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Is There Big Trouble Brewing?

It seems there is some trouble in the recorded music industry. Sales of recorded music has fallen 5% in 2001, 9% in 2002 and the global forecast is for a drop of 12-14% in the year 2003.

Regulators, especially in Europe have blocked mergers between companies including Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI and BMG, and seem to be holding firm on their positions. The music industry feels that consolidation may be the answer to many of their woes. I don't know if I can agree with this.

Do you remember when you purchased an album that contained 12 or so songs? Usually 70-80% of those songs were great recordings with quality content. Now if you find 10-20% of the recorded content to be of any quality you are doing well.

The recorded music industry likes to blame piracy and the world economy to be the culprit. Could it be the lack of quality in conjunction with out of proportion pricing? Many companies feel that format changes may provide the diversity for multiple income streams. Is that why they continue to introduce recycled music in the new formats?

I myself feel a great resentment towards the music industry. I am sick and tired of paying high prices for low quality and I'm sure many of you feel the same way. If the industry would like to see the new formats have a higher acceptance factor, don't you think they would do so by releasing new material on the newer formats?

I don't get it. Is there anyone out there willing to embrace the new formats so that they may listen to recordings that they have been listening to for the last 30 years? Will the industry ever wake up and realize that the consumer is disgusted with the bill of goods we are presently being sold?
128x128buscis2
seandtaylor99
1,262 posts
 
there certainly is trouble brewing. In my opinion we need record libraries and download technology to allow us to "try before we buy" and to explore more music without having to pay up front for music that often does not live up to the hype.

The good news is that there is a tremendous back catalogue to explore, and that a good redbook / vinyl system can be extremely enjoyable to listen to.

The other good news is that technology may allow more artists to bypass record companies altogether and market direct via the web. So overall I'm not too worried.

My final point is that ultimately the quality of a service industry is linked to the quality of its consumers. If consumers are buying video games at the expense of CDs, or buying loads of britney or gangsta rap then at the end of the day they've only got themselves to blame for the fall of the music industry. Everyday we vote with our wallets.
hueske
124 posts
 
Most of those statistics are RIAA dervied (read: junk).

A great deal of the decline of CD sales has come from the disappearance of the single. In fact, the amount of singles that AREN'T being produced (compared to past years) almost completely makes up for the "falling" CD sales.

RIAA lies
buscis2's avatar
buscis2 OP
468 posts
 
Good points Sean
buscis2's avatar
buscis2 OP
468 posts
 
I beg to differ Hueske. The information sources I utilized before posting this thread was totally devoid of any information provided by RIAA. Information sources such as Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Investors Business Daily, The World Economist, etc. probably do not have any vested interests in RIAA so I would suspect less of a bias/slant towards the industry.

I am sure that "newsgathering" by the aforementioned would contain some information from RIAA, but I would not be sure that the RIAA input would be all that they would use.

To the contrary, I noticed a "you made your bed, now lay in it" slant, if any.
seandtaylor99
1,262 posts
 
Thanks Buscis. The first company that I worked at out of college had 5000 employees on a single campus, and there were many active hobby groups .. pretty much like college with a salary ! Anyway, one of the groups ran a vinyl library (CD's were just starting to take off) and you could rent an LP for about 50 cents a week. I started working for the club cataloguing albums ...we had over 7000 albums !!!! I'm sure the RIAA executives would have tried to close us down had they known that people could rent good condition LPs and record them to cassettes. I recorded hundreds of albums to cassettes. In the execs. short sightedness they would probably villify me for killing record sales.

But here's the thing ... for every album that I ended up liking I probably went out and bought 2 new LPs. Those that I didn't like stayed on the cassette. If I really like an album then I've just got to have the original, and the club got me into many many new artists who I would never have otherwise have heard about, since they don't attract any airplay in the UK (where I was at the time). I must have bought over a hundred albums directly as a result of that library.

Hence my suggestion that lending libraries (or virtual libraries, if we use internet downloading) could be the saviour of the industry, not its demise. I don't condone companies like napster (jumped up techies stealing intellectual property), but at the same time how slow can the RIAA execs be ? Look at apple's new service ... I'm sure it's going to be a screaming success.
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