Okay, I'm going to take a deep breath and try to add something new to this debate. The idea came to me while considering my own history of purchasing music (and not), so to explain where I'm coming from, I'll briefly summarise it now:
* When I was young (so much younger than today...
) I certainly couldn't afford to buy much music... I'm not sure what kids are complaining about today... back in the late 80s/early 90s a CD was AU$30 and a cassette was AU$20 (we didn't have a CD player) I got about AU$1-$3 pocket money a week. These days CDs are AU$20 and a full album off iTunes is AU$17, and my friends with kids give them AU$20-AU$30 a week allowance. Then again, I didn't have a mobile phone at 13. Anyway, I'd probably get 3 new cassettes a year... birthday and Xmas usually, so dubbing each other cassettes was rife in my group of friends... I gave most of my money to TDK and spent my time listening to everything in hi speed dubbing.
* When I was (briefly) at university in the late 90s I was turned onto the wonders of the internet, Hotline and MP3s. I had even less money then so needless to say my fellow coursemates and I shared a lot of MP3s, and I got turned onto a lot of new artists I'd never heard before, such as PJ Harvey and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
* Eventually I entered the workforce and started earning some coin. By this stage I was a pretty enthusiastic consumer of music, averaging about AU$100 a month on CDs. Amongst other purchases I focussed on buying back catalogues of the artists I'd discovered back at uni... after downloading PJ Harvey's "Missed" off Hotline the year before, I bought all her CDs at the time (3)... as of today I own everything she's released, including The Peel Sessions on vinyl. After a friend at uni gave me a rip of Nick Cave's "Let Love In" I similary bought their entire catalogue too... which at the time was something like 10 albums... again, I've continued to buy all their stuff, as well as Grinderman and other side projects by Cave, Mick Harvey, and so on. These are just two examples. Working in IT it's been common for our offices to have "MP3 servers" where people collate their music libraries so everyone else can listen to everyone elses music. Again, this turned me onto a lot of new music. I discovered Bill Hicks through a fellow workmate's collection... and yes, I own everything he ever released too. Ditto for Radiohead, Mr Bungle, Faith No More, Tori Amos, John Mayer and many, many others...
* After some time, I begin to realise quite a few CDs in my 500+ collection aren't what I call "listen through-able"... meaning there are songs I usually skip through. I don't listen to pure pop stuff (save nostalgic stuff from the 80s) so most of the CDs that fall into this category are in the mainstream-alt-rock area. Because in some cases I've been able to hear a full album a few times beforehand, I start to curb some of my spending because I'm sick of buying CDs to get 1-3 good songs, and instead just buy the stuff with a high "signal to noise ratio".
* In 2003 I got my first iPod. Spent literally weeks ripping entire CD collection. I'd never been a big fan of radio before this time, but since then I never ever listen to it (if I can help it).
* In late 2005 the iTunes (Music) Store comes to Australia and I take to it like a bee to honey. I stop buying CDs. According to iTunes, I have over 1300 purchased songs currently. I'd estimate half of these are full albums, with the other half being cherrypicked, thus solving my earlier conundrum of buying CDs full of filler.
* A couple of years ago I bought some high quality vintage hifi gear including a turntable and 1/4" RTR, so I start buying vinyl and trolling eBay for old 5" prerecorded reels. I'd previously bought some Radiohead vinyl as a spur-of-the-moment/collector decision several years earlier with the intention of getting a turntable at some point. There's only one decent store in Hobart that sells vinyl (the other is a DJ place, not really my taste musically) but each time I go in there I spend at least AU$200... no wonder I'm now allowed to pop in late in the day and go out the back to see his full inventory.
Well ok, that wasn't very brief.. but some general points that can be lifted.
* Kids have always copied/stolen/pirated music, because they generally don't have much money and more importantly they have the time to do it. The difference is now it is a lot faster (set a torrent to download then go away), the quality is a lot better (less incentive to buy the real thing when you can) and your group of friends to trade within has gone from 1-2 dozen to 3 billion..
* Adults generally have the money to buy music
* Inconsistent albums make for a poor CD purchasing experience
* Freely distributed MP3s CAN equal record/ticket/tshirt sales. I bought John Frusciante's entire catalogue based on listening to his 'free' internet album (
From The Sounds Inside) and the collection of acoustic demos from
Shadows Collide With People. Again, that's quite a few albums. I'm now trying to find my favs on vinyl
* I appreciate vinyl because (a) it sounds better (b) I know the stuff is expensive to produce and ship and (c) playing it is a special experience... switching on everything, setting up the turntable, getting out the LP covers... staying still so the thing doesn't skip and listening all the way through because jumping around with the stylus messes with the disc... I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way (and bear in mind, I was born in 1980... the only LP of my parents I ever listened to during my childhood was
War Of The Worlds... everything up until I got my first CD player in 1995 was cassette).
OK, time to make a point. Few will disagree that the landscape for the music industry has completely and irrevocably changed. The stranglehold record labels once held over recording, distribution and marketing has been removed thanks to digital recording and the internet. Every attempt by the major record companies to maintain this stranglehold has well and truly failed - SCMS, DRM, copy protected CDs, shutting down Napster, lawsuits against kids and unis, etc. etc. In my opinion if it weren't for the iTunes Store, things would be a lot LOT worse. And even then they're still shooting themselves in the foot trying to make tracks more expensive and wreck a simple system that at least worked... (so much for the cheaper back catalog tracks... just searching through iTunes, have not a single track less than the old AU$1.69/US$0.99 price)
There is a generation of music consumers who believe that copying/stealing/pirating music is either perfectly OK or not a big enough deal to get in a tissy over. They've never heard tape hiss, they've never heard
Appetite For Destruction at 2x then hid the copy so your dad wouldn't find it, they've never spent all their pocket money on 3 packs of TDK SA-90s. CDs to them are passe and inconvenient. To them copying, sharing or downloading it off the 'net is as easy and commonplace as taking a sh!t. For many of them, buying music isn't a known or common experience.
