Will downloading kill the music business, part 3,980,876,312

I'm pretty much an absolutist on downloading music--I only do so when the artist is voluntarily giving it away. I've long voiced worries that the file-sharing culture will kill the music business, making us all worse off--a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Don't worry, file-sharing advocates reply; bands can use albums as loss-leaders for their concert revenue.

This has never seemed very convincing to me; live performances are limited in a way that albums are not. I can expand the amount of music I listen to, but frankly, these days if I see three live shows in a week, that's a huge week for me--and most people my age don't go to any, because concert venues don't like infants. Depending on concert revenue is limiting in terms of market size, and also, it seems to me, puts a time limit on an act; once your core demographic hits thirty, you'd better start looking for another job.

The American has suggests another reason concert revenue will not replace album sales:

Concerts might be a short-term fix. As one national concert promoter says, “The road is where the money is.” But in the long run, the music business can’t depend on concert tours for a simple, biological reason: the huge tour profits that have been generated in the last few decades have come from performers who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. As these artists get older, they’re unlikely to be replaced, because the industry isn’t investing in new talent development.

When business was good—as it was when CD sales grew through much of the 1990s—music labels saw concert tours primarily as marketing vehicles for albums. Now, they’re seizing on the reverse model. Tours have become a way to market the artist as a brand, with the fan clubs, limited-edition doodads, and other profitable products and services that come with the territory.

“Overall, it’s not a pretty picture for some parts of the industry,” JupiterResearch analyst David Card wrote in November when he released a report on digital music sales. “Labels must act more like management companies, and tap into the broadest collection of revenue streams and licensing as possible,” he said. “Advertising and creative packaging and bundling will have to play a bigger role than they have. And the $3 billion-plus touring business is not exactly up for grabs—it’s already competitive and not very profitable. Music companies of all types need to use the Internet for more cost-effective marketing, and A&R [artist development] risk has to be spread more fairly.”

Albums are a classic high-fixed-cost, low-marginal-cost industry--the kind where you want volume sales to defray large up-front expenses. What I hadn't though of before is that, in a sense, so are concerts. The larger the venue, the higher the profit--so a very fragmented music industry may not provide enough money for anyone to make a career.

Music is basically a tournament business: a few people get rich, encouraging many others to toil in poverty. This almost certainly generates more new music than paying everyone $18,000 a year for the rest of their lives. If the tournament runs out of prizes, what will happen to those of us who like having a lot of new albums to listen to every month?

Comments

Large up-front expenses to produce albums? Sez who? You can produce a CD, from recording sessions to boxes of CDs in you basement, for a few thousand dollars. This is for small scale stuff: a guy with a guitar renting some studio time. If what you want is highly produced wall-of-sound type music, that is a different matter.

I see the model of the future as being more hobby-based: regional bands consisting of people with day jobs who don't seriously expect to support themselves by their music, who make music because they enjoy it. The result of this may be less polished and smaller scale, but I don't see these as bad things. But I am a music consumer with some niche tastes: for me we are in a new Golden Age. If I were trying to make a living by sellings records, I would have a different opinion.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | April 14, 2008 3:40 PM

"I'm pretty much an absolutist on downloading music--I only do so when the artist is voluntarily giving it away."

Did you know you can purchase downloads now? It's the new "legal" way of getting music.

Posted by Nelson | April 14, 2008 3:56 PM

People said the same doom and gloom crap when the first recordings became commercially available, because they thought it would kill of publishing and live music. That didn't happen. The industry adjusted. This isn't any different than cassette tapes. People dubbed tapes and traded them in the 80s, and people copied songs from the radio onto cassettes. Formats change, and somehow money is still made.

I think that a few experiments from Trent Reznor and others have shown that people generally want a free download. Why shouldn't they? The radio is free. But also people are willing to pay for downloads and people are still willing to pay for a disc of some sort. There is money to be made, and with the production costs being much lower due to digital technology, it stands to reason that bands will start to break out in this digital age. Weep not for the record labels, for they dug their own graves.

