In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.
At least don’t tell me anymore that file-sharing leads to more music purchases — an argument that
never held any water. But let’s deal with the new world. Despite keeping innumerable lawyers in silk undergarments with its sue-every-sophomore litigation approach, the music industry will never put this genie back in the bottle and return us to a time when you had to buy a whole album to get the one good song. Michael Arrington argues that this is good news, because it’s time for a long-overdue swing of the pendulum:
The faster music labels realize their massively profitable days are over, the better it will be for them, as well as the bands they represent and us, their customers. Digital music sales are not going to make up for lost revenue. Suing their customer base is not going to make up for lost revenue. In fact, absolutely nothing is going to make up that lost revenue. The industry, revenue-wise, is going to continue to shrink.
Can he be anything but right?
UPDATE: Instapundit picks up the story.
Originally posted 2013-12-03 10:39:51. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
I remain unconvinced that the industry is losing money because of “piracy”. It is far more likely that they’re losing money because they’re not putting out a product that anyone wants to buy…
Quite simply, I cannot think of an album in the last 2 years that it was worth my time to download– even for “free”. That being the case, I can see the industry’s declining revenue…
Andrew, everything’s worse than it used to be, isn’t it? On the other hand, it is possible there’s no hot new “act” that has had people excited in the last couple of years.
How the hell would you and I know?
It’s the product that is bad.
There are good bands in Europe in pop, metal and rock that they
never promote..some on major labels.
They just keep pushing American Idol and Rap. It’s crap.
I agree with you guys…
The truth is that the music industry is shrinking, therefore, music business turned into some kind of McDonalds. Music is cheap, abundant and everywhere.
Record labels are under stress, they don’t invest on artists development anymore, therefore they only promote heavily singles and then drop the artist.
Record labels squash the volume of music thinking it will sell more. This is part of the stupid “Loudness War” going on. They believe it sounds better in shoppings and on radios… I find this completely retarded. Music sounds so annoying today (besides the music itself), so loud, that I can’t enjoy the dynamics… Dynamics are crucial for good music !!
Record labels are also involved in the music making (very, very stupid)…
…thinking like this: If product A sells good, and we have an artist with product X, we must change artist X into A and it will sell really good ! (sad but true)
Music is not the priority now… maybe it never was in the show business, but at least, back in the day…. music had some value that nowadays we can only dream of.
I think it’s pretty hard to attribute the decline in sales to only a decline in good music… this is a rather large, cavernous decline in sales. … more than 3 years later and nothing has changed! See “OK Go’s” article on this in the NY Times… they have a lot to say.