The state of the music industry in 2010 is a landscape barely recognizable to any of us who came of age in the era of the recordable mix cassette tape, the advent of the CD, the era of MTV music videos, Billboard Charts and Rolling Stone Magazine and the birth of Spin Magazine, and of course Kasey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown. The CD was acclaimed as a medium that would never decay; a digital (read: advanced) method for storing the sounds of generations and preserving them in a compact, simple format that will be passed on to future generations as well. This was a dawning of the infinite possibilities that existed in the music industry – record labels thrived and artists were overpaid and slickly overproduced, radio station managers received lucrative payola to push particular artist singles, fans got up-close documentaries of their beloved artists through music videos.
Then, in the ‘90s, the music industry experienced an epic meteoric rise and then subsequent meltdown, ironically in the same vein that grunge buried heavy metal and rap and then inevitably, at the crest of the double Aughts, rap and hip-hop secured the throne and abdicated rock music to the independent labels, smaller venues, and more grassroots approach that hip-hop initially took from its organic street origins. Now, in 2010, the decade before triggered such a paradigm shift that the music industry seemed like a limping prize fighter still trying to reclaim old victories; Rocky with the sticks and stones and raw wilderness workouts vs. Ivan Drago and technologically advanced training methods.
The Internet became a massive tool in the dislodging of the music industry’s almost proprietary hold on the music industry and scene – music became an editable, multi-formidable and sharable object through the Internet, and once Apple secured iTunes and DRM-free file sharing, the music industry now finds itself marginalized, buried in litigation, and an aging dinosaur in the realm of advanced technology. CDs are now found to be biodegradable and will probably not last more than 50 years; shelf space for music mediums is now diminished in most stores across the land; further, with the collapse of Tower and other Big Box music retailers, you have to rely on Amazon.com or other online sources both illegal and legal in order to obtain new releases.
As a snapshot, here are CD sales for 2009-10 as of January:
Album sales fell to 373.9 million units, a 12.7% decline from 2008. Total sales fell a whopping 52% since 2000. CDs still account for almost 80 percent of all album purchases.
1.16 billion individual songs were purchased digitally, an increase of 89 million units, or 8.3%, from 2008. That represents a significant slowdown in digital-sales growth. In 2008, sales of digital songs increased by 226 million, or 27% over the previous year. Digital downloads now account for 40% of music purchases.
In the arena of downloads, we have noticed an increase in online activity among torrent sites and music file sharing sites, and it is predicted that the rate of broadband strength will increase 300% by 2012. It is estimated that 6 million simultaneous users are online at any given time with access to 900 million files, resulting in the average illegal downloading of 6.5 billion files per month. Apparently, people are tired of inflated CD prices and music industry gridlock, now yearning for easy access to files, cheap methods for getting the music they currently want, and convenient packaging since they are free to make their own CDs or burn their own mix CDs due to laptop technological advancement. Interestingly, many people blame artists for the online illegal file sharing boom; it is a common belief that for decades the music industry has grown lax in its A&R departments causing an influx of diminished talent and lower quality outputs from established artists; why plunk down $15-$20 for a new CD if you only heard the single and if the previous two albums were not generously received by the core fan base? It makes much more sense to download the hit single or album for free, then decide if you like it enough to purchase it for posterity (not that I am advocating illegal file sharing).
It is indeed a different environment than in previous decades, and whether you choose to download iTunes legally or use file sharing sites illegally to obtain your music fix, bear in mind that technology will continue to highlight the accessibility of on demand music files and exacerbate the demise of the once holy, once ironclad Music Industry. As long as we get to our tunes, and it becomes more convenient to listen to what you want wherever you may be, then I am all for technology. Good luck and good listening.
