From the Rocky Mountain News
Despite the year-end noise, music industry fading away
This is the time of year when the music industry pats itself on the back.
Journalists, radio stations and others are getting pressure from labels to pick their best albums of the year. The Grammy nominations are coming up soon. Christmas gives the music industry the best sales of the year.
It makes for a good but temporary buzz. This year, many in the industry know the party is just about to end. A high-powered player in the music industry for the past quarter century recently remarked privately that “the music industry is over.”
Not completely over, but certainly over as we know it.
People are going to still listen to music and go to concerts, but everyone has finally realized – way too late – that the old way really isn’t going to work, no matter how hard the industry tries to resist change.
For many fans, the response to this is “Duh.” Downloading and burning CDs has been a way of life for a generation of fans. And with sales slumping, it’s finally dawned on the industry that no amount of bullying or bluster is going to make it go away. The old world is gone.
The industry has tried to ignore downloading. Then it tried to quash downloading. This year it tried copy-protection, which doesn’t work. In advance releases sent to the media and radio stations, it has tried putting digital watermarks on the CDs to keep them from leaking on the Internet. Others have gone more low-tech; Epitaph Records sent out the new Nick Cave CD with a letter imploring the recipient to please not leak the disc.
It just can’t go on; it has finally reached critical mass. As noted here last week, concert ticket prices are starting to come back to Earth.
But this year it has finally dawned on the industry as a whole that the ship is sinking, and it’s not about to stop.
The party already has ended for some; while the problems and layoffs of Qwest and United Airlines have dominated headlines, the record industry has quietly been “restructuring” even more – that is, laying off people, dropping artists, slashing rosters.
Downloading and CD burning has won. High ticket and CD prices have lost. By trying to maximize profits, the industry killed them.
CD releases have become like bad movies, the kind where they don’t let reviewers see them in the hopes of getting at least one week’s worth of good business. For CDs, the hit single pushed on radio becomes the equivalent of the movie trailer and commercials, revealing just the best part of the product. By the time you shell out your money, you’ve been had. The industry just hopes for a big hit in first-week sales before word-of-mouth reveals the disc to be a dog.
Oddly enough, Prince – widely ridiculed for turning his back on the record industry years ago – ends up looking damn near clairvoyant. He established an online music club; he’s been releasing his own music and keeping the profits. Those who mocked him for breaking away a few years back would now kill to be in his position.
Radio programming has become overly formatted. Talk shows and morning news shows have become the new radio – the new place for performers to let the public know they have new music out there. Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Delbert McClinton, Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel and more. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler is appearing on the Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire. Led Zeppelin, The Clash and The Who get high-profile audio exposure through automobile ads. The classic-rock programming inside Mervyn’s and Michael’s stores is better than what you hear on the radio.
Clear Channel has quietly put its concert division on the market, looking for interested buyers. The timing clearly isn’t good. Word is out that Concerts West made another low-ball bid for House of Blues Concerts, which turned it down.
DVD audio and Surround Sound mixes are keeping audiophiles interested in the music scene, but the numbers are still tiny. They’re small even for conventional music DVDs. Paul McCartney’s Back in the U.S. DVD set a record for first-week sales of a music DVD – with sales of 61,000. As noted here a few weeks back, Spiderman sold 11 million its first week out.
This is where someone is supposed to come up with a brilliant solution. But there isn’t one. All there is is an ugly winter lying ahead, and the certainty that by next year at this time, everything will be different. No one knows just how different.