Posted by freddiemac | April 14, 2008 4:07 PM

Technology is rapidly lowering the cost to create music. My guess is that within a decade or so, music will be like blogging. I also figure that people will be willing to pay to keep the good musicians, while the bad ones will fade away.

I'd guess we'd see more musicians but lower revenues for each musician. I also expect that the total music industry would have lower revenues, given the loss of the middlemen to virtually zero-cost technology. I also expect you'll see more variation in music, but also more variation in quality. People will be willing to pay to get high quality, too, as a differentiating factor.

I don't see anything to worry about here. It's different than what we have today, but whether it's better or worse will depend on the individual.

Posted by kdp | April 14, 2008 4:12 PM

yeah.. what freddiemac said. NIN's system of downloads and the availability of selling his music directly to people without middlemen means a lot more money for the artists and a lot less money for record labels made up of people who don't really have much to do with the music--other than making money off of other people...

anyway.. I'm sure I'll still be able to find good music after the labels die. most of the music I now find is from people who are on fly-by-night labels that front them like $3-5k to make an album, and then the artists make money selling it... and I'll buy the album (or the songs individually) if I like them.. I'm usually unwilling, however, to buy whole albums when I only like like 2 songs out of 11. The new evolving systems are much better in terms of customer choice and forcing people to make better music and less filler..

Posted by another NIN fan | April 14, 2008 4:15 PM

Albums have been loss leaders for fifty years for the musicians. The only people directly being hurt by illegal downloads are the labels themselves and the megastars like Sting or Elton John who have a history of sales and therefore leverage to negotiate deals that give them a share of album sales. Smaller/indie artists signed to a major label are not losing money because of illegal downloads, because they were making no money to begin with. Smaller artists on a DIY label, or a very small, non-major, musician friendly label will lose money from illegal downloads, however.

Smaller artists on majors or unsigned artists can be hurt indirectly by illegal downloads because the labels are less willing to throw money at artist development and A&R. Personally I think that's a good thing because I think the major labels reduce the choices consumers have in the marketplace.

Technology is getting robust and cheap enough that home recording and DIY marketing and distribution is a feasible way to release any album (even by a major band like Radiohead), rendering a large part of the function of the labels totally moot, which IMHO is fantastic. Technology can also make up for a lack of talent or musicianship, I'm sorry to say. The one thing it can't do --yet-- is make up for poor songwriting or production.

Posted by bakum | April 14, 2008 4:20 PM

I'm not sure that most albums ever really make money for the bands. Its always been my understanding that below a certain level of stardom or mega-stardom, the album is actually a money loser for most bands since the record label generally charges them all kinds of fees against their initial advance to recover the production cost of making the album. The real money, in this scenario really is the performance.

If all that's true, then the real loser in all this is really the record label, which is what we are seeing with the decline of CDs. There's also an argument for record labels adding the value of providing the talent scouting and development, but lately that has been to the end of reducing the supply of new music, as devote more of their resource to developing blockbusters and leaving the more niche related acts to die on the vine as it were.

In that sense, I think the internet is a viable, and welcome replacement for the labels. The cost of producing the album has dropped precipitously as the cost of the technology has dropped, and online buzz generators like Pitchfork, Stereogum, and others provide an online analog to the traditional marketing efforts of the old labels.

This doesn't really address the ethics of file sharing, but it does suggest that the online world can provide reasonable incubator for new bands in the absence of labels.

Posted by hwestiii | April 14, 2008 4:27 PM

OFF TOPIC

Megan,

I have a date this week with a 6' 3" gal. Any tips?

Posted by Sidney | April 14, 2008 4:27 PM

I have a date this week with a 6' 3" gal. Any tips?

Don't risk hurting your neck. Talk to her breasts.

