On the record Industry
I think the most basic problem is that background music has no inherent perceived value.
Listening to the radio is not the same thing as listening to a record once was.
The i-pod is rapidly replacing the radio for background music but there remains a giant void in the place that the LP once occupied.
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There is also little or no evidence that price affects sales volume very much.
If people really want it, they don’t hesitate to pay $15-20.
If they don’t want it, they don’t buy.
If lower prices helped, there’s more than enough of a retail margin for stores to be competing on price.
Finally, here in the U.S. there are far fewer record stores than major labels.
It’s kind of amazing how people rant about the majors being a monopoly when retail is far more of one.
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The record stores demand a $15 or $20 product in order for it to be worth the shelf space.
The only answer is better music and better packaging.
But that costs money…
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Here’s the deal.
It is true that the major labels have had a great deal of trouble selling new releases for well over a decade.
This was caused by the effect of the massive takeover of local retail sales by national entities.
It has affected both the distribution of recordings and the kind of music these new national advertisers were willing to support the exposure of.
The result has been an almost complete disconnect between music fans and broadcast music.
Before piracy this problem was somewhat cloaked by a huge increase in catalog sales as millions of people got their very first CD player in their new computer.
(The stand alone CD play only ever sold to a tiny fraction of households having LP or cassette capability.)
Piracy killed both catalog sales and new release sales.
There was nothing gradual about this change.
For quite a while sales were normal in areas that didn’t have broadband and virtually nonexistent in the areas that did.
The worst part is that it has destroyed the incentive for people to invest in the careers of young music artists.
Few people realize that most of today’s musical icons only became successful on their second major label “deal.”
Music’s middle class has indeed been utterly annihilated by piracy.
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There’s a bunch of investment bankers in Silicon Valley who want to see CDs, record stores and record labels all go away and leave them with a monopoly on international music distribution. Their endless press releases have nothing at all to do with the reality of what benefits performers and their fans.
Vinyl went away because of the consolidation of record stores and massive corporations such as Wal-Mart refusing to order LPs because the CD offered them a twelve dollar per unit profit margin increase. New artist sales have been a shipwreck since then because most fans never bought a CD player until one came built in to their computer ten years later. This nasty little problem was covered up by the major labels because it made them look bad and catalog sales of CDs compensated for the loss until piracy killed them and there was no longer any place to hide the fact that the average new major label release was selling less than a thousand units.
Vinyl is actually a huge opportunity but you won’t be reading much about it in publications that are supported financially by the folks who are hoping to kill off competition from record labels including artist-owned record labels.
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As far as I understand 180 gram was a marketing gimmick to help justify a premium price.
By far the best vinyl I’ve ever encountered were the Columbia and RCA DJ copies during the ’60s before transferring records to cart machines became common.
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Developing talent is something management companies do as opposed to record labels.
Motown was a management company and music publisher that had its own record label.
I think people have really got to let go of their emotional baggage about record labels and start looking at the real problem which for more than ten years has been exposing new artists. Record labels sign what they can get exposed which at this juncture means what they can get on the radio. They drop anybody they can’t get past the radio focus groups. This isn’t rocket science, a conspiracy theory or incompetence. It’s just a messenger carrying an ugly ugly message.
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“The way consumers wanted to go” is a commonly repeated insult to music fans. Portable music expanded the market but no music fan I know ever wanted portable music to replace the experience of buying and savoring a great album many times over.
The idea that portable music was a trend is precisely where I think the labels and especially big music retail screwed up big-time because they left the engaged music fans behind.
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The CD was the replacement for the cassette. They were priced to be the same as the cost of an LP plus the cost of a blank cassette in order to be able to play it in the car.
Here in the U.S. it happened at the same time as a big jump in songwriter’s royalties. Lots of people missed that LPs and cassettes had also gone up a bunch at the same time. The apparent size of the increase was compounded by the fact that stores refused to discount CDs.
What’s ironic is that there have been no signs that the average person will even cross a shopping mall to save a buck on a CD. Because lowering prices doesn’t work, the only solution left is better recordings and better packaging.
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Records are fine but they aren’t the real deal. We forget that way too often!
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Kind of amazing that we’ve got a generation of A&R and management folks who don’t seem to listen to, or if they listen, don’t want to do anything about what their artists sound like on the air. It isn’t an “audiophile” issue, it’s a pure “balls” issue.
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( and the label didn’t know what to do with them…)
That’s code for focus group tests not showing a narrow enough segment of people liking them to sell radio on playing their record.
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They don’t have any incentive to even buy music recordings today!
That’s progress? No it’s utter stupidity.
It’s time for people in the music business to stop looking down their noses at music fans and start giving them extraordinary recordings again.
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Only the inner inch or so of grooves lose top-end at 33. There is no significant loss at 45.
Mono 45s were the “money” version that we poured all of the effort into mixing and mastering.
A lot of LPs were not very carefully mastered before the ’70s and a lot of the stereo mixes just plain sucked.
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Below added 17.5.2010
Originally Posted by frobass View Post
…I mean not to be argumentative, if someone makes a product, sells it, and then can not get paid, there is no ‘business’. The artist simply can’t continue, unless they are independently wealthy or being funded by their parents, girlfriends, wives…….fill in the blank…
In the long run it is the Silicon Valley crowd that still needs to find a business model. Offering “free content” is bottom feeding on past investment that eliminates the incentive for investment in new “content.” It is really a Ponzi scheme and not a business model.
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The recording industry was in big trouble before the internet.
The problem with the internet is that it’s a mad dash of huge corporations that are each attempting to create a monopoly by destroying each other and the recording, broadcast and film industries, their unions and all of their existing contracts with composers, authors and performers.
This is a battle for individuals in the creative community retaining the right to ownership in what we create.
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… I use Digital because the business has fundamentally changed, and no amount of nostalgia will take me back. Sounds like I’m in a different business than many of you….
…For me, it’s about the music and CREATIVITY, and that is enhanced a hundred-fold by digital and it’s capabilities. No, make it a THOUSAND fold…
Fundamentally changed, true.
Fundamentally changed to where music seems to be less important to most people than at any previous time in my lifetime.
Business?
Business is all about relationships between buyers and sellers.
Creativity?
Creativity that most listeners don’t consider worth reaching into their wallets and supporting?
Tape isn’t necessarily the answer but somehow I have this suspicion that things may not have changed nearly as much as people seem to think.
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The music industry hasn’t been through this period ever…
Oh yes it has and how! For example the late 1940s when the majors dropped everybody who wasn’t a movie star and Wall Street was predicting that the end of radio, records and motion pictures was imminent because of television.
The means of exposure and the communities of fans come and go. A lot of our problem is that the folks who built the industry up from nothing the last time around have cashed out and been replaced by sorcerers’ apprentices who are going through the motions without having a clue about why certain things had been done in in the first place.
