I completely agree. You would figure these huge corporations would have some remotely intelligent people working for them. How difficult is it for them to see that they need to change the way they do business. As far as I can tell, the independant scene is doing a better job at finding quality artists. The record companies want total control, until they are willing to give up some control, find better talent, and stop attacking their customers I think we will see U.S. album sales decline by double next year.

“Even though I am in the technical industry, I can honestly say that half my friends probably don’t even know what a file sharing network is.”

LIES LIES LIES Either you’re completely full of sh*t or you only have two friends because about 3/4 of all internet bandwith used on planet earth is being used for file sharing.

I agree as well… Bands just suck these days! They seem to be writing more of a business plan than actual music. Only a few good bands out there still making that real old music. I have file shared a little, but to support my fav bands…which is really all i listen too. I either buy the cd, or get it from itunes. Radiohead did a great thing, and they got more money. The BUSINESS is taking money away from the artist, not the consumer. We dont have to buy music, we do cause we want peace, joy, and all that good stuff. We want to enjoy someones hard work!

You also have to figure in the cost of CD’s, which any savvy consumer realizes is WAY too high, considering the cost of reproduction.

Consumers did not demand digital technology - it was foisted upon us, and we’ve come to accept it. We’ve also come to recognize certain advantages that digital technology provides, including the fact that media is CHEAP, and perfect copies are now easy to make.

In a perfect world, the recording industry would share the advantages of digital technology with the consumer (ie, CD’s should be *very* cheap to buy). Instead, the industry has decided to hog all of the advantages for itself (cheap reproduction, digital distribution with zero overhead), and force consumers to pay the same price, if not higher prices, for albums.

If Ford ever figures out a way to perfectly reproduce a car digitally in a matter of seconds, then it would only be right for the price of Fords to drop drastically. Likewise, the recording industry needs to realize that the cost of an album should be a fraction of what it is now.

“LIES LIES LIES Either you’re completely full of sh*t or you only have two friends”

Well, most of my friends don’t work with computers at home. The female friends I have (roughly half) don’t really deal with computers too often.

“about 3/4 of all internet bandwith used on planet earth is being used for file sharing.”

3/4? I’d like to see where you get your numbers from on that. I thought it was Spam that took up the most bandwidth.

I have been a producer for major labels for many years and had the priviledge of producing and signing some of the worlds finest talent…Tracy Chapman, Joe Jackson etc. While I agree that there is a lot of manufactured music out there today which is cold and has little soul, the shift to finding new music on the internet has done away with the “gatekeeper” mentality that in order to get signed and/or promoted you must fit into a labels view of a “commercial” sound. The old system led to a huge amount of music being created by new artists in a “stiff” and “unnatural” manner in order to get signed. Today that’s not necessary…virtually anyone can get their music up on the Internet and heard by the world. The majors have lost traction and power is being passed back to the artist. Developed properly, we can look forward to an avalanche of new,creative and meaningful music because it will be unhomogenized and unfiltered by a label. That’s the good news…the bad news IS that in order to stand out from the massive number of tracks uploaded daily to the net, ithat music MUST be developed properly. Still for the first time in decades the opportunity exists!! It’s going to be exicitng. Visit me at musicproshollywood.com for more….

My only response to this is…word.

I believe the internet bandwidth is still mostly dominated by adult material

I don’t agree at all. Some of these problems have been around before the whole mp3 age. Cost of an album and radio have been around for such a long time now; it’s not a new problem. Different radio stations play all of the same songs repeatedly, and I think CD’s help you avoid the constant replay. The RIAA isn’t p*ssed that you put your music on the computer; it’s what can happen to the music after it is on your computer. A very talented artist on an independent label that I know (Andy McKee) has had well over 9,000 of his albums downloaded from just one torrent site. And he is a musician that is living off of his album sales, and all of those albums that were illegally downloaded could give him a stronger income. I think this is terrible for the independent label. But for the major label that’s a different story. Majors have pretty terrible music these days, so people are more drawn to independent artists. Not since the days of Motown has independent record labels seen such public interest (for lack of a better saying). They are finding much more talented artists than major labels.
Major labels treat their artist like dirt. The artists make very little money off of album sales. The label makes such an absurd profit from album sales. The artist makes very little. The label can make millions were the artists makes around $300,000 to split between everyone (including the manager, producer, and the rest of the people that helped with recording the album). The major label is very greedy. They are the ones that the public hears making a big deal about file sharing. Not the independent labels. They are the ones that really get hurt by file sharing. The public usually doesn’t know about them. They don’t have artist going platinum. They have very small profit margins. They lose a lot of money from file sharing. The majors lose money too, but they can afford it.
I think I got a little off topic here, but all of the artists you care about that are on an independent label making music that you like are trying to live off of album sales. They don’t have a marketing department like majors do to get noticed. So when you download their album, you are taking money away from their families. So I think labels have a right to complain about this problem.

