Interesting Admissions From Record Industry

way2trivial writes "Many in the Slashdot community say the reason music sales are off is the content. It appears the industry and some music producers agree. In todays NYTimes magazine there is an article that says the quality of todays music is the problem. I have an issue with one part however, it reads "...and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple" and here I thought Apple made most of their money with their hardware sales and a pittance on each track, giving the majority to the producer."

Go back to the beginning...

To my knowledge (accumulated from the popular press and talking to some folks at Apple in addition to being a shareholder) is that Apple makes almost nothing on the sale of the music itself, believing that the majority of the profits gained from media should go to the artists and producers themselves. Understandably, the recording industry wants to maintain its profitability, and for that matter Apple would like them to maintain their profitability as Apple is not interested in producing media content. Apple's interest here is that if there is an insufficient supply of affordable, quality media content, then people buy that content and need devices to enjoy that content in addition to having to manage it. Apple then gets to sell lots of widgets that help us to effectively manage that content and better our lives. But Apple rather than the media companies appears to be more willing to be an advocate for the consumer and understands that music, television, etc... beyond a certain price point will decrease sales because people are simply not willing to pay $5 for a TV show or $3-5 for a song. When this happens, Apple sells fewer widgets => bad.

Of course the risk for many of the media companies who fashion themselves as middlemen rather than true content producers is that Apple will simply cut them out of the deal and function as the clearinghouse for media, allowing even more of the profits to go to the artists. How do these media companies defend themselves against this? Its simple really... go back to the model that first got record companies, television studios and movie studios in business. *Create* and produce new, high quality entertainment, music, movies that are driven not principally by profits, but by the desire to tell a story, engage a listener, make a difference. At that point, the profits will come and Apple can even help them to make this happen by producing enabling technologies at ever lower price points, which results in increased profits.

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Understandably, the recording industry wants to maintain its profitability, and for that matter Apple would like them to maintain their profitability as Apple is not interested in producing media content. Apple's interest here is that if there is an insuff

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Seems obvious that since Apple makes the hardware they should profit from it, and since the artists make the songs they should profit from them... but then, I have a question for you (or any other shareholder): Why do you think Applet should get a cut from

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Remember though that once the money leaves your pocket and becomes the carriers money, it is no longer yours. So, if you look at it in terms of not revenue out of your pocket, but revenue out of the carriers pocket then it is a different story. What Appl

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The reason (as I see it) that Apple has the grounds to get a chunk of the contract fees for the iPhone is that without such a cut, Apple would have been far better off (in terms of hardware sales) selling iPhones as unlocked devices. By granting exclusivi

Re:Go back to the beginning...

Why do you think Applet should get a cut from *calls* made with an iPhone?

I pose the question why do shops like Universal think they should get a cut of the sales of the Zune [engadget.com] (which was paid by MS) and the iPod (which was not paid by apple). Perhaps we should that Universal has also implied that Apple should pay them for (by Universal's estimation) "the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material" [ilounge.com]

Not to mention that Universal-NBC wants consumer to pay significantly for downloads of shows that they could buy on dvd for less.

This all boils down to a the last throes [youtube.com] of a failing business model.

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I do notice a wee bit of hypocrisy here in that Apple refused to pay universal, but expects for AT&T to pay a similar fine.

Yeah I can see how it does seem to be similar, and I'm going to analyze is in this post as we go... thing is some of things just

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So the conflict is that Apple wants to maximize the number of iPods sold, which means getting people to buy the maximum number of songs to fill up their iPods, thus requiring a bigger iPod.

The music industry doesn't want to maximize the number of songs sol

Re:Go back to the beginning...

So the conflict is that Apple wants to maximize the number of iPods sold, which means getting people to buy the maximum number of songs to fill up their iPods, thus requiring a bigger iPod.

There is already enough stuff out there to do that. There is also enough television that you could start watching now and never come to the end of it. There are certainly enough books that even attempting to read just the good ones would be a fairly impossible goal for one human lifetime.

So when will copyright no longer be needed? Will it always really be necessary to keep offering such strong protections to creators at a cost to society? At what point could we look to patronage and ego to supply enough new works to keep things fresh, without needing copyright law at all?

Re:Go back to the beginning...

The music industry doesn't want to maximize the number of songs sold. It wants to maximize the number of dollars brought in. This means higher prices per track but selling fewer tracks, so long as they take in more money.

