The record industry is dead

[andrewducker]

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

here

Note, also, that all of the Big 4 record distributors are now releasing their music DRM free in the US via Amazon. The world seems to have become a fraction saner...

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Someone I read this morning (I think Simon Hoggart) suggested that the economic pattern in music is now that one releases free recordings in order to sell hugely expensive concert tickets.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Which is fairly good for bands, because most bands make virtually no money from CD sales (that all goes to the record label).

Middle men eventually become irrelevant.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

And merch, too; not just tickets.

But not all tickets are expensive. Bands have never made much money on CDs, and it's rather hard to see what they were getting out of the record companies for all those years. Yes, the very biggest bands got rich. But everyone else? Not.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

The general line in digirights circles is that almost all artists make most of any money they do make from gigs and merchandise - basically if you're below the Metallica/Madonna level.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Our house is full of CDs but we don't listen to any of them. One of Marianne's Christmas presents was the new CD by one of her favourite bands. She just looked at it blankly; intellectually she knows that a lot of the music comes from CDs but they simply don't resonate for her at all.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The moment this same penny dropped for me was when, last summer, I manned a stall outside Smart Deli, a Japanese cafe in Berlin. I had some magazines, some DVDs, some PlayStation games and a pile of audio CDs. There was almost zero interest from passersby in the music CDs. Anyone who picked one up was guaranteed to be over 35. Kids went straight for the computer games. Designers fingered the magazines.

There are still plenty of physical objects which interest people precisely because they aren't digital information on the internet, but music CDs aren't one of them. (Music concerts, however, are.)

[figg.livejournal.com]

"The majors are trying to strike “360-degree” deals with artists that grant them a share of these earnings."

Hahaha. That's a wonderful phrase.

'We can't exploit you now from records, do you mind if we do so from concerts?'

Which, if anything will be the death knell for artists making /any/ money from a major contract.

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

[nuttyxander.livejournal.com]

The thing that does always strike me in these cases is that it is amazing how incomplete the sales figures are for CDs. For my buying habits, a major effect of my shift in buying habits now that I have an emusic account is that yes I do go to gigs more but I buy the CD from the artists stand right there, or later by post direct from the label or act. These are the kinds of sales that don't go into Soundscan or RIAA figures.

I certainly don't fetishise my CDs though, they sit in a yellow crate on top of the wardrobe.

I'm not sure that leaping into bed with amazon ahead of certain other options is necessarily a sane leap. But it is a leap.