There are, however, several generations of music lovers prior to this group who are. Despite my relative computer savviness I feel good buying music and supporting the artists I like. It's a simple respect thing. So does my father... even if he had a computer and the internet he wouldn't have a clue how to wade through torrent sites, so he still buys CDs and tapes... and since I got him a nice turntable and amp for Xmas, he's also bought a few LPs too.
So, if we've come to the conclusion that the young (10-20 year old) generation would rather steal music than buy it, and that older people (20-25+) generally still do,
then why the f**k are record labels not concentrating on the latter market? Why invest so much money in teen pop and hiphop and numetal when the primary audience for that music won't pay for it?
Why not focus on music for those people who might actually take out their wallet and pay for it? I don't want to hear Lady Gaga and pop princesses and Idol finalists and dickheads rapping about their plasma TV... I want to hear real bands, real instruments, real artistry. I want to hear something original, something different, something inspiring. I doubt I'm the only one. If people like me are willing to pay for music like that, surely it makes sense to invest in artists who produce that kind of music?
As a side note... this idea came to me when I was watching a doco about teenagers (James May's 20th Century) which talked about how music specifically for young people only came about in the 1950s. Of course, back then, they paid for it...
Another side note... vinyl records. It's not a huge market, but some in the younger generation are discovering it and liking it. It can't be ripped easily and of course a digital copy of vinyl defeats the purpose. Why not make more music available on vinyl? I absolutely love my 4 LP, 2 CD + full download copy of In Rainbows. Instead of giving the boys 5 cents for the download, which I could have done, I paid nearly AU$100 (whatever £40 was at the time) to have the full banana. Again, make stuff for those willing to spend the cash.
One last thing - distribution and availability. iTunes Store kicks arse up until the point I can't find the artist/album/song I want. This is happening less and less these days but it still happens occassionally and it drives me nuts (especially when I get a song stuck in my head during a nostalgia trip and the only way to purge it is to play the song over and over until I get sick of it!). It's at this stage I get very tempted to Google "[song name] .torrent"... the problem usually is that within about 10 seconds I can find the said song and have it on my HD within 10min-1hr. If record companies want to compete against this kind of convenience
they need to make their stuff available. Yes, I probably should visit/ring up every music store in the state to see if they've got a copy, or troll every online store and eBay... but I don't have oodles of free time in order to find 3 minutes of music so I can get a f**king song out of my head.
A very good example of how poor distribution results in piracy is with TV shows. I'll put up my hand and say yes, I do download TV shows. In Australia we have totally f**ked up networks who greatly delay stuff from the US and UK, mess around with schedules, hold off on episodes for weeks on end and generally make watching TV an awful, frustrating experience. However, thanks to some worryingly organised groups around the world, I can get episodes of Top Gear, 24 and Grey's Anatomy within 6 hours of their screening in their home country. Currently 24 is showing about 6 weeks behind on Australian TV (and on iTunes AU), same with Grey's and SBS's Top Gear UK schedule is a few seasons behind (on SBS they just reviewed the all-new Hillman Imp... j/k
)... I console my conscience knowing that these shows I download I can see for free anyway (ok, minus the advertising) when they screen and I pay extra for a MyStar account so I can record 'em too. Not saying it makes it right.... but Top Gear UK is paid for by UK TV subscribers so that's an interesting case... from what I can gather the producers don't really mind the overt online distribution of the show internationally... it certainly created a massive audience for them outside of the UK, and they've then been able to do that Top Gear Live thing on the basis of having that audience... this is of course just one case.
Anyway, these TV/media companies need to realise their old business models are moot. Like it or not, the pirates have created new models which people obviously like, and the best way to counter that is to do what Apple did with iTMS and offer greater convenience for a reasonable price. The fact that I can buy SOME TV shows on iTunes and do whole-series purchases is great, but they're shooting themselves in the foot by delaying them so that the US networks are running ahead of everyone else. Also, the TV selection for iTunes AU is absolutely hopeless. I realise licensing music and other media across the world is an absolute legal minefield but for godssake, it's been over 5 years since iTunes Store started - f**king figure it out!
Now, I'm not going to say piracy is justified in this case, but how the hell do media companies expect to control their product if they keep on giving the upper hand to the pirates? Obviously they're going to want at least a bit of money for their stuff, but since it has been well and truly proven that at least some people will pay for convenience, why can't I prepay AU$20-$30 for a season of 24 then have each episode start downloading THE MINUTE the episode starts streaming in the US? Giving the local network the first run advantage is old world thinking; as a new world consumer, I don't give a rats. I want it as soon as possible (seriously, 24 is addictive) and if you won't offer a mechanism that will do that legally, there are plenty of dubious sites that do...
Ok, this is getting waffly now, so hopefully some of it made sense. In short.
- The business model that served the record industry so well for 50 years no longer exists, and nothing will bring it back.
- Consumers now have different expectations about how they acquire media. They want things instantly, they want to be able to play it wherever they want, and in lieu of a legal, affordable, timely option, they will seek the illegal alternatives.
- It's a scary but interesting time to be an artist or band. Those that embrace the new landscape should do well. Those who don't probably won't.
- Kids are scruffy, foul mouthed little sh!ts with bad tastes in music they won't even pay for, so stop making sh!tty disposable music for them! Instead, make awesome music on vinyl for people like me
Cheers, Ben.