Bingo. Translation for the recordingeese-impaired:

...and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which benefits the consumer, but breaks our model of charging $15 for a CD containing eight songs you already have and two that you don't. Instead of paying $15 for those two new songs, people are only paying a dollar apiece, so we can't make a mint off of teenagers' pop music purchasing habits anymore.

I think that about sums it up.

Re:Go back to the beginning...

No, the risk for record companies is in investing in new talent. They want to be able to plug into "the formula" to market and sell albums. The companies look at what is working in the marketplace then find something just like that to invest their marketing dollars in. When they find the sound they want, they then go looking for the people who look the look they want and can make that sound. It's not a new technique -- The Monkeys, for example, were completely manufactured this way. But also (more recently and more to the problem) Creed only got a record contract because they sounded like Perl Jam, but better washed and without all the righteous indignation that can be so difficult for a record company to get around when marketing. It didn't matter that Creed was essentially a bunch of no-talent hacks because they could do the Pearl Jam formula, only without all the fuss.

But now they've become so refined in what they think people want and so limited in competition (there are only, what, three major labels now?) that they are just regurgitating and eating their own crap. They're actually cloning their clones. After Creed worked so well, they dug up Nickelback. That worked too, so how about this Three Days Grace thing ... and, well, Three Days Grace sucks ass, and they suck so bad that the record companies have to admit that the music sucks. But they can't see that it's because of their refusal to get out of their formula. They think it's the talent pool. They think there aren't any more good artists because they can't find somebody else to fill in on the played out "Pearl Jam" slot. And all their other slots.

In the past it has taken about 12 years to go from innovative revolution to played-out commercialized copying clones -- 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991 ... but now it has been 16 years without a revolution. There hasn't been an Elvis, or a Beatles, or a punk/new wave/disco explosion, or a Nirvana. These record labels are completely lost. The only thing that has really changed is that the labels have consolidated so that they have no reason to try anything new. They are idiots.

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They want to be able to plug into "the formula" to market and sell albums.

Who the hell are you to claim you know better than music industry experts as to what people want to listen to? Next, you'll be telling us people want more than Old Country Buffet for

Reality

Maybe reality is finally setting in. I remember buying albums because I liked 2 or 3 songs on the album. The rest of the songs sucked.
But that was my only choice. Now that I have the ability to buy only the tracks I like, I do that. There are some albu

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there isn't a decent margin selling hard copies of singles. They always used those to sell the albums, which held decent profits.

Singles make some money yes, but not that often, after all, one number one single might sell millions, but the next number one

Re:Reality

"Maybe reality is finally setting in. I remember buying albums because I liked 2 or 3 songs on the album. The rest of the songs sucked. But that was my only choice. "

Yeah...that is sad really. I mean, sure, I did that too with a few songs I really like back in the 70's and early 80's. But I gotta say, the majority of the albums I bought back then...I liked EVERY song on.

I bought the album for 2-3 songs, but, it turned out...the WHOLE album was great. What happened to that? Boston's first 2 albums...all good. Dark Side of the Moon, Animals, The Wall, the entire Zeppelin collection (with the exception to Hat's off to Roy Harper on Zep III), A Night at the Opera, Get Yer Ya Ya's Out (possibly one of the greatest live albums ever), Some Girls, Tattoo You, Paranoid, Abbey Road, Klaatu, Hope, Aqualung, Back in Black....etc...etc.

Sure...I bought singles on some songs...a few clunkers, but, large part...most every album I bought, the whole or 99% of it turned out to be quality music. What has happened to that? Why are there largely not bands that put out full quality work?

The music industry...plain and simple. They are only interested in a quick buck, one hit and out the door. Bands today don't get the luxury of developing...that takes time and work. I personally don't feel that there are as many good venues for new bands to play and hone their skills before 'breaking'. With licensing the way it is...hard to let a band play cover tunes, and guess what....that is how many of the old bands started!!!

Sad....I see young kids even today..wearing AC/DC and Zeppelin shirts....I mean, I'm very happy to see the music I grew up with has lasted...but, really, these bands should have been replace with quality groups today.

I can barely find a band today that has a guitarist of the caliber of Page, Claptop, Vaughn or the like. Seems today they are more interested in sampling the playing of the past, rather than learn to play, sing and excel at original content that is fun to listen to.

Re:Reality

Sad....I see young kids even today..wearing AC/DC and Zeppelin shirts....I mean, I'm very happy to see the music I grew up with has lasted...but, really, these bands should have been replace with quality groups today.