Posted by Rob Lyman | April 14, 2008 4:37 PM

I'm half again your age and I'm not stuck in a CD time warp. You write as though your only choices are (1) download for free like old-school Napster and the musician gets nothing, or (2) buy little plastic discs for beaucoup bucks and the musician gets, well, slightly better than nothing. You're missing two whole markets, both mentioned above: (3) pay to download direct from the musician's website, and the musician gets all the money, and (4) pay to download from iTunes or Amazon, and you support both the musicians and the recording companies just like when you buy CDs, except that you can get individual songs a la carte if that's what you want. Downloading as a means of distribution may not be good for the suits in the record industry, because it hurts their ability to make you buy what you don't want in order to get what you want. But it needn't be bad for musicians at all, and it certainly needn't be the equivalent of theft. Anyway, why do you need the suits (and their hefty slice of your CD dollar) in order to enjoy your several new albums per month? The music is out there.

Posted by PJ | April 14, 2008 4:42 PM

Kvetching about the impending doom of the music industry due to the arrival of new distribution mechanisms is as old as sheet music. Literally.

The industry has fought innovation tooth and nail, even killing some formats such as the digital cassette tape due to piracy concerns. Fortunately, the convergence of digital CD audio which initially could not be digitally duplicated, and the CD-ROM as a computer media in need of a recordable option, set off a technology depth charge that the music industry wasn't able to sabotage before it became ubiquitous.

Inevitably, when they finally and grudgingly concede that a new format isn't going away, and instead adapt their business model to accommodate it, they then make another dumptruck load of money off it. The downloadable media crybabying is no different.

When MP3 first hit the mainstream in the mid/late-1990s, its enormous popualarity should have been a clue that there was a new market emerging. As usual, the empty suits in the media empires instead fought it visciously and justified their protests with 'Aagh! Piracy!', then finally conceded that maybe there was a market but that it required draconian DRM schemes (including Sony's infamous auto-installing rootkit -- essentially a trojan), gradually discovered that those were uniformly unpopular, and now -- lo and behold! -- are beginning, one and all, to sell unrestricted high-bitrate MP3 files, just ten years and many abusive lawsuits after the initial fact.

At present, iTunes is the primary holdout, although Apple's licensing scheme was originally the most lenient and allows for an unrestricted CD to be created, and Apple also deserves credit as the primary force in breaching the music industry's collective wooden skull.

As for concerts...that's just about the only way artists ever made any money off their creations, unless they self-published or became huge (i.e. Sting or Madonna huge -- relatively few artists ever obtain that kind of brokerage power even though many artists obtain some degree of success). The music industry contracts on the CD side have traditionally been uniformly one-sided in the labels' favor.

In other words, this industry never learns anything except by paradigm shifts. I am quite happy to let the execs continue chewing nails until the paradigm finishes shifting, and then see how the results sort out.

Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | April 14, 2008 4:52 PM

concert venues don't like infants.

And infants don't like most concerts. Nor do they like being kept up way past their bedtime.

Posted by Stuart Buck | April 14, 2008 4:53 PM

Anything that destroys that RIAA and the record industry in general is fine by me. Then we let the artists build a new model out of the ashes. If marginally fewer artists produce music, so be it; it will have been worth it.

Posted by Al | April 14, 2008 5:00 PM

The obvious solution is...a citizens' basic income?

Posted by Marcin Tustin | April 14, 2008 5:06 PM

FYI, Terry Fisher at Harvard Law has the idea of taxing ISPs to replace lost revenue for the entertainment industry. See this lengthy chapter: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/PTKChapter6.pdf

Posted by Stuart Buck | April 14, 2008 5:07 PM

Happens I had an article on this at PJM just a short while ago.

Basically, I think you're wrong about the implications. NIN and Radiohead have demonstrated that people will pay enough for an album for big-name acts to make more money than they would out of a record company; there are a number of businesses that are selling cuts by smaller groups; and, amazingly enough, there are people performing "live" in Secondlife that are making a living from it, via a combination of performance fees and on-line sales.

What has happened is "disintermediation" --- you don't need a record company to sell music internationally any longer. If you look at the numbers, record companies primary business was manufacturing and selling small-unit-cost physical items with, as you point out, high setup costs. (Primary because the profit proportion on the media overwhelmed the cost of the content; if they could sell blank CDs for $20 each, it wouldn't actually improve their margin that much.)

