In th piece, titled Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable, analysts see digital music sales as coming to a halt. From the story:
In each of the past two years, the rate of increase in digital revenue has approximately halved. If that trend continues, digital sales could top out at less than $5 billion this year, about a third of the overall music market but many billions of dollars short of the amount needed to replace long-gone sales of compact discs.
"Music’s first digital decade is behind us and what do we have?" said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Not a lot of progress.”
Further along, record execs point to some crazy stuff like the success of legal crackdowns in France and South Korea and taking "innovation" to TV sets. TV sets? And we wonder why the music biz is hurting?
I haven't thought really hard about this, but it does seem to me that there is virtually no way that record companies will ever be able to come up with a song file format that will stop file swapping. It would make owning music way too onerous and for every code they come up with, I'm confident a hacker will find a way to copy and distribute it.
Perhaps the days of earning money on recorded music are over. The means to make that music and promote it have certainly never been less expensive. Maybe the days of record comapnies as useful entities in getting music to people is over (or almost over, anyway). I'm not worried about that.
Bands still have ways to make money: play out and sell T-shirts. And, as is more popular these days, get your song on a commercial.
I don't think we need to worry about artists. And I'm really not worried about losing record execs and A&R guys. Sorry.
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