One other thought. Guilt. The industry tries to guilt people out of file sharing (”You wouldn’t steal a car… You wouldn’t steal a purse…”) How guilty do most of us feel when we see “artists” with over-the-top bling, cars, houses, diamond studded dog collars, and MULTI MILLION dollar contracts that record companies willingly pay. Are they telling me that these folks will suffer from not receiving my .99¢ ?

I don’t think the standard of music today had much to do with the trouble the record industry is allegedly in. Downloads mean you can songs from any time period, rather than being restricted by what is in the shops. This means old songs can actually climb up the charts, as was seen in the UK top 40 this Christmas.

Instead of bleating on about illegal downloads, the record industry should try sorting the legal downloading process. Many sites are absolutely useless. I’ve paid for a song and downloaded it only for it to be a completely different song off the album, or not been able to download at all because of my system, despite having already paid.

iTunes is the nearest do get it right, but that means that if you don’t have an iPod you’re stuffed. I’m told you can now download different file formats for slightly more, but when I looked I couldn’t find them, and I don’t think most people would try that hard. More needs to be done to stop iTunes monopolising music downloads.

If anything is killing music it is DRM, which was implemented by the record industry itself. It masquerades and as a universal format, but it is not. I tried putting songs on a Creative Zen Stone (hardly an unknown brand) from a site supporting DRM and they wouldn’t work. I had to pay for a converter, which makes the process of actually putting music on to my MP3 player extremely time consuming, and some times the files are damaged during the file conversion.

DRM is simply to stop you possibly doing anything illegal with a song once you have already legally bought it. I can’t download on my computer downstairs then move the song to my laptop as it won’t play without the licence I got when I downloaded it. it’s like saying you can only play a CD on one CD player, which is frankly pretty hysterical.

One universal file format needs to be agreed upon, with the needs of the public, not the music industry in mind. Manufacturers should only be allowed to make devices that support this format, and that includes iTunes.

The record industry is currently destroying itself by not adapting to downloading sufficiently, and they are fools to not see that.

Oh man don’t get me started.
Great article BTW - you can tell by the number (and quality) of the comments.
Everyone makes great points ( i love the one about artists and their bling and multi million dollar contracts…will they really miss my 99cents?) except for Dr. Phil. What an idiot! 3/4 of all bandwidth on the planet is being used for file sharing? I’d like to see the source material on that one! Where did you pull those figures from? Oh…out of your a** I see.
Did you know that 89% of all stats are made up on the spot.
I agree with most that the RIAA is the one to blame, as they haven’t moved with the times. Still offering the same ol’ sh*t - when we have DVD, HD, software, games, XBOX, Wii, etc etc etc competing for our entertainment dollars. Innovate or deteriorate - up to them really.

Very good point of view!

I agree with several points in the article (RIAA whining, MTV’s suckage, competition from the gadget/game industry), but the point at which the poster says that there is no one making great music in their garage anymore is COMPLETELY UNTRUE.

There are more people making music right now than there have ever been due to the availability of affordable instruments/software/digital recorders/etc. Though the vast majority of it is unlistenable, there is lots of it that is fabulous. Better still, every single person can cater their listening precisely to their tastes without too much trouble. Last.fm is the perfect example of a service that will allow you, without much work at all, to listen to near-infinite amounts of music that you love.

My overall beef with this post is this: who cares anymore about the recording industry? Musicians will make money from :gasp: working (playing shows). Humans will never let music go away. We love it too much. As a career musician, I’m roasting marshmallows on the burning embers of the “music industry.”

I honestly don’t know what to think. To me, as long as I get the song I want, I don’t care where the hell it comes from.

Excellent points. I’ve never heard the “we have cooler things to buy” argument before. Well played!

