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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