You also don't need a whole lot of money up front any longer to produce a reasonably professional album --- my nephew the budding guitar man is doing to pretty effectively on his Mac in his bedroom.

The full argument is in the PJM article, but I think the effect will be that a lot more musicians will get heard; via the "long tail" a lot more will be able to make a quit-your-day-job living from it if they care too.

Posted by Charlie (Colorado) | April 14, 2008 5:25 PM

major labels are dying. the standard major label deal: they advance/loan you the money to make a record, they give you $1 or so for each record sold, you pay back the advance out of your $1, not the label's cut.

so almost all bands make little to no money from records. (even a platinum record -- 1 million sales -- is $1 million for the band less the advance to make record/videos/tour, so maybe you're down to $600K, then you pay off management, lawyers, booking agent and taxes, maybe you're down to $400K for the band to split four ways, pay taxes on, maybe each band member makes $60K for a couple years work.)

like everything else in life, the money is in the concessions. bands make good money off t-shirts, touring can make money, though many tour at a loss. and publishing is a goldmine if the songs are hits.

so most bands are much, much better off w/o labels, keeping a higher percentage of a smaller pie, keeping control of their lives, etc.

and in the world of logic/live/etc., you can make a record for nothing, then distribute for free. both musicians and music consumers are in better shape, thanks.

Posted by dj superflat | April 14, 2008 5:41 PM

forgot: funny for a blogger to mourn the death of big music. would you prefer to go back to a world where you can come to prominence only via a relatively small number of old media outlets or where the web creates the opportunity for anyone to gain new media prominence?

Posted by dj superflat | April 14, 2008 5:44 PM

I think the music industry is mourning the aging super big ticket bands. That was an immensely profitable niche but why is the end of anything. I go to a fair number of concerts at smaller venues. I was at a sold out concert for about 3000 Saturday night. The tickets were about $40 and merch sales were brisk. That band is making money, not Rollingstones type money but adequate. A lot of musicians are looking very seriously at the Nine Inch Nails multi-tiered release. With direct sales and inexpensive recording options a lot of the industry is bypassed. I've been to several sold out concerts at similar size venues for bands less than 10 years old. These youngsters could be going for a long time.

I guess the question is how a band makes the jump to earning a living. Most won't make it but is seems like being able to get a few 100 people at each concert of a tour is the point where it makes it.

I agree with Megan about downloading. Every item I download is officially free or I pay for it. Some artists have started selling downloads of songs for a dollar at their label's site. It allows them to do individual songs that might not fit on an album and keeps costs low.

I don't see much to mourn in the death of big music. All sorts of industries have been changed by computers. This is just one where a lot of very highly paid people are seeing the money evaporate. It has been a long time since labels would adopt artists and nurture a talent so what are they good for? Nowadays it is sell a lot on the first album or be dropped.

Steve

Posted by Steve Harris | April 14, 2008 6:08 PM

You also don't need a whole lot of money up front any longer to produce a reasonably professional album --- my nephew the budding guitar man is doing to pretty effectively on his Mac in his bedroom.

The fixed costs of creating an album aren't just studio costs; you also have to count the costs of the time it took to write the songs, time spent practicing instruments and vocals, money paid to backup musicians and vocalists, etc.

Posted by Stuart Buck | April 14, 2008 6:14 PM

btw, the thing that's really killing the music industry is bad music. where half the bands sound exactly like something from 10 or 20 years ago, there's not much reason to care.

related: it's incredible how there are no new groups that can play stadium shows, and few that can even sell out something like the MCI center (which used to be fairly average).

as for the fixed costs including learning, paying back up musicians, both are now cheaper -- the web makes learning stuff much easier (you can get lyrics, guitar tabs, etc.) and sampling renders many back up musicians/instrumentalists unnecessary. you con't really even need to buy instruments any more, just get trigger samples from your keybd or make things with apple loops or whatever.

Posted by dj superflat | April 14, 2008 6:21 PM

Re: I'm pretty much an absolutist on downloading music--I only do so when the artist is voluntarily giving it away.

