Music Execs Stressed Over Free Streaming 375
itwbennett writes "At the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York, music industry watchers gathered to puzzle anew over the continuing decline in music sales. 'We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years,' said Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group who spoke at the conference. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry. In years past, the blame was put on digital music piracy. At this year's conference, however, the focus was on free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube."
What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
...free streaming over the air, i.e. radio?
people are broke.. (Score:5, Insightful)
and most of the music sucks! What else is there to say?
Funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny that I bought most of the music in last 3 years after listening on Pandora.
What they don't get is - digitization has made me purchase just one good song from otherwise crappy album and hence paying only a dollar and not a full 10-20$ they used to charge.
Re:What about... (Score:2, Insightful)
They can control radio much easier than they can control the Internet.
None so Blind as Those Who Will Not See (Score:5, Insightful)
They will clutch at every straw and leave no stone unturned in their quest to increase sales... except for the myriad ways that they are their own worst enemy. It will never occur to them that suing your own customers is not good for business. They will never think that what is in my opinion the obvious "buy-a-law" political corruption (designed to institute perpetual copyright) in which they engage makes people with a conscience decide not to support them.
They will never consider that threatening tens of thousands of people with lawyer letters demanding they either pay a settlement or face a lawsuit they could not possibly afford, with no regard for the fact that many of them were innocent, might earn them some ill will. Nor will they think that taking children to court and using interrogation procedures obviously designed to intimidate them is something that decent people don't care to reward financially.
Nope, it's them evil pirates, those horrible music streaming services, etc. Of course it is. That adequately explains everything.
It's at a base level and I openly acknowledge that, but I can't help but to smile when I see that they are showing signs of desperation. They deserve more failure than they are experiencing.
Really?? (Score:4, Insightful)
14% of buyers accounting for 56% of business sounds pretty normal. They're called enthusiasts. And I would bet a lot of that 14% probably do a lot of free streaming too.
I'm guessing that I'm one of that 14% (I buy a new album every 2 weeks-ish lately), at least in the past three or four months. The main reason for that is that I started a job that involves a lot of sitting at my desk, and i listen to a lot of pandora.
The market is changing, diversifying and reducing the power of "blockbuster" artists, and that's scary for these companies. However, streaming services like pandora make it *easier* to make money off of a diversifying music market, by making it easier to find new music even as tastes narrow. Hopefully theyll figure that out sooner rather than later.
Oh... gee... I wonder why... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe if you didn't make it such a pain to use your product by telling people when and how they can use it this wouldn't be happening? Also, I'd buy more music from you if you actually released what I wanted. Give me easy access to Svetlanov's recordings of Tchaikovsky's Symphonic Poem Manfred, or good recordings of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Harpsichord Concertos and Orchestral Suites. The complete set of Beethoven's Sonatas, and Chopin's Nocturnes and Etudes at reasonable prices and we'll talk again. But alas, my local music store only has the latest on all the cruft that's out there now and only the first five seconds of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony*.
* I happen to own the full CD set of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Karajan playing all of Beethoven's Symphonies. Best recordings I've ever heard, ever.
Re:Greed knows no bounds (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The "problem" won't go away (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing will make the problem go away, because at no point are any of the modern musicians going to be as wondrous to today's audiences as the musicians of the 50s, 60s, and 70s were to theirs. Prior to then, music was pretty much local. If you lived in the hills, you listened to local boys with banjos. If you lived in Italy, you listened to local boys with mandolins. If you lived in Germany, you listened to local polka bands. If you had money and traveled, you'd hear different local music.
Then as recorded music became available, so did Elvis, the British Invasion, Dick Clark's American Bandstand, rock and roll, and it was all NEW to everyone. People created new sounds, they collaborated with other musicians, and it was an amazing time for everyone. The record companies printed money in the shape of round black vinyl discs, and hired people to shovel cash into their limousines.
And then it wasn't new any more. Music fashions appeared and disappeared, new bands came and went after sharing a one-hit-wonder with the world, and the mummified corpses of the 1960s and 1970s bands were propped up on stages around the world, with such unforgettable names as the "Steel Wheelchairs Tour" and "The Traveling Dingle-berries", hawking overpriced concert tickets to acid-brain-washed aging hippies who never really left the 1970s. And as time was unkind, they had to get out of their own limos to shovel the money in.
