Quote:
Originally Posted by Never1  There is just too much free media, today.
Why on earth would I go out and buy the new Paramore album when I can punch it in the search engine and listen to it for free, without doing anything illegal?
The industry as we knew it is gone. Doomed. Done.
The problem is, it's hard to put out anything new if there's no real money coming in to develpp and support it. |
Why even stream the new Paramore album?
Seriously though, a few thoughts:
- The industry dug it's own freaking grave when the big 4 failed to work with Napster to develop their own downloading/streaming framework ahead of the curve. Most of the disaster happening now in the industry is still a result of every major corporation being hesitant to cut short-term profits to fight off a long-term threat, thus permanently reshifting power of distribution to the masses.
- I'm curious what the industry was valued at before the 80s, and how 5.5B maps to that with inflation. I have a feeling that everything since then has been an inflation of perceived worth via major labels controlling pricing and the sales channel.
- Keep an eye on television for the next decade to see an interesting analogy. The networks have been great about looking into online delivery methods before they became mainstream (and broadband rates were ubiquitous enough to make TV streaming a cinch). I think you'll find that normal TV watching dive-bombs (like CD sales), the industry as a whole shrinks by maybe 25% (due to realization of value inflation due to big corps controlling pricing and material), but lots less jobs will be lost since online monetization will pick up lots of the slack. And unlike the Napster days, everybody knowing and trusting Hulu for free will be a helluva lot easier than everybody becoming used to P2P and then being asked 5 years later to switch to iTunes, where they actually have to pay money.
But seriously, what I care about most is that the music is awesome, and frankly music today is 100x better than it was in 1997, mostly because there's so much of it being released, and thus that 1% art to 99% crap ratio becomes 1% of a much larger pie.