What about when you can legitimately pay for the content? I see downloading music (legally and ethically) as a means to actually improve the quality. The old format of CD/LP/Casette required a lot of filler, and some of it was total crap. How many of us bought a CD because we liked one song and discovered the rest of the music on it sucked?

IMO what's really killing music are DJs and the techincal wizardry: it used to be that any decent nighclub booked live bands for at least its busier nights; DJs (whose only function was change the record or CD) were for slow nights. That created a market for a lot of bands. True, 95% of them were pretty awful, but the system did allow real talent-- and new sounds-- to rise to the top. Where will the next Nirvana come from now that every hip and trendy club has some DJ spinning a boring trance-techno mix for the benefit of meth-addled patrons? (Yeah, the world needs better club drugs too; meth kills good taste, among other things)

Posted by JonF | April 14, 2008 6:42 PM

Music is basically a tournament business: a few people get rich, encouraging many others to toil in poverty.

It has been, but I don't think it's going to be. Nobody's going to get rich from album sales OR concerts in the relatively near future. When the aging performers who can fill arenas are gone (and almost no new ones are being created), even the faint possibility of getting rich is going to disappear.

This may be a bad thing or it may not be. Music is, after all, a lot of fun to do, there are psychic rewards from being listened to, and as others have noted, the cost of recording and distribution has dropped to near zero. In the future, popular music will mostly be created by people who do it part time for the love of it. And I think I could live with that.

Posted by Slocum | April 14, 2008 7:11 PM

dj superflat:
"btw, the thing that's really killing the music industry is bad music. where half the bands sound exactly like something from 10 or 20 years ago, there's not much reason to care."

I don't think anything is killing the music industry. Perhaps the major labels aren't reaping huge monopoly fueled mega-profits, but that's hardly killing the music industry. There's plenty of creative new music out there in the world, just maybe not on Warner Brothers.

Posted by bakum | April 14, 2008 7:37 PM

The demographic argument is bunk. There are plenty of bands that make a good living, maybe even getting rich, off the Grateful Dead business model. Bands that can play their instruments and put on a good show will be noticed and will sell tickets. Even teenie-bopper acts will sell tickets to adoring girls.

What would studio only acts like 1966+ Beatles and late 70's Steely Dan do if confronted with the modern era? Would they have sucked it up and done stadium shows? Obviously middle-aged Dan has gone back on the road, but they can afford to tour in style now.

Posted by Matt B | April 14, 2008 7:59 PM

Music's been around since prehistory. It's only been a big money-maker for the last hundred years or so.

Surely you didn't think that would last forever.

If so, you mind if you get paid in salt? It used to be pretty valuable back in the day...

Posted by Herb | April 14, 2008 8:26 PM

To reiterate a point made already I'm sure, it seems rather odd that on an ostensibly free-market blog the death of an unsuccessful pricing model is being slavishly protested. It would seem to me that we are in a transitional period. The price for an album, a CD as such, has been deemed unnecessarily high by the market, which responded by formulating an acquisition method to circumvent the high prices. Now the merchants are in the process of evolving to the new needs and expectations of the consumers, as they have no other choice.

I agree that to say that the "RECORD COMPANIES" were big bad corporations that needed to be excised on principle is absurd, but any truly principled free-marketeer would agree that such is the fate of an inefficient business that fails to bring in profits due to overpricing. If the evidence is clear that record companies are making less money than the independent artists that were mentioned before and perhaps iTunes, I'd say it is testament to the healthy functioning of the invisible hand if ever there was one today.

Posted by Peter | April 14, 2008 8:55 PM

I'd like to hear a more in depth explanation of why file sharing (even illegal file sharing) is a "tragedy of the commons".

Posted by themightypuck | April 14, 2008 10:53 PM

"I'm pretty much an absolutist on downloading music--I only do so when the artist is voluntarily giving it away."

Pfft... you pay for downloading music? I don't understand some people. Why don't you just burn money? As a consumer, if I compare buying a song on iTunes, and, say, burning a $1 bill - burning the money just makes more sense. At least I get the thrill of seeing something on fire and get a bit of radiant heat.