The system was already getting tired, and then along came digital music. As modern music entered a new age of suckage, perfect digital copies introduced the modern consumer to a new age of self-empowered selfishness. The double whammy has left the music industry where it is: barely able to afford Korbel Brut taps in their limousines instead of hot and cold running Dom Perignon. And nobody wants to drink Korbel after that.
Re:What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Radio doesn't play the music you want to hear when you want, there's no way to skip songs you're tired of and so on. You might find a channel that's reasonably close but that's it, it's no replacement for owning the song. Spotify lets you play any song directly, save playlists, take the songs offline etc. and is much closer to having a huge mp3 collection on a network drive, owning it isn't that important anymore. Instead of buying CDs or on iTunes to play, people skip the "buy" step and play from Spotify.
To them Spotify is a huge double-edged sword. On the one side, it brings many pirates to a legal streaming service. On the other side, it brings a lot of profitable buyers to a not so profitable streaming service. But if they make Spotify worse then people will go back to P2P, probably in even greater numbers than before. Not that I think they can stop the move to digital downloads anyway, fewer and fewer use a CD player anymore. Delivering it on CD is just a very impractical temporary medium until you can get it ripped.
Re:The "problem" won't go away (Score:4, Insightful)
"As modern music entered a new age of suckage" - if you think modern music sucks, you're not looking hard enough. Thanks for proving that despite my years, my mind is still young.
Re:What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that the radio station selection is rather limited.
I've been scanning the dial only to hear the same song playing on at least 3 different stations at once.
This is what Corporate Music has done to us.
Define "buyers" (Score:3, Insightful)
We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years
This is easily misleading. If Mr. Crupnick means "album buyers", he is more likely to be correct than if by "buyers" he meant total number of customers buying music. The fact that people can now easily purchase single songs when they previously were forced to buy entire albums in order to get only one or two songs they really wanted might have something to do with this. In fact, it might have everything to do with such a typically misleading music industry claim.
Re:Make better music and provide better service th (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Last year I paid *over* $2000 for music, so that puts me probably not just on the top-14% of consumers, but probably on the top-1%. But like you do, I always check what I buy, I don't buy whatever random stuff are around. Youtube has neither good or bad effect, because it neutralizes its position by helping me decide to buy something or not. If youtube didn't exist, I would probably buy LESS.
What's the killer though is that 80% of my new music these days is downloaded for free from BandCamp rather than bought. Not because I don't want to buy (I've can prove that I do to anyone who would check my iTunes and Amazon receipts), but because the KIND of music I listen these days very rarely can be found on iTunes, and to much less extend, on Amazon. I started listening to obscure indie bands that record at home, and these people just do music for fun, and so they often don't charge any money for it.
More importantly, it's that THESE musicians are pushing the boundaries of music, since they don't have to answer to any music exec. 95% of popular music will never win me back, so for these execs mentioned in the article, I'm already a dead customer. Even if I spend so much money for music (since it's mostly for indie labels' music, and the rest is music I get legally for free).
Re:Funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. But the thing is, this used to be something that happened once you hit 40 or 50, when you were old enough to have teenagers of your own.
Now, almost as soon as you graduate from high school and get exposed to more diverse music in college, you look back at what you were buying and listening to, and wonder WTF you were thinking. Pop music has become so irredeemably shitty that the so-called generation gap is all but gone.
Re:people are broke.. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about "I really love Jamendo [jamendo.com]"?
Because I do. Just putting it out there in case anybody wants some nice, freely-available indie music to replace the RIAA trash and stop giving those bloodsuckers free advertisement and/or money.
Re:What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the music was worth buying, people would buy it.
As long as most of what they are trying to sell is disneyfied overproduced crap or bieberfied overproduced crap, we don't want it.
Re:people are broke.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. Maybe they could sell more music, if they actually hired musicians. You know, people that can sing, and play instruments. I can't believe people actually pay to hear hip-hop. Although I admit, it's not my generations music, I have a hard time hearing the music in it at all. Just shouting and a beat. I guess it's disco...
I like harmonies in the vocals, and an actual tune. I like the occasional instrumental solo, but the vocals are key (not the bass).
Re:people are broke.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I have a hard time hearing the music in it at all. Just shouting and a beat."
It's poetry. The most successful form of poetry in history. Kids on street corners practice their poetry and aspire to be poets when they grow up!