Zepplin I can understand but AC/DC? My god they made a career of playing the same song for 40 years.

The missing decade

Basically the music industry looks back on a decade of not seeing the internet as the opportunity it is, and now the labels frame Apple, which forced them to open their eyes, as the bad guy. They're such good sports.

Re:The missing decade

The music and motion picture industries have always tried to maintain the status quo. If that involves going to the Supreme Court and attempting to get specific technologies outlawed ... so be it. That's why they're so dangerous: they are willing to go to any extreme to protect what they already have, and need to have new opportunity shoved up their collective asses before they recognize it. Look at the motion picture people and the VCR ... fought it bitterly until they realized they could make even more money by selling us prerecorded tapes! If the Supremes had ruled in their favor and made the VCR a contraband device they'd have lost billions! Yet they couldn't see that until well after the fact: I'd say we're not dealing with particularly intelligent people here.

The music companies are no different, and are still thinking in terms of eliminating the competition (or, in Apple's case, a middleman they never really wanted in the first place.) They have no vision, no real awareness of the possibilities, no ability to take measured risks. I believe that if there were a magic button that, when pushed, would make the Internet, data compression technology and all audio/video recordable media instantly vanish from the face of the Earth ... those bastards would trample each other trying to be the first one to press it.

Dangerous parasites, all of them.

Wait...

You mean it doesn't all go to the artist?

This is why when I want new music I try to get them directly from the artist, or through a website like cdbaby.com [cdbaby.com] which seems to have better service than big labels and hopefully gives more money to artists. It also seems to promote a lot of the little guys which is a nice bonus.

Re:Wait...

CDBaby gives a *lot* more money to the artist. I get $0.637 for every $0.99 track sold on iTunes, which is far more than I'd make per track from a traditional record company. The problem, of course, is that there's significantly less marketing, etc., so the overall quantity of sales are less than they could be.

Buy from amiestreet.com, artist gets 70%

Amiestreet.com is showing media companies and artists a new model [amiestreet.com]. New tracks by any artist start out free. As demand warrants, the price of a track rises. Max price is $.98/track. Amiestreet keeps the first $5.00 to cover overhead, then passes along 7

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You mean it doesn't all go to the artist?

Every business has overhead that isn't just paying the people who make the product. I have now problem with the labels taking a share, although usually they take far too much. I'm glad the big labels are realizing

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CDBaby requires a $35 one-time setup fee and takes $4 / CD sold. You can charge what ever you want ... but they take $4 / CD no matter what.

I do really like CDBaby. I've sold a few CDs through them. But I feel like I have to charge a lot more for my CDs th

Lucrative Albums

So, they're upset that consumer don't have to buy an entire album and mainly crumby songs to get at the 2 or 3 good ones that exist?

Of course it was lucrative, one or two songs would be played that people enjoyed and represented the album. But when the album was actually played it turned out those singles weren't representative of what the consumer thought they were buying. they were paying $15.00 to get a couple songs and a bunch of filler.

Make 12 songs worth buying and you'd be surprised, people might actually buy them. But don't complain when people stop buying the filler.

Another lesson learned in the aftermath of ripping people off? Or is it "the consumers are stealing" line as usual?

Not just quality

I'd wager competition plays a part too. A while ago music was competing mostly against other albums. Now there's DVD box sets, video games, ect. Say, for example, a $15 CD gets about an hour's worth of music. Now say a $20 golden hit game gets 100 hours of playtime. Sales are down because there are other things to buy that can net more bang for your buck. And, of course, there's the fact that not all songs on the disk are necessarily of the same quality (maybe only one or two are worth listening to, in some cases) so it stands to reason that some people just opt to download the ones they want.

They summed it up well on page 4

"Until very recently," Rubin told me over lunch at Hugo's, a health-conscious restaurant in Hollywood, "there were a handful of channels in the music business that the gatekeepers controlled. They were radio, Tower Records, MTV, certain mainstream press like Rolling Stone. That's how people found out about new things. Every record company in the industry was built to work that model. There was a time when if you had something that wasn't so good, through muscle and lack of other choices, you could push that not very good product through those channels. And that's how the music business functioned for 50 years. Well, the world has changed. And the industry has not."

--- Essentially, the music industry has been operating as a monopolistic cartel for so long, and now they are (relatively suddenly) forced to survice in an environment with real, healthy competition. Columbia is on the right track by using Rick Rubin the way they are, but they (and the other major labels) need to do a whole lot more to save themselves.