Listen, the game's over for the Record Companies. How will the industry adjust? I'm not sure, but it's definitely creative and it's sure as hell destruction. I find it hilarious when Record companies engage in these silly moralist arguments, "pay money to US, jerks!" when they're caught, again and again, flat footed behind the times.

Here's what consumers want: free, unlimited, drm-free downloads. Until someone can find a way to make money off of that, people will continue to illegally download music. And you know what? I don't think that's necessarily impossible. Google's free, and it still makes quite a bit of money. Will consumers tolerate ads? Yeah, probably. Will consumers tolerate subscription fees? Sure, maybe if the service is good enough (see: OiNK).

Now if only someone could get all the legal BS out of the way, the free market could do its thing.

Posted by Chris | April 14, 2008 11:04 PM

I've been consistently unimpressed by libertarian arguments in favor of IP rights. They seem to boil down to a) what's mines is mines--which begs, inter alia, the question why patent monopolies are temporally limited (unless the argument is for an unlimited monopoly but we'll take what we can get politically); or b) everyone is better off--which opens things up for empirical arguments that seem to be the road to Hell or worse, utilitarianism, for (deontological) libertarians. In any case, absolutism seems a ridiculous position for an honest libertarian to take.

Posted by themightypuck | April 14, 2008 11:26 PM

Given the way the RIAA acts, I think you've got a moral obligation to download and distribute all music they control.

Posted by secret asian man | April 15, 2008 12:06 AM

"IMO what's really killing music are DJs and the techincal wizardry: it used to be that any decent nighclub booked live bands for at least its busier nights; DJs (whose only function was change the record or CD) were for slow nights. That created a market for a lot of bands."

I remember when Ithaca, New York, had great live music all over town at least four nights a week. There were terrific original bands in an extremely florid culture, with players jamming with each other everywhere all the time. This was all set in a regional touring context in which people could actually keep themselves alive with an eye to a future in live music. They were serving their journeyman years in clubs.

Then: the drinking age went from 18 to 21.

That was that.
.

Posted by Billy Beck | April 15, 2008 12:22 AM

Actually, in the wake of new technology and lower marginal cost for musical production (and replication), this should be a wake-up call to abandon IP while we still can. The ever-growing deadweight losses arising from IP monopoly pricing continue to distort the market for music and likely induce overproduction of it -- see Sir Arnold Plant for some outstanding critiques of IP.

Posner & Landes do an admirable job of summarizing the dilemma if they ultimately miss the overall welfare calculation.

In any case, the music industry wouldn't go anywhere should we embrace file-sharing and abandon IP. Yes, it would decrease in size and yes, there would be incentives to band together -- but all in all it would look more like the founding of the music industry and we survived that, didn't we?

What is to fear from an emphasis on live performances or unique events? Of *course* the albums will generate buzz and widen the base for such performances. People would likely be willing to pay for the authentic recording to some degree as well since people value it. Your main critique seems to be "killing the music business" but it's hard to see how that would ever happen, especially when the business has been thriving in low-profit areas such as MySpace for years now.

It's time to re-evaluate your assumptions.

Posted by Admiral | April 15, 2008 1:34 AM

Actually, in the wake of new technology and lower marginal cost for musical production (and replication), this should be a wake-up call to abandon IP while we still can. The ever-growing deadweight losses arising from IP monopoly pricing continue to distort the market for music and likely induce overproduction of it

You have those concernse regarding musical IP? That's just the flea on the elephant's back. I would like to introduce you to the three little pigs of Software Patents, Process Patents, and Copyrights. Enter the three big bad, wolves of Disney, Congress, and IP Companies. As they say, hilarity ensues...

Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | April 15, 2008 2:04 AM

I'm not surprised, but I think the dismissive tone of what the record companies have provided strikes me as a little naive.

Records companies typically provide services similar to what a venture capitalist would. They front money in exchange for a share of earnings.

