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The Death of the CD?
 Is the CD dead yet?One of the most common questions we get asked is why we're anti-CD. Given all the hype over people like the RIAA prosecuting filesharers based on 'loss of profits from CD sales', surely the entire record industry exists to sell CDs and destroy the Internet? Well, maybe, but a few of us are out to change that from the inside. When the 'music industry' started, artists and management wanted to sell music, to make money, to make music, to ... you know the rest. 'Music' was just that, sheets of paper with printed scores. The first 'music charts' were based on sales of sheet music. People bought the tunes to play themselves. Looking back on that era, it seems amazing - so why will looking back on today seem any less so? The growth in recorded music changed the industry entirely. Sheet music was history, the production lines pressing records, writing tapes, stamping CDs, these were the money-makers. Even the terms for royalties - 'mechanicals' - reflect the devotion to the churning machinery of the industry. 'Record Label'. Think about it. Says it all, doesn't it. Physical recorded music, on vinyl, cassette, video or CD is what we call 'legacy media'. An object you make, sell and own. You can't replicate it, if you give it away you don't have it anymore. For decades the music industry was wedded to the idea that 'the public' liked owning music, without really thinking about if they just liked listening to it, and were forced to own the damn things in order to do that. I love watching the TV. Or is it that I love the SHOWS, and the TV is something I had to buy to let me do it? Even before the Net, people were copying music. Illegal taping from radio, copying tape-to-tape, it was all happening. Commercial-scale operations were limited by the poor quality of repeated copying, but still made a lot of street markets their daily wage. Most people though, for reasons they really never knew, went out and bought music from a shop. Just think about that for a moment. How about if we suggested you bought words from a shop too? "I heard this joke on the radio last night, I really gotta go buy it". Is this starting to sound strange yet? But hold on a cotton-pickin minute here. You're like... in the industry! You're promoting copying? wtf? No. We're promoting the idea that copying isn't needed anymore. Legacy media isn't needed any more. Record labels aren't needed anymore. MUSIC companies are needed. If you look at the statistics, you see an inescapable trend. Folks aren't buying things like they used to. The idea of going into a store and buying a single is vanishing faster than the industry cares to admit. Sure, the invention of CDs gave us a brief blip in sales, but sure as the sun rises, sales are falling once more. Album sales are doing OK, for some reason, but there's this little creeping percentage on the graphs.. Online Sales. So what's going on? Well, it's simple. You won't get a record company to tell you this, but we're not a record company. We're nastier than that. People hate albums. Period. Why? Because they cost a lot of money, and of the 10 or 12 tracks on the CD, you probably only like 5. Sure, the artist had some grand vision of what the album was to mean as a concept, and designed it as a musical journe.. er, no. Crap. The album was sorted by a team of record executives thinking brand placement, market value and how to fill 650MB without using too many good tunes. Now this is fine, and we're part of the machinery that does that. If you know you're being had, and you're happy about it, then all is good. The problem for CD sales is people are starting to realise that what they actually want to own is the 5 tracks they like. Maybe not the singles. Of course, until the Net came along, you had to buy the album, or the singles, or know a friend who could copy you the music. Buying tracks 1,5 and 9 wasn't an option. Now it is. Online sales are almost entirely track based. People buy themselves a catalog of music, create their own albums, mix artists and eras and tastes, and they enjoy doing it. It's not just cool to make your own playlists, it's the way we want it to work. Some artists, who still hang onto the idea of an album as a complete package, hate this. Fine, but they have to hope their fans have the same attitude, or they will simply sink under their own egos. What's happening right now is obvious: People hear a new track on the radio, on stream feeds, on a website, on their phone. If they like it, they head over to the Web and download it. If they're being good they pay, if they can't find it or don't like paying, they download it free. While they're doing that, they're exposed to lists of other music and maybe try out a few other tracks too. Occasionally, if they decide they really adore this artist, they buy the album. Probably online, as to walk to the record store is so.. last century. Once they have their music, they spread it about their world, form the computer to the phone, to the car, to their MP3-enabled hamster. If the horrible licensing people haven't locked the file, they give it to their friends. They drop into the artist's website and read up on stuff, maybe chat to people. At no point has the single made it onto the conventional charts. This makes the record companies all moody, but