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Say, for example, a $15 CD gets about an hour's worth of music.

Don't know about you, but if a CD is any good, I'll get more than 100 hours of play-time out of it (maybe spread over a few years, though). While I agree that "other things to spend money on"

Distribution of revenue

iTunes income substantial for music partners
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&newsI D=17997 [macworld.co.uk]

For everything sold on iTunes, we get the majority of the 70-79p per unit sale price

Rubbish?

Popular music may be rubbish, but that doesn't mean there is no demand for it; if there was no demand for it then there would be no huge p2p effort to supply it!

Certainly the perception of value for a large section of the market may not be high enough to justify paying for it at the current price, but that's not the same as saying that no one would buy it if they couldn't get it for free. The real answer is probably somewhere between 0 sales lost per download and 1 sale lost per download. I doubt we will ever really know for sure.

In any event not liking something is about the most stupid reason imaginable for justifying piracy. If you think it's bad then use your time to consume or create something else instead - there are certainly an enormous number of people giving things away who would be delighted if you took the time to look at their work. A lot of it is really high quality too - I have heard some excellent indie stuff, especially some experimental classical/rock stuff, that could never survive in the commercial world.

Re:Rubbish?

P2P is the entire candy store, not just a selection of tracks that somebody who knows nothing about me thinks I would like because several million other people bought it. Download a Gnutella client and you'll find stuff that hasn't been commercially available for decades, because someone somewhere dug out a disc (or digitized an LP or a 45) and put it online. Rare music that you can't buy because it's just not available. People with eclectic tastes (or who just prefer older or non-mainstream stuff) often have nowhere else to go, assuming they even know how.

Here's ScrewMaster's Plan for Resurrecting the Music Industry. If the studios really want to substantially reduce illicit downloading and make money hand-over-fist, here's what they do. Create a download service comparable to iTunes but with every track ever published available, and I mean all of them. If they can't find an album in their archives, offer a reward to anyone who has a copy they can "borrow" to put online. NO DRM, but support every compression format known to Man (MP3, Ogg, you name it.) Maybe make the customer pay an extra nickel a track for archival quality. Most people won't care, but those that want the extra quality and can afford the storage can obtain it. Hell, make 16-bit PCM (raw CD format) available as well, in case we want to burn original-quality CDs.

Develop client platforms for Windows, Linux and the Mac that seamlessly handle purchase and transfer of music to portable devices, and not just the iPod. Design your desktop application with a plugin-based interface architecture, and release the specs to the hardware vendors. Let them support their product lines for you ... believe me, they will. Make it possible for a portable device with an Internet connection to buy music directly and download to itself: that could be a "killer app" in its own right.

Keep prices at no more than a buck a track for new stuff (seems like a good impulse-buy price point) and maybe half a buck for older songs. Put the ancient recordings that aren't even copyrighted up for free: it will bring in people and they might buy other stuff. Offer quantity discounts to individuals who purchase lots of your music. Offer monthly plans like Netflix and Blockbuster (100 songs for $25/month!) Oh, and fire your lawyers ... you won't be needing them. Then sit back and watch the money just roll in.

People want music, and I believe the majority of us are more than willing to pay for it. We just want the studios to do what every other competitive business has to do: listen to us, their customers. That means giving us what we want (lower prices, better quality, and more variety) and in the process finding a way to turn a profit. Oh, and pay your suppliers: we'll respect you more (this "protecting the artists" thing is wearing a bit thin.) With the extra money you'll be making you can afford to. This is not rocket science folks, it's just a matter of good business. Something they know very little about, unfortunately.

Look, with their resources, this is something they could do very easily (hell, Apple already did it, so there's no innovation or vision required! They just need to improve upon Apple's model.) We have a bunch of old-guard corporate types unable to grasp that they are completely out of touch and not in the driver's seat anymore anyway. They could get it back. But they'll have to accommodate us to a much greater degree than they're willing to now.

Period.

Seems to me...

"...and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple"

Seems to me that downloading singles mainly benefits the ~CONSUMER~.. I'm far from being a big Apple fan, but I gotta say that the reason that iTunes is succeeding is that Apple's actually giving the customer what they want. How many times have you heard a song that you liked enough to actually go out and buy the CD, only to be disappointed by all of the other tracks?

I'm no conspiracy monger, but I've had the sneaking suspicion for some time that the music industry wants the artists to have one single song drive the sale of the entire CD, and may even go so far as to have the artists hold back on other potential singles for the next album.