The cost of producing an album is, as many have said, gone down. But marketing and distribution costs will continue to be extremely high, even in the world of the internet. So, if a band wants to get to the point of making a good living at what they do, they'll still need significant investment to get them over the hump of consumer appeal. The difference is that investors won't be able to rely on album sales to recoup that investment, so they'll instead take a cut of concert revenues. (I think Madonna signed a deal like this recently). These 'record labels' will use the actual music as marketing for the concerts.

Let's also keep in mind that many bands that ended up as our favorites took a number of albums before 'hitting it big', and I think we should give a least a little credit to their investors (ie. record labels) for sticking around while they built up their customer base (RadioHead and Metallica come to mind as bands with pretty tepid sales of their early albums). I don't pretend that labels do this because of their love for the music, but they were able to see potential long term returns for their investments.

I suspect we're headed for the corporatization of music. We can already see this with Starbucks' label, where a company receives marketing value from association with a band. And it won't be long before we all go to 'American Express Presents Green Day' concerts. At that point, forget about any music that pushes the envelope.

I don't have a good solution for all this, but please don't assume that my thoughts mean that I prefer to close my eyes and hope for a return to the good old days. However, the question of whether current industry changes will ultimately result in better music is still wide open, and personally I'm slightly pessimistic.

Posted by JonN | April 15, 2008 3:14 AM

If online is going to kill the music industry, the sucker sure is taking a long time to die. I've been having this argument every day since the MP3 was invented. What's that now, 10 years?

More importantly, music is vastly better and more multifarious today than it was 10 years ago. The music scene is weirder and more diverse. And I, personally, am listening to vastly more music than I ever did before, and have a much wider ability to consult and investigate new styles of music recommended to me, because it's all happening online.

To harp on what we've lost in music over the last 10 years seems perverse to me. Music in Europe, North America and East Asia is more interesting and more compelling today than it has been in my lifetime -- probably since the '40s and '50s, the last era when most music was either live (touring big bands) or free (radio).

Posted by brooksfoe | April 15, 2008 6:13 AM

I'm with Brooksfoe on this. The internet's made it easier for me to listen to a load of new music, and it turns out to be a whole lot better than the crap I was spoon-fed back in the good old days you're harping on about.

OK, some of the labels' problems may be to do with people "stealing" what they used to pay monopoly prices for, but a lot of it's about consumers getting better informed. Libertarians usually think that's a good thing.

Also, how did you work this one out?

Music is basically a tournament business: a few people get rich, encouraging many others to toil in poverty. This almost certainly generates more new music than paying everyone $18,000 a year for the rest of their lives.

Now obviously that doesn't work mathematically - if we wanted to support the most maximum possible number of musicians, we'd divide it up equally.

But lets suppose it does actually work to attract more people into the business. For the system to work at all it's going to need musicians who are:

a) Are basically in it for the chance of getting rich/famous

and

b) Really suck at calculating what those chances are

A system that selects for the optimum combination of avarice, vanity and stupidity actually probably is a pretty good description of big label music, but I'm not sure it's a great way of making good tunes.

Posted by Pete | April 15, 2008 8:15 AM

People dubbed tapes and traded them in the 80s, and people copied songs from the radio onto cassettes.

I still remember the logo the RIAA used back then: a cassette-and-crossbones (!) with the dunning slogan: "Home Taping Is Killing The Music Business!"

If only.

Posted by RMc | April 15, 2008 8:35 AM

Damn, do I hate these discussions where people seem to assume that all the interesting musical artists out there must tour regularly -- and don't deserve to make a living producing quality music if they do not.

I'm also amused at the notion that we are probably seeing "overproduction" of recored music. I don't know how you'd measure that -- actually, I'm not even sure what it means. Is there "too much" music out there? There's plenty of crap, sure, but certainly my favorite artists could easily produce two or three times as many recordings that I would pay good hard cash to get. And considering how many of them live a thousand miles away and rarely tour on mainland North America, going to see them live more often is a pretty impractical substitute.

(PS -- on the size of venue issue -- last concert I went to had a hundred listeners, according to the organizer, and I suspect that number was exaggerated a bit.)

Posted by Sol | April 15, 2008 10:24 AM