[memphisindie]

Originally Posted by redvelvetstudios

memphis -

I really respect you a lot man, and we've been together philosophically in a number of threads on a number of issues, but here I have to respectfully disagree. Please take this response with the respect that is intended, despite our differences in opinion.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

The single greatest issue for declining sales is rampant piracy and the ability for consumers to share massive amounts of music very easily via harddrives.

I agree, it is.

Neither of these phenomena occurred prior to year 2000 in any real mass consumer way. A minority of early adopter perhaps, but nothing like the Moore's Law curve of it's increase since then, essentially doubling every 18 months at like half the cost. My first 1gig harddive was $1,200 - I just bought an 8gb flash stick for $19.99...

I also agree with this which is why I think this issue is as important, yet, supersedes in priority, the talent acquisition and development issue, however, BOTH MUST be addressed or any recovery will be shallow and short lived.

If you look at average household bandwidth/connectivity, and price per gigabyte of storage it's a no brainer. People can argue the correlation, but really it's pretty obvious.

To say that declining sales are due to a lower quality in music I believe is misleading. Again, my soundclick versus itunes argument - the same stuff being purchased on itunes is the same stuff being stolen en mass via P2P.

I also agree with this , it isn't the sole reason, it's a core reason, but, the facilitation of the response to it is definitely the P2P availability.

If there were a real, and suddent end to P2P, all P2P, I'd expect to see a 20-30% per year increase in sales until the industry were to surpass it's previous high water mark.

Probably so.

No industry can compete w/ Free. This is the undeniable heart of the problem. Anything good enough to steal, is good enough to purchase. And if I'm lying I'd expect to see every iPod filled with the druck from Soundclick and not the Top 40.

That's what I was saying when MTV and VH1 came out. How do you sell natural tomatoes with all their flaws when someone is giving away healthy looking GMO tomatoes 5 feet away? The answer: You can't.
Man did I get flamed for that, over and over and over.

The truth is, music is more integrated into peoples lives today, and is more a part of their daily experience than every before, music consumption is in fact at an all time high - but the same technology that allows for these experiences also allows for the mass scale looting of the industry and the complete disregard to copyright and IP that the recording industry (not the music business) has been built on.

It should also be noted, the single largest earning year in the music business was 1999... driven by Britney Spears, N*Sync, The Backstreet Boys and the like - I don't think this is what you are referring to as "money making quality music".

Ha ha ha. Yeah.
I wonder what the numbers were after returns. Of course, there was a HUGE influx of teen pregnancy and unwed mothers then, a lot of them have 16-18 year olds who have sever lack of education and couldn't find a job before the depression, now the crime rate is high and downloads are through the roof. So many reasons.

Britney is as much a pop phenom as any female superstar that has preceeded her, whether we like her or not.

I haven't met her so I couldn't say anything about her, Madonna I can say was very sweet to me, but, I only met her a couple of times for a second.

I'm not sure what's driving your perspective, because from your posts I would assume that you are engaged in making quality music - and surely, you can not be the only one.

Yeah, when I can find it and I don't have any problems making it happen/getting it together.

Originally Posted by clorax hurd

I strongly disagree with this:


it's not like this. major labels doesn't offer anything meaningful to the bands i listen to.
for example, major labels are limiting creativity of lot of artists.
they want profit. they don't care about music. why would any musician want to crossover to major label? give up music for money? what's the point? i'd rather start having sex for money than giving up music. for most of the bands, being signed to small or no label is not some temporary phase of their career - they are happy to have freedom to create some awesome music.

That 's that safety issue that all businesses have and the lower revenue gets the worse they are about it, the problem is that it's the opposite of the cure. It's a way to stagnate the sounds and remove real enjoyment from music. Every now and ten something will poke through, but not to the degree that generates lasting success. Not everyone needs or wants to have a 20 year career in music though.

also something to think about - do you know Extraordinary Machine album by Fiona Apple? if not, then take a listen to it. It's brilliant.
that album was recorded in 2003, but the major label to which Fiona Apple was signed (EPIC) refused to release it becasue they thought that it wouldn't be commercially successful (but still they owned it, and she couldn't release it even anywhere else). and this is thing that happens quite often, but fortunately this is not the end of this story. the recorded album leaked to public and thanks to piracy it got spread between her fans, who started to flood the label with messages asking them to release it officially, so they finally did in 2005 - which is two years after the album was finished, almost ready to be released.
isn't this crazy? and it's not something uncommon. such things happen and usually without this kind of happy end (never bought the album from them while i don't want to support label doing such machinations)

That's a great story, it's pretty telling of what's going wrong in addition to the P2P problem.