If ALL songs were judged (in a commercial sense) on their individual merit, the music industry probably worries that their sales would go down (cuz nobody'd by the 'filler' crap). However, if the industry was less concerned with protecting their old business model, they'd notice that they'd make up on volume what they lost on bundling, and in the process would have a much more enthusiastic customer base. Apple has kind of figured that out, no?

Wow, I do sound like a conspiracy nut... hmm, maybe the tinfoil hats really will stop the black helicopters from transmitting signals to my brain. :)

Blaming Apple as a form of theatrics?

FTA (thanks BugMeNot for saving the login requirement):

From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. "Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did," David Geffen told me. "IPods made it easy for people to share music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it."

I'm not sure how the iPod makes it easy to share music, since you can't move music from one computer to another with an iPod. The only way I can see an iPod sharing music is with a Y-adapter on the headphone jack.

Furthermore, what business did Apple take from "the business"? Apple doesn't record music, it is a distributer.

I get the feeling that there is a bit of "blame Apple's success for our failure" theatrics going on here.

Turn that shit off!

It seems like everytime my wife and I turn on the radio and hear rock or metal from the last few years, it's all either whiny, pussy emo shit or non-melodic, screaming heavy metal. We're only in our mid-20s and we already "feel like old people" when it comes to music sometimes. But then, we realize something. Most of us who were teenagers in the mid-to-late 90s remember when rock and metal were more than emo and frat boy headbanging crap.

I know there is more than those types of music, but it's like the music industry ain't even trying to promote anything decent anymore.

Re:Turn that shit off!

We're only in our mid-20s and we already "feel like old people" when it comes to music sometimes. But then, we realize something. Most of us who were teenagers in the mid-to-late 90s remember when rock and metal were more than emo and frat boy headbanging crap.

Um, hate to break it to you, but being 42 and seeing music come and go, music has sucked since the early 80s. The mid-to-late 90s is *exactly* the same as today. Grunge wasn't emo and frat boy headbanging crap? And this isn't one of those "my generation was better", I even recognize that my generation's early 80s music sucked. Where are the Led Zeppelins? Where are the Pink Floyds? Hell, where are the Beatles? I recently listened to most the Beatles discography, and it's still unbelievable how different they were from anything before and anything since.

Where is the innovation?

Innovation is on the small labels

There is still good innovative music it just isn't on the radio or tee vee, go listen to Mr. Bungle, Andrew Bird, Calexico, Neko Case, The Arcade Fire, DJ Spooky, Howe Gelb, Spoon, Sufjan Stevens, and then get back to me about how "terrible" today's music

Albums vs singles

So it's Apples's fault that people prefer singles instead of albums? It can't be that Apple is just responding to consumer demand, could it? Actually, I'm one of the those who prefer buying singles because it's been a damn long time since I actually found a entire album to be good enough to buy it.

As for the alleged deterioration in music quality - what utter nonsense. As a music lover, you have access to more and better music than ever before, largely thanks to the Internet. No one is forcing you to listen to that mainstream crap, you know.

Actually, I think that there's a connection to be made here: as more and better music becomes available, people become more captious about the audio they listen to, because their time and money is obviously too limited. Instead of buying a couple of pretty good albums from a few artists, people buy a couple of great tracks from many more artists.

The article

(From the New York Times website: properly cited, and being used for criticism and discussion so if you want to complain that reposting it here is violating copyright, I call if Fair Use so go stuff yourself.)

From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin .t.html?pagewanted=print [nytimes.com]

September 2, 2007
The Music Man
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG

Rick Rubin is listening. A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating. He appears to be in a trance. His eyes are tightly closed and he is swaying back and forth to the beat, trying at once to hear what is right and wrong about the music. Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, gray beard, is curled into the corner of a tufted velvet couch in the library of a house he owns but where he no longer lives. This three-story 1923 Spanish villa steeped in music history -- Johnny Cash recorded in the basement studio; Jakob Dylan is recording a solo album there now -- is used by Rubin for meetings. And ever since May, when he officially became co-head of Columbia Records, Rubin has been having nearly constant meetings. Beginning in 1984, when he started Def Jam Recordings, until his more recent occupation as a career-transforming, chart-topping, Grammy Award-winning producer for dozens of artists, as diverse as the Dixie Chicks, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Neil Diamond, Rubin, who is 44, has never gone to an office of any kind. One of his conditions for taking the job at Sony, which owns Columbia, was that he wouldn't be required to have a desk or a phone in any of the corporate outposts. That wasn't a problem: Columbia didn't want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.

