Monday, September 02, 2013

Music in the Digital Age


When Spotify offered to help me find AFI tickets, it felt very familiar. I realized they were starting to do a lot of things that had been in the potential business model for Napster.
I knew this because I had recently completed Steve Knopper's Appetite For Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry In The Digital Age.
The book was pretty interesting in general. Much of it took me back to my time at Intel, because of the changing technologies, yes, but mainly because of the corporate issues. The biggest one for the music industry, over and over again, was an unwillingness to change in response to emerging trends, because the old way had been working well for them, and making them lots of money, and they wanted things to stay that way.
This wasn't just a resistance to digital music; they resisted CDs too, and then resisted getting rid of the long box, and so resisting digital music was exactly what you would expect based on past behavior. The problem has been that waiting to accept the future direction results in missed opportunities. They kept bouncing back nicely because other opportunities would come up, and the labels would make millions of dollars, despite stubborn foolishness.
You may remember Napster as a villain in this story, but that is a selective telling of the story. There were attempts at negotiation between Napster and record labels. There were talks about different business models, like having a monthly subscription fee, with a limited number of downloads per month, or you could have done a payment per download.
I don't know what level of artist royalties would have been built into a plan like this, but there were definite benefits. First of all, at the time you could have had a subscriber database of 26 million. That's compared to 2.5 million Pandora subscribers, and Spotify apparently has 24 million users, but only 6 million paying users. Getting Napster in with subscribers early would have established a pattern of paying for digital music early, before people got so used to free online music.
The other opportunities were that Napster would be good at leading people to concert tickets and band merchandise, as well as helping people discover new bands, who were not signed, a cause close to my heart.
The thing that was most frustrating for me in all of this is that it wasn't even so much that the bands would be getting a bad deal through this, but that the labels were resistant because it would subtract from their enormous cut, and this is after reading about a lot of exploitation of artists via labels. It's not that they never do anything helpful to a band, but so much of the success comes via dumb luck, and they get such an exorbitant amount for what they do. I know, my anti-corporate bias is showing; what's new?
Regardless, this is the world we've got now. I am sympathetic to a lot of the sides. As much as I love albums, I understand the value in being able to download a single, and sometimes that is all I want. I still have a fondness for CDs, but I understand the convenience of digital. Some MCR members were tweeting a while back about lugging a big folder of CDs on tour. Now you can get thousands of songs on a little iPod. That's easier. There are good things about this new world. There are bad things too, but we need to take a realistic view.
First of all, it was never really easy to make it big. Making it stratospherically big is harder now in some ways, but making music a career at all is kind of a more democratic process. You don't need a label to produce music, or start acquiring an international fan base, or to tour.
For some bands in the past it was primarily the label that would get record sales, and the band would get ticket sales. Now there is not enough money in record sales, so you get 360 deals and it may not be worth it.
I don't think people are going to get back into purchasing music the was it was when you had to. Yes, I keep telling people to buy music in these posts, but it is so easy to download, or burn, or to listen via free services that technically pay royalties but in microscopic amounts, that I think that is going to be the standard, and so it is necessary to adapt.
That can mean many things. You don't have the big budgets for music videos anymore, so interesting things happen there. Band merch has become more creative, so instead of one or two basic shirts bands will have twenty different kinds, as teen wardrobes become as much about musical affiliation as fashion.
Some get very creative. Beck created a song reader with his sheet music. Touring is important, and we see add-ons to the touring experience. Some of the innovations are great, and some are hideous, but that's what change is like.
This is something we will be exploring more, including tomorrow, but for now I am going to link to two old posts from last year. "It's Not Priceless" links to several good (if lengthy) articles on digital music issues.

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