Looks like the music CD is sliding toward oblivion.
The recording industry has been living in denial about this for years now, for a variety of reasons. Partly it’s because once CDs finally die, they’ll lose their rationale for all that legislation they get pushed through to protect CD sales. For a long time they’ve been arguing that file sharing is hurting CD sales, but that’s a harder and harder argument to sell as it becomes more and more obvious that people just don’t want CDs anymore. But I think it’s more because without a physical product to sell, it’s hard to justify their existence. Manufacturing these pieces of plastic and getting them into hundreds of thousands of stores around the world requires factories, warehouses, trucks, all the infrastructure of a product distribution organization. They paid the entry fee to do business that way, and they want to keep doing business that way. But distributing digital files doesn’t require any of that; just some computers and some internet bandwidth. They’ve stayed willfully blindered to that, so grassroots networks grew up to fill that gap in their absence. They ignored the market for digital music distribution, thinking they owned the distribution channel forever, and now it’s too late; the free distribution model pre-empted them. No amount of legislation will save them now; a whole generation of customers grew up understanding that music is free on the internet. Young people are their market – always have been – and they’ve lost them.
DRM has been a complete failure, and for good reason. The recording companies thought they could take advantage of the technology to tighten their grasp, but the restrictions were so draconian and so poorly implemented that it quickly became the Edsel of the tech world. DRM made sure the only way you could count on keeping your music was to pirate it; people who trusted DRM systems inevitably wound up finding they’d paid for unplayable files, when the authorization changed or they lost the computer it was registered to.
Now that it’s inescapable that CDs are obsolete, maybe it’s time for a new model for artists. Stay away from the labels and their last-century ideas. Treat the recorded music not as the product, but as the advertisement for the live shows. That’s been the only way artists have been able to make any money for years anyway. Let the recordings go; it’s impossible to keep ownership of them anymore anyway. Artists have to find something else to sell now, and it’s pointless to try to sell something people expect for free, so the labels and their old way are no help. Sell the live performances, and give away the recordings.
If the labels still want to have a reason to live, there’s always back catalog. That won’t keep them going forever, but it will at least give them something to do for a while before they chain the doors closed.
We went into the trunk of the car a couple of weeks ago and found CDs. They had made the transfer from the Cavalier to the Hybrid year before last. They even made the trip to and from Arizona. But we had completely forgotten about their existence. I gave them to my mother to keep or distribute to my siblings (knowing that most of our music isn’t to her taste). I had made a last ditch effort to use CDs by making mixed CDs of songs that we both liked. That only lasted to and from AZ and we never touched them again.
My issue with CDs always was that I had to buy a whole CD of music I didn’t necessarily want. Typically, I only like one or two songs on a CD. It’s rare that I like most of a CD or all of one. Incubus, Pink, and Dido are a rare few that come to mind. So, I would buy CDs only when I could get a really good deal (multiple CDs for the price of one, one super cheap, or some Hits CD). And to top it off the CDs felt over priced (seeing as I would only be listening to maybe 5 songs at most). I love that I can buy individual songs now.
Yes, it’s over. Time for them to go away. I will miss physical media, personally, but I’ve always preferred live music to recordings anyway, both as musician and as listener. So I’m fine with it. The problem for me is that you need to record and produce videos in order to play the emerging game. But you can’t ever make back any of money you spent on them. That makes being a musician even more of an expensive hobby than it already was.
Another concern I have with the new model is that there are so few places for young musicians to learn the craft of live performance anymore. At 16 I was playing in bars, but that world is gone, killed by a Puritan backlash. Now you have to wait until you are 21 to start learning how to do it. That’s too late. If it’s really all about “live” now, I see that as a problem.
I’ve read several stories about suddenly hot young bands that played their first gigs in front of tens of thousands at festivals because of some clever online marketing using songs they had recorded at home on their computers. They sucked. They never got a chance to suck in front of small audiences stacked with friends and family for a couple years before tackling a big stage. They had their shot and they blew it. Next! This is not a system likely to nurture and develop young talent. It will churn though them. The next decade will be chock-full of one-hit-wonders and washed up 23 year old has-beens.