it makes us happy. Why? Read that section again and count how many times this fan has been exposed to our marketing campaign. You should get to at least four. Now here comes the Ravenous Beast of Death that the industry fears. Our fan can easily do all that without ever paying a cent to anyone. Why buy a tune at a dollar when peer-to-peer has it for nothing? Who's gonna catch me? Let's put a million cans of beer in the center of Manhattan, send out one policeman, put up a small sign saying "please pay $1" and see how much we make. The technology of the Internet is designed for free information exchange, and 'the industry' wants to work against that. Us? We just realised a while ago that was a stupid idea. So how's the artist going to make any money? Where do the royalties go? How do we feed the Gods of The Mechanical Fee? Well, we believe that just as with sheet music, the industry has to let go of the past and move on. 'Music' as an entity is never going to be controlled completely, no matter how much we try. It's simple and fast to duplicate and share, the fans don't actually care about the artist getting paid, and finding people who download music is, from the opinion of people who actually do it for a living, a damn nightmare. Currently, web bandwidth and the cost of server hosting means that it's just that little bit too hard to share video. Multi-layer DVDs are increasingly hard to copy except in professional labs, and most fans are OK with the idea of paying ten dollars for a DVD rather than spending 3 days trying to download it, steal software, apply cracks, burn the disc and pay for the blanks. For a while at least, we can safely assume that DVDs will sell, and the industry numbers agree with us. Music gives us a hard decision.. do we write it off as free, or fight to make it pay? Well, we don't know. We can see it going either way, and we kinda like both. Now don't go all cynical on us, we're not giving up our hard-ass attitude - we still know we're always right, just this time we're always right in two ways. OK? Good. On we go. Option A. Music is free. We give away MP3s on the official websites, iTunes is a distant memory out there with the Betamax video and the disc camera. Artists make money from click-through advertising, merchandising sales and their DVDs. People subscribe to the website to get insider information, live feeds and all those things they don't on the whole understand enough to bypass. The artists doesn't release albums anymore, just a catalog of music. The DVDs are mostly of live tours, with lots of reality-TV-type stuff about life on the road and the fun things to do in a bus with leftover chicken. Singles charts now count shares on peer-to- peer to decide who's popular, and blank CDs have gone up by 30 cents to offset the fact nobody ever buys pre-recorded music anymore. Sharing music is the norm, record companies are seen as places that give stuff away and sell things to fans, but are on their side. Option B: Music is cheap. Every artist sells rights-managed music on their websites and through iTunes, years of quiet campaigning have almost convinced the public that filesharing isn't socially acceptable, and for those that still steer the dark course, we have teams of coffee-fuelled junkies who use them for marketing and misinformation management, even though they don't know it. DVDs still sell, as do albums. The introduction of massive 'golden ticket' competitions means every CD might autorun the news that you've won free flights to the next concert, a signed lemon or the chance to be licked by the artist's pet cat. Prices are lower, but people know they can't win if they don't buy. The artist makes most money from online sales, but does well from click- through and merchandising too. The industry thinks that each purchased track is probably copied 8 times, and so it's worked out a sensible premium on downloads, blank CDs and memory cards to cover it. Sharing music is like speeding - everyone does it but knows at some level it's not quite right. Record labels are seen as 'defeated but useful'. Or, option C: We stay how we are. CDs cost more than downloads on the Web, and more music is available on peer-to-peer than on legitimate sites. Labels are constantly in the press for attacking the fans about illegal downloads, but refuse to lower prices for the new albums. The label's seen as being on nobody's side but it's own, so the website forums are mostly full of comments about how horrible the label is. The DVDs still sell well, featuring 8 audio tracks, a few videos and one 10 minute out- take of a rehearsal. People buy them because they're hoping one day they'll get better. The music charts are based on CD singles, and this week someone entered at number one with 8000 sales. Nobody even listens to the TV shows anymore. The artist is paid on mechanicals as usual, but as the label insists on releasing albums, their income is like a rollercoaster. They download stuff themselves but get told to say how awful it is in interviews. Sharing music is cool because it's fighting against some corporate giant out to screw the public. Whoever you are, one of those three worlds will be your future. We work hard to make sure it's not the last one, and it's up to millions of music lovers like you to decide from the other two. Whichever becomes reality, we're ready. Are you? |