Destruction of the Record Business
Record sales are down, fewer CDs are going platinum and more artists are finding other ways to make streams of revenue for themselves, whether its selling clothing lines, sneakers, crunk juice, or vitamin water. The good ole days of selling 7 million albums looks like a thing of the past. Most music insiders blame it all downloading and the Internet. I have a totally different take on it. I own satellite radio in my car which puts over 184 channels at my disposal at any given moment. Plus I have my local radio stations. I subscribe to an expanded cable TV line up which gives me MTV, MTV2, MTV jams, MTV hits, VH1, VH1 soul, BET, BET Hip Hop, BET Jazz and few other small music channels. So I can watch music videos anytime I want. I also have cable provided Internet service which I listen to various Internet radio channels and I stream music video at yahoo’s launch website. What I am getting at here, with all the access to music I have, why in the world would I need to buy any CDs. I can listen to music at anytime I want. I believe this is causing music sales to be in the toilet, there is too much of an abundance of free musical vehicles out there to prompt anyone to buy music. Let me make one thing clear, ever since the record industry moved from vinyl records to CDs it has basically shot itself in the foot. What the music industry had with vinyl was a medium that needed its own direct device to play it, a record player. No one could burn their own vinyl or make their 45 (45 inch single). You did not have the problem of piracy that you have now with music on compact disc. It was very hard and expensive for someone to bootleg records, now anyone with a CD burner make copies for friends, thus cutting into the sales of the record company and its artists. The only thing that can save the industry is for it to go back to its own dedicated device that is hard to copy even if that means the death of the CD. Selling downloads is a tricky business for record companies. Since you don not have an actual hard copy product like a CD or a 12 inch vinyl single, it is hard to inventory MP3 downloads. If I own a company like ITunes, I could say there were 3 million downloads of songs, when actually it may have been 5 million downloads. In the old way of doing business, if I shipped 5 million records and/or CDs I can easily inventory that, but not with a download that is stored on some computer server. The industry would never actually know if the mp3 retailers are being honest. The solution is for record companies to change the distribution loop. If you are going to offer downloads, labels should create their own website for multimedia music and video distribution. I should be able to go right to 50 cents website or Interscopes site and download the MP3 for a fee. They could also offer additional media, video, and music for membership fees or subscription fee for extra content not available to other people. I do not think the music industry is going to recover if it continues on the same trail. Something drastic has to happen. One of the biggest problems is an easy solution. You have to put out a quality product. Too many times labels are cloning acts that look and sound too similar to other acts, which I guess is good if you are cloning Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye artists that are going to end up in somebodys hall of fame. But if you have to have butt naked girls in the videos, every video, and 6 cameos from other artists and RKelly on the hook to sell a CD you are probably doomed to begin with. You need quality music and quality songs. The problem is nobody in an A&R department seems to know the trick these days. They keep looking to sign what worked for the last hot label and most artists are biting of the last hit record they liked, so you end up with a never ending cycle of mediocrity. Someone must break the mold and do something different, something that challenges the minds of the youth but also engages them with a certain flair and style. If that happens and the industry learns how to harness the power of the internet maybe the music industry might just stand a chance.
About the Author: CDinser
