Music industry watch

The demise of the music industry is rapidly accelerating

I've been waiting for ten years for this time in history to come and now things are moving soo fast its hard to keep track of it all. DRM is gasping its last breaths, artists like Radiohead release their own albums without the help of labels, Prince releases his album in a newspaper, Trent Reznor and Madonna dump their labels and you will soon be able to buy all music in DRM-free mp3. Awesome!

Seriously, this is where the music industry should've been 10 years ago when mp3 first appeared on the scene. But what did they do? Nothing at first. Then came Napster to prove that there was demand and the labels balked and sued Napster. Never did they open their own store to meet the market demand.

What happened in light of this? People figured out the tools to rip their own CDs. The learned what it meant to enjoy music in the digital age, even though many rips were crap and early mp3s sounded pretty awful. The metadata was a total mess, but with a little effort you could be in control of your own music collection. In other words, they lost the consumer. Forever.

The music industry missed the opportunity to sell the old catalog once again. People have been willing to buy CDs, even though they bought the same cassette tape years earlier and the labels failed to capitalize on that. Instead, the balked and started suing their customers.

In the meantime the value of recorded music drops to near zero as BitTorrent makes the experience to pirate better than the experience of going to the store to buy the media. (This is especially true with movies today where you do not have to sit through endless trailers that you can't skip. BitTorrent the movie and you get no heavy handed trailers and only the movies you wanted. For free.)

By focusing on their insipid desire to self-destruct, they neglect the artist. Artists have been ripped off for years and when the consumers/fans bail on the labels, the artist are stuck holding the bag. So, what's the logical conclusion? The artists revolt and dump their contracts as soon as they can.

The blindness of the label caused them to lose the consumer and the artist. Gone. If you have neither, you have no business left. Expect massive lay-offs or total collapse at the labels in the next few years.

Finally -- I've been waiting for 10 years.

The new music industry is here. CD Baby, IODA, iTunes, Amazon already provide lots of means for artists to get their music out to fans. After being bitter about the utter lack of progress for so many years, I'm enjoying sitting back and watching this whole scene unfold. Finally.

Posted by Mayhem at October 11, 2007 02:10 PM