legendary? Gut level art and undying passion? When you don't have bills to justify, you're not likely to get that.....there's no additional reason to impress. When you've got mouths to feed and an audience that will quickly disappear if you don't make it worth their time, chances are that there's something at stake. Something to lose.

Right now, this aspect has everything to gain for the average musician. Alas, it just has nothing to lose.

Matximus · January 6, 2009