What that means, most of all, is that the company wants him to listen. It is Columbia's belief that Rubin will hear the answers in the music -- that he will find the solution to its ever-increasing woes. The mighty music business is in free fall -- it has lost control of radio; retail outlets like Tower Records have shut down; MTV rarely broadcasts music videos; and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple. "The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content," David Geffen, the legendary music mogul, told me recently. "Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it's no longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music. And there's no clear answer about how to fix that problem. But I still believe that the top priority at any record company has to be coming up with great music. And for that reason, Sony was very smart to hire Rick."

Though Rubin maintains that his intention is simply to hear music with the fresh ears of a true fan, he has built his reputation on the simultaneously mystical and entirely decisive way he listens to a song. As the Gossip, which is fronted by a large, raucous woman named Beth Ditto, shouts to a stop, Rubin opens his eyes and nods yes. This is the first new band signed to Columbia that he has been enthralled by, but he is not yet sure how to organize the Gossip's future. "Let's hear something else," Rubin says to Kevin Kusatsu, who would, at any other record company, be called an A & R executive. (Traditionally, A & R executives spot, woo, recruit and oversee the talent of a record company.) "We don't have any titles at the new Columbia," Rubin explains, as Kusatsu, the first person Rubin hired, slips a disc out of its sleeve. "I don't want to create a new hierarchy to replace the old hierarchy."

Rubin, wearing his usual uniform of loose khaki pants and billowing white T-shirt, his sunglasses in his pocket, his feet bare, fingers a string of lapis lazuli Buddhist prayer beads, believed to bring wisdom to the wearer. Since Rubin's beard and hair nearly cover his face, his

Substance and talent over fluff? (tho I doubt it)

Ever since the record industry began casting aside the talented musicians in favor of "singer-dancers," they have had total disdain for the public. They have known for years that they can take the most untalented act, wrap it up in a pretty package and saturation-market it, and the mongrel public will stupidly buy it. Ask yourself: "what instruments do they play?" and "do they write their own music?" Then go to your CD shelf and start throwing out the embarrassing evidence before anyone sees it. Look for anything that is eyecandy + microphone.

Are they now suffering from the cruelties of the market? No. They are finally paying for their sins.

Not worse, just less relevent

I don't think there was a golden age of music, and I do not believe the stuff we have now is objectively any worse. And I don't think some old dude listening to music and determining the next big thing is the solution. In fact it is the problem. The solution is to diversify.

I recall the time when startup network and cable channels came on the air. The old network channels were decimated because the new channels could do more innovative programming as they were not aiming for huge shares. So Fox had Married with Children and 21 Jump Street, and NBC responded with the throw back conservative Seinfied, which kept the innovators at bay for a while, but now NBC is a the bottom of the heap. And they will stay that way because while they are willing to sell shows, they are not willing to do so at decent terms. Networks now choose programming to minimize cost rather than really compete.

So there is quite a bit of good music, and my music budget is still respectable. The only issue I see is that the major labels are increasingly concentrating their marketing on a few big acts, therefore making it seem like there is little music available for the audiences with uncommon tastes. Cheaper CD packaging, online sales, and the like should let them market even greater number of acts, but instead they are retreating behind obsolete models, i.e. old guys listening to music and deciding what the young people want. Of course perhaps it is also unrealistic expectations in which even the most boring acts expect million dollar deals, and the studios still milk that money for all it is worth, rather than update the deals for modern needs.

This does not even account for the truly sad cases, like the owners of the Beatles catalog, who still believe it has some long term private sales value in the current market. U@ was brilliant to sell his songs on an iPod, and the more has bin the group the more sense such a move makes, especially when the back catalog is large. There is still money to be made for licensing for public performance, and of course they are pissing that money away by killing net radio, but very few people are going to buy the same song 5 times, as was the case in the past.

The reason for lack of content

Popular music is informed by youth culture, and thus reflects the hopes and fears of the youth of any particular era. The 60s was about Vietnam (not because of any real concern about the war, but because teenagers faced the possibility of being drafted). The 80s was about overt avarice and consumerism.

But what about the 90s and the 2000s? What were they about? I, and most people I've talked to about this, draw a blank. Some people think modern emo bands were influenced by the Columbine massacre and its aftermath, but that is at best a minor facet of popular music.

