Google Music and a few other new cloud services by Apple and Amazon have raised a lot of new questions about piracy and file sharing, with some Recording Industry of America legal minds calling such services a way to "launder" pirated songs. Both Google and Amazon, which allow users to upload their music to a cloud locker (a reserved piece of storage on a remote server), launched without first securing license agreements with major record labels. Many observers are wondering when the lawsuits will begin.
The RIAA has spent more than the last 10 years in a all out scorched-earth campaign to try and enforce copyrights and crackdown on file sharing services. Yet 10 years later, there's little evidence that the lawsuits and threats have done much to stop people from downloading whole albums illegally, which for even the least tech savvy users takes a quick Google search and 5 minutes to download a compressed .rar or .zip file. Sales are still really low... so low in fact that Cake was able to top the Billboard Album Charts in the last 6 months. Cake!
Most of us are not going to feel a whole lot of sympathy for record companies, which spent the '80s and '90s gouging customers with $18 cassette and CD prices. It's easy -- having personally spent a fortune on cassettes and CDs through the years -- to see the music industry so perfectly disrupted.
Those price were followed with a remarkably cynical A&R strategy that turned from long-term artist development to a form of talent acquisition that most closely resembled day trading. The late '90s saw the beginnings of this as all the early '90s darlings that had been signed in the hopes that they'd release the next Nevermind were dumped and the majors returned to pop for their big record sale hopes. And artist repertoires suffered tremendously.
As a result, recorded music is no longer a sure-fire cash cow. Kids who have grown up in the last 20 years don't even understand why anyone would pay for music, period. And CDs? It's strictly a medium for Gen Xers and Boomers who never quit buying repackaged back catalogues of the Beatles and Stones.
The RIAA's inability to adapt has been a real mystery to me. In many ways, online sharing poses so many opportunities. It's clear the stick isn't working. Why not try something different?
The first opportunity is viral music. Never has there been a better and less expensive way to reach an audience than the Internet. I wrote about a really great piece by OK GO frontman Damian Kulash on EMI's decision to restrict embedding of the band's video. The OK GO earned tremendous audiences because of the ubiquity of a several really clever videos that were shared millions of times. It's the sort of publicity that would have cost millions to generate 20 years ago.
But even more important is the low cost of distribution. Letting customers download music costs little to nothing. Before the Internet, cassettes and CDs were as important for the cover art and liner notes contained in the package as they were for the songs. But today, with all of that information a quick search or trip to Wikipedia away, it makes sense to just make the music available for download, eliminating the costs of manufacturing and shipping.
Yet the cost of albums on Amazon, iTunes and other mp3 services remain high in relation to lower cost CD prices at Best Buy and Target. A baseline price for a simple 10-song album should be $5. I've noticed this price turn up on Amazon recently -- I bought My Morning Jacket's new album in Mp3 format for a $5 download. The most recent Band of Horses record just went on sale for $5, too, and that download includes a digital booklet.
"Now wait," you might say. "How are artists going to make a living selling their music for $5?"
First, I think more people will buy at $5. Theres a correlation with iPhone apps that people will snap up for $0.99 without thinking (Angry Birds, anyone?). You won't convert hardcore torrent downloaders, but more people would snap up records at $5 than $9.99. Second, if those $5 records reach more people, touring bands should sell more of what really makes them money: concert tickets and T-shirts. In this model, the record is more of a promotion. An act won't be able to sit back and reap profits from album sales, but they should still be able to earn a pretty good living on the road.
But perhaps low cost downloads and web savvy PR ain't enough. One thing though that would really help the RIAA is to come to terms with the new realities of digital and figure out how to create a new business model that doesn't rely on $15 CD sales.
More important, big record labels, and bigger indie labels, too, if they have any value now, is to provide opportunities for young bands to record great music. In an era when musicians can record, release and distribute their music themselves at low cost, the music biz needs to offer something other than a posse of lawyers ready to ride into battle to secure copyrights by any means necessary.
The thing is this: recorded music has never been less valuable as a commodity. The days of wringing a lot of money out of a recording are likely coming to a close for all but the most successful and in-demand acts. If they expect me to fork over money for new music, the music biz is going to need to do a much better job.
This is a well-written piece that pretty much nails what the industry has done wrong in the last 10 years and why.
ReplyDeleteI'd add that it's forced a lot of artists to become more directly engaged with their audiences and to tour more as well and for many who never sold that many records to begin with, touring was always their bread and butter so I'm not sure if anything has really changed for many artists other than easier access to their work and what not.