It’s not so much that all bands suck, its just that the manufactured bands with their sucky music are advertised so much more that they basically get all the attention.

Mass media like MTV is full of crap that they get money for playing and the whole channel has been just a big joke in the 21st century.

Thank god for file sharing networks, they are the only way good music still travels from person to person and it IS very popular.

Musicians have to realize the only way to make money nowadays is to make genuinely good music and not to rely on making 1 song that gets played on all stations 20 times a day and loading the album full of other similar crap. Also what guarantees some profit is live performances and touring.

Excellent Article! I have known that a few of these were true for quite some time, but you brought a couple of new points in to the picture. Too bad the RIAA won’t even read this and then get it through it’s head. I really hope the RIAA goes bankrupt, it is time for a new system.

@Dr. Phil

“LIES LIES LIES Either you’re completely full of sh*t or you only have two friends because about 3/4 of all internet bandwith used on planet earth is being used for file sharing.”

You sir are the idiot. While you make a valid point (3/4 is a real stretch, but I will play along), file sharing umbrellas more than P2P illegal traffic. This includes downloading ISOs over bittorrent of LEGAL data, your grandmother right clicking a pretty picture on the web and selecting “Save File As…” Hell, with the right argument SPAM is file sharing, it is just unwanted file sharing.

“an enemy of my enemy must be a friend” by i have no idea anyways, me and my friends all have this wonderful creed if you will, if we really like the band then we’ll buy a t-shirt because the artist gets more money that way. also i personally believe that we should do a simple boycott of the riaa, but thats just me.

Excellent article by the way. It made a lot of great points. I believe the recording industry (read RIAA) is hemorrhaging money mainly because of it’s irresponsible business practices. When we figure in the outrageous salaries of the execs, the producers, all of the middle men, and then throw in the ridiculous advances that some of these artists receive, we can see plainly where the money is disappearing to.

When the cost of production has plummeted, and the content itself has severely degraded while being forced to fit in a cookie cutter form in order to appeal to a demographic, we find that the music industry has streamlined the process so much that they see it not as the art form it actually is, but instead as merely something to prefabricate and sell as a product.

As time marches forward, we will see more independent bands becoming Internet stars versus whatever tripe the established recording industry is trying to sell us.

Essentially what P2P is doing to the music industry is forcing it to lower it’s demands and accept a reasonable income for the work involved. In doing this, we will see that the mega-millions that execs command, and the millions that producers demand, and the middle men, will be cut bare. Either cut out of the equation completely, or their salaries and control over the end results will greatly diminish in order to attract new acts who could better be served producing themselves and handling their own distribution.

For possibly the first time in recording history, the artists have the ability as well as every single tool required to professionally create, package, market, and distribute their works.

Technology has stolen Fire from Mt. Olympia and given it to the mortals.

You are so totally wrong I feel physically unwell. Among many many others (more than ever before), *I* am the kid in the garage. You need to look harder, my friend. You can start with switching off the radio.

I suppose it has less to do with “why” album sales are falling, and more to do with “why I don’t care,” but for years, the American recording industry has been foisting upon young people rock and rap albums reflecting an ever-increasing absorption in unrestrained hedonism. One commentator has said that “[w]hat America increasingly produces and distributes is now propoganda for every perversion and obscenity imaginable.” Someone else opined that “[w]e are living through a cultural collapse, and major corporations are presiding over that collapse and grabbing every [dollar] they can on the way down.”

The recording industry has significantly contributed to the erosion of the disciplinary tools of morality, shame, and stigma. With all that they have done to advertise and promote pornography, violence, nihilism, rage, the turn away from God, the unrestrained self, the hatred of authority, the “gangsta” lifestyle, and outright criminality, it’s tough to feel sorry for the record lables who are taking issue with such behavior only NOW that they can’t monetarily profit from it.

The record industry is only reaping what it has sown.

@ the kid in the garage

You need to get better so I don’t have to turn off my radio, you as an artist need to appeal to the mass, not have the mass do what you want them to do.

The thing is, these record companies need to realize that the CD isn’t going to last forever, the world has changed, why haven’t they changed? Because they’ve been run by the same people for decades. They need to realize that moving to the internet, selling each song at a buck a pop, is the best move to make right now, instead of relying on failing album sales (which you have to admit, are partly due to file sharing and its easy accessibility).