The thing that characterised our societies after 1989 was a sense of triumphalism. The cold war was over, the world had unanimously chosen the best way of running things (sic), and it was the end of history. Essentially, we were told all the battles had been won and there were no more challenges left for our generation to take up. People say 9/11 'changed everything' but in reality it changed very little, for the most part western society still smugly grinds away as it did before. The daily life of young people is largely unaffected.

So the prevailing feeling is apathy. You go to school, go to college, have kids and die. There's nothing else to do. The music reflects this.

Re:

So the prevailing feeling is apathy. You go to school, go to college, have kids and die. There's nothing else to do. The music reflects this.

For my particular slice of the demographic the prevailing feeling is bitterness that the generation that grew up in

New Music?

FTFA: "A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating."

Guess what? Gossip [wikipedia.org] has been around since 1999, that isn't exactly new. Somehow people have gotten an attitude that good music will find them and don't bother trying to find it themselves, so when they turn on their radio and nothing but crap comes out they start blaming the music industry for not making anything good anymore. If you think all music sucks today its your own damn fault for limiting your definition of music to crap played on the radio, go do some leg work and see what else is out there.

"the quality of todays music is the problem"

No shit, Sherlock! For the past 10-15 years, the record companies have been concentrating on quick-hit novelty hits such as the Flaming Lips (that horrible, amateurish "Peaches" song and the like). Virtuosity in musical performances and songwriting has been virtually eliminated, which is a major factor in getting people to connect emotionally to music. The huge success of Nirvana and the grunge movement, with the punk movement behind that, provided the impetus for the record companies to eschew with expensive talented musicians and take on any crap acts who can pump out a quick hit for the bean counters. Cheap, disposable music concocted of samples and computer-generated blips and bloops, with minimal human interaction with the actual creation of the music.

Heavy metal has lost any sort of melodic element and is now just a brutal assault with guitar-like sounds which for all we know might have been entirely generated by sampler (as Marylin Manson did with his Beautiful People song) and with not guitar virtuosity in sight (please somebody give me a challenging guitar solo - PLEASE!!).

Add to all of this the current propensity of the record companies to compress the music to the point of unlistenability and you have a recipe for disaster. Heart came out with a really good album a couple of years ago which was a real return to their awesome roots but was torpedoed by the Ultramaximiser applied to the final product. I couldn't listen for more than a few seconds before my ears started bleeding. You know, it's interesting that when I mention that I come on here and mention the superiority of analog sound on vinyl records the first thing people point out is the supposed greater dynamic range of digital. Yet if that is indeed the case, you'd be hard pressed to prove that with most modern pop recordings.

Cheers

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No shit, Sherlock! For the past 10-15 years, the record companies have been concentrating on quick-hit novelty hits such as the Flaming Lips (that horrible, amateurish "Peaches" song and the like). Virtuosity in musical performances and songwriting has bee

the simple fact is:

Fewer and fewer people are interested in buying CDs. LOTS of GREAT music is being made, every day. It can be hard to find, but that doesn't mean it's not there - it just means that it's hard to find.

I asked my students - 153 in a lecture class - "How many of you bought a new CD in the past 6 months? Raise you hands." About 20 raised their hands. I then asked "How many of you have downloaded a new song either through legitimate means with iTunes and other companies, or illegitimately, via P2P? Raise you hands." Almost everyone raised their hand.

The fact is: the CD is dead. It's dying because CDs are long format and inherited the interest in long playing music from the LP and 78rpm "Albums". People today have the attention span of gnats, and are too distracted by the gazillion different toys to just sit and listen to music. When I was young, we'd roll a fatty or three and put on some Yes or Genesis or Tangerine Dream and space for hours while we glotzed the gatefold cover art. We didn't have Xbox, playstations, etc, or cellphones or IM or texting or internet porn or whatever. Our options were comparatively limited - TV, records, radio. And these media have their own requirements as passive "sit back" media. Now, with active "sit forward" media of Xbox etc. and the jump up and down of Wii, and the focus of IM and texting, there is really no "pay off" to sitting around listening to music. Actually listening to music seems almost like a meditation practice to contemporary cultural "intake".

The CD's duration was determined by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - one can sit through the entire symphony uninterrupted. With LPs you had to get up every 18 - 20 minutes to flip the record. CDs removed that hassle, and a CD became a musical journey. Constructing such a journey and doing it convincingly is hard work, which is why so many CDs had "filler". Sustaining interest in a listener for 1.3 hours is tough work.