They don’t have to play in bars. They can play wholesome music in church halls or basements.
I shall miss the CD. I like having the physical object with its artwork, like a library on the shelf. I like buying them on the serendipidity principle, in the fnac chain or in museums (the best location for my kind of music). Although I have my collection imported into iTunes, and listen to them from there, my subconscious or something doesn’t think I really have the music without the CD, so that if someone sends me a track, I don’t Import it, but think, hmm, must get the CD of that. Although my kind of music is now available for online purchase, I don’t use my credit card on the Net and so can’t buy it; moreover, I may have a mental block on this caused by the fact that I do not intersect with the world of “hits” and “bands” at any point, and the online world was originally confined to youngsters’ music that I found as entertaining as a pneumatic drill.
That’s why I’m suggesting the “advertising” model for thinking of them. If you were making, say, a TV commercial for soap, you wouldn’t expect to make your money back from people paying to watch the commercial; you’d hope to sell a lot of soap and recoup the costs that way. Think of the videos and recordings as ads for your “brand,” instead of products in themselves.
If the business changes along these lines, it will create a new market for just such venues. If that’s where the money is, there will certainly be people willing to create them. Maybe the labels will get off their lazy asses and invest in them, though I sort of doubt it; their gaze is still lovingly fixed on the rearview mirror, and they’re more likely to steer off the road than drive confidently into the future. But someone will, if they’re needed or wanted.
And this is unlike the current situation?
Bottom line is, this will work itself out. The creative impulse is strong, and people will find new ways to use the technology and better ways to address the market than what we have now. We don’t see them clearly because we are currently still locked into the remnants of the old ways. I will miss the CD too, but if its death is necessary to kill the big labels, which are little more than enormous parasites at this point, then that’s worth it. Once they’re out of the way, whatever is coming next will be free to emerge.
I am not sure about the factuality of CDs being a dead media. Artisits are judged by how much they sell. The fact is, millions and millions of CDs are still being sold, and not just to old guys like me. The kids are the ones making Brintey Spears rich by BUYING HER CDs. Ditto Taylor Swift, Kanye West, and so on. Where I live, in the 3rd world, CDs are a hot commodity. Maybe the day will come when what you have written about CDs will be true, but I feel that day hasn’t come yet. Living in the land of prosperity as you do, everone owns a computer and can download whatever, but here in the 3rd world where owning your own computer is a financially unattainable dream, the concept of downloading music is still far far away. Michael Jackson sold over 1 million CDs in the first week after his passing. NOT dowloads.. SALES. As in.. in music shops and Walmart or whatever. Is that right?
This is very wrong. People have been saying that cd is dead for years AND THEY ARE STILL WRONG. There is not that much profit in digital downloads, cd sales dwarf itunes, amazon mp3 etc sales by a huge amount. The erosion of profit is due to illegal copying, but a decline in sales does not equate to death of the format.
Actually, mahlerfan, digital downloads accounted for 41% of the music sales market in 2009 and are poised to overtake CD sales this year; projections say 52%. I don’t know where you’re getting your figures to say CD sales “dwarf” digital downloads by “a huge amount,” but it’s incorrect.
I would also like to see your logic for there being “not that much profit” in digital downloads. That’s counterintuitive. At $0.99 or $1.29 per track, digitally downloaded tracks are at approximate price parity with buying music on CDs. You’re claiming that the labels are selling with lower overhead, but at the same price, and somehow making less money in the process. If they’ve figured out a way to do that, then they’re really bad at business and will fail soon anyway.
Finally, “a decline in sales does not equate to the death of the format”? Really? Where do you buy your VHS tapes, Betamax movies, cassettes, 8-track tapes, 126 film, flashcubes, zip drives, floppy disks, and pocket pagers these days?