The advent of the MP3 removed the need for the "extended hypnosis" and brought back the spirit of the 78RPM and the 45RPM record - "singles". If you're a talentless hack, and so many musicians are - talentless hacks give a ground to judge how we know someone isn't a talentless hack - then you probably don't have the chops or the depth of a song list to fill a CD. So, it only makes sense to put what you've got going on an MP3 network, and when you hve enough of your crap for a CD, do that too. But the pressure to cook up a CD's worth of tunage FIRST is gone.

This doesn't help matters for the gangsters in the RIAA.

They had a chance to put a meter on P2P with the original Napster. We (at Napster) had developed a billing client, and suggested a very very low price for P2P'd songs - where a DL would be dinged off a client's account value. We tested it - and IT WORKED. It was kind of clunky at first, and we needed to work on optimisations, but it really worked, and it was pretty damn slick. The RIAA et al told us "No". And now those idiots are reaping the whirlwind for their greed and stupidity, and we are all the worse for it.

RS

This article is just more BS..

Want proof? Listen to what this guy's BOSS has to say!

Steve Barnett is nervous about the subscription model. "Smart people have told me if the subscription model is not done correctly," he said, "it will be the final nail in our coffin. I've heard both sides of the argument, and I'm not convinced it's the solution to our problems. Rick wants to be a hero immediately. In his mind, you flick a switch and it's done. It doesn't work like that."

Uhm..HELLO???!!! You've had TEN YEARS to come up with a subscription model! That sure doesn't sound like "flicking a switch" to me!

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue. This is unprecedented -- even successful artists like the Dixie Chicks make a large percentage of their income from concerts and T-shirts. "Artists should never give that money up," Natalie Maines told me. "The companies are all scrambling because of the Internet, and they will screw the artist to meet their bottom line. I can't imagine Rick will go along with that."

YEAH! THAT'S IT! Screw the artists even more! That's a GREAT business model!!

This is just more of the same one crap thay've been doing all along...

Shocking how everyone missed this

I know, no one at slashdot RTFA. Yet, by not reading it, everyone skipped this little gem, which is the tell tale of what is in the mind of the recording industry execs and how they perceive the music business:

Rick Rubin, the "outsider", thinks like this:

Rubin has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere.blockquote>

That is a really nice, level-headed idea. Rick Rubin acknowledges the obvious fact that the label's present business model is obsolete and if they do not update it back to sanity, the labels will go the way of the buggy whip industry. Yet, his vision of a new business model is based not on oppressing the consumer into compliance. It is based on offering the consumer a service which not only the consumer wants but also its in fact better than everything that ever existed and in the process cutting operational costs. That is,by definition, a good business model to upgrade to.

On the other hand, look at what the established music execs believe is the music industry's salvation

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue.

What the fuck does a music distributor, a service that consists of distributing music, has to do with the artist's other lines of revenue? What the fuck entitles a record exec to get a cut of an artist's each and every performances? And more importantly, how exactly does this save the impeding disaster where the record labels are directed to? The only thing this accomplishes is screwing the artist even more and, more importantly, once again makes the case that ALL ARTISTS are better off not involving themselves with any record label whatsoever.

This is the reason why the record industry is becoming irrelevant and obsolete. Their execs aren't capable of thinking for themselves and understanding their market. The only thing that they learnt and ever know is that they earn their money by screwing the artist and if they aren't making more money then they aren't screwing the artist or the market enough.

Missing the point of the Apple profits comment...

I think a number of people are missing the point on the Apple profits comment from the article. In a market where singles and single songs sell well but albums sell poorly, the music companies make less money but Apple continues to sell iPods, because their store sells singles and their singles play on the iPod. If people start gravitating back to the album, that is, if albums come with enough good songs on them that people want to buy more than 2 or 3 from the same album, fewer people will be buying the singles from the iTunes music store and they'll just be buying the CDs. And while people can rip songs from CDs to the iPod, it takes effort and a CD is easy to take with you and pop in and out of any old CD player.

The death of the music industry is, then, good for Apple so long as it doesn't go too far and kill off all the content.

Re:blaming the quality of the music...

Yes, the reason that Britney Spears sucks is that she just doesn't have enough $200,000 SUVs. A few more Hummers and her music would really improve I think.

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I very much doubt that, people who make good music generally enjoy making good music, generally, they do it as something they love. I think its far more likely that the reason the quality is declining is because now it's easy for crap music to sell, so no