The internet has made it easy for anyone to illegally obtain full, high quality songs and albums and this is commonly blamed for the decline in sales in the music industry. But one aspect of the 'information revolution' I haven't seen much discussion about, is the ability it has given to anybody to hear and audition songs - or song extracts - they might be interested in before buying them. I'm thinking of the legal music extracts on amazon or itunes, etc...

Back in the pre-internet days, if you were interested in off the beaten track music, it wasn't always easy to keep up with what was going on in a given genre, especially if you didn't live in a vibrant place like NY, London or a place with a radio station/show that exposed you to the latest stuff. In my personal experience, in the late 80s early 90s I was living in Europe and into hip-hop, and too many times, the only way to see if a group was any good was to buy the music 'blind' and hope for the best. Even with a group of friends into the same thing, sharing mixtapes etc with one another, the hit-rate for CD's I would listen to more than once was pretty low. Later on, I had a funk/rare groove period when I was ordering a lot of music off of dustygroove.com based on what I read online (mostly at allmusic.com - this is before music samples really became available), and the dustygroove description. Again the hitrate for tracks I thought great was pretty low, and God knows how many CD's/LP's I listened to once and never listened to again - but I thought it was worth it, because I was getting an education and deeper knowledge of what music was out there, what certain artists sounded like, even if I didn't like them that much.

Anyway, my point is that the internet has made it possible for anybody to listen to samples of tracks in an educational, informational capacity, free of charge (again, through amazon, itunes, allmusic...) without having to order hit or miss cd's and wait for them to arrive. In my experience, before this was possible, this aspect of listening to music accounted for a disproportionally large portion of my purchases. I'm assuming this is true for many other people, so my question is what has had the largest negative impact on music sales? Piracy, or the simple ability for people to hear before they buy?

Economist Stan Liebowitz argues persuasively that file-sharing is responsible for most of the decline in album sales.

He also contends that the ability to 'sample' songs like you describe also tends to decrease sales:

It's reasonable to accept a slight decrease, but no more than that.
In reality, unless you had to buy your music in the first week of release, it wasn't that hard to hear music pre-internet.
In the UK you had John Peel, The Old Grey Whistle Test and Jools Holland etc....
You typically had friends who liked similar music and would play albums when you visited them.

Actually, music discovery is balanced out because before the web you had John Peel introducing millions to new and obscure bands, now you have web-blogs and YouTube.

simple. none.

The internet has also made it possible to audition music any time of the day, and buy it instantly.
From my perspective that's led to more sales as I don't have to trail around several stores looking for one that has an album in stock.
Swings and roundabouts, but basically another excuse to divert away from the negative effect of piracy.

for me the effect is huge. like qwanta I used to regularly order lots of music from dustygroove or forced exposure based solely on the descriptions. but of course I was burned many times by their deceptive overenthusiasm . or even when websites started to give you little 30 second samples but they were the best 30 seconds from the only 2 good tracks on the album. now of course there's no reason to waste money like that and I basically end up liking 100% of the music I buy.

but people like qwanta and I are obviously a very small niche. for mainstream audiences the effect really isn't the same.

But the audition process and the attached instant purchase can lead to more sales.

How much of the decline is due to the ability to audition before buying?

None of it.

You might be too young to remember, but back in the old days most record store had some means yo audition records before purchase. The really good ones actually had listening booths where you could take a stack of records and listen on phones. Smaller shops would play records on their store stereo system. Most dfedicated record shops still do, at least where I live. In the old days about the only place you COULDN'T auditionm a record was when you bought records in supermarkets and 5 and dime stores, and even some of the dime stores had listening booths.

And there was always radio. Top 40 radio before the commercial consolidation of playlists used to play EVERYTHING - in the course of an hour in the '60s you might hear The Beatles, Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra, The Stones, Slim Harpo, Dave Brubeck, Buck Owens, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, The Trashmen, The Beach Boys, Tommy James and the Shondells, The Ventures, Barbra Streisand, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass,The Kinks, Johnny Cash, some local band who brought their record by the station, Freddy King, The Coasters, Ben E. King, The Shirelles, The Boxtops, Otis Redding, Den Martin, Lesly Gore and Roger Miller. Pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, easy listening, soul, novelty, even early ska and reggae all in the same radio show. Every week there would be 40 wildly different artists plus several featured "pick hits", plus whatever else the particular DJ happened to feel like playing, plus audience requests. The top 40 was determined by a combination of sales at local record shops and call-in requests, but DJs had considerable latitude in what they could play. Some DJs would favor one or another type of popular music but stations hired djs that represented a range of tastes.

If anything, it's actually HARDER to be exposed to new (or different) music now, as everything is so channeled and genre restricted. What I find interesting is the reactions of people in the local bar I hang out at which has an internet enabled jukebox. Certain customer demographics tend to plaqy very narrow selections because they haven't heard anything else -they just not exposed to it. I go in and play 12 or 14 songs they don't usually listen to and reactions can be quite interesting. People who only know modern pop and rap dancing to country, '60s soul music, Chicago blues, and rock and roll. People asking me "What's that?"

The thing is, that music is always there on the box, available to them. But they haven't been exposed to it before.

He's correct about that.

Well, you can't be right all the time. How old is he, I wonder? He may not actually remember......

You might be too old to get it

Take a look at a site like Dusty Groove Much of the stuff there was recorded in the '60s and '70s. How much of it would you have heard on the radio in the US or found in even the best record stores in a major city like NY or LA? Maybe 20% of it, and basically none of the foreign stuff.

Your list that's supposed to show examples of the breadth of '60s radio is remarkably mainstream and US-centric. To people who want so seek out stuff beyond the constraints of radio and what your local store has in-stock, the internet has been an enormous boon. But as I said before those people are a tiny niche and so the overall effect would be minimal.

It can. But it totally depends on the person. There's a certain type of record buyer who is seeking something special and won't rest until they find it. They used to have to spend thousands of dollars in that search while maybe having a pretty low hit-to-miss ratio. But that's a totally different thing than the person who has $10 in their pocket and will spend it on whatever they find that sounds best to them.

I'm 'old', I've also worked in record stores.
In the late 70's I was around universities. There were niche record stores sited near most universities.
Take any record up to the counter and they would play it on the house system for you..... all the way through.
Just as much as audition is a factor now, unavailability was a factor back then. Very often, popular records were sold out when you went to buy them, very often more obscure, interesting music wasn't in stock.
The counter balance of track auditioning in the internet age is easily matched by the ease of availability and instant gratification.

Sure. And if the record wasn't in stock you couldn't audition it. So if you really wanted to hear it you might have the store special order it for you, or you might mail order it from a zine and then you would be buying it without hearing it first. I'm speaking more from an '80s or '90s perspective here obviously, but I'm sure there were record collector freaks who found a way to order hard-to-find records in the '60s.

There's the clue - "... what sounds best ..."
They have to hear it first.

I always gritted my teeth when buying music "unheard". It's always been too expensive in this country for the joy of finding a "keeper" to outweigh the disappointment of finding a "hater". As a result, there were likely many albums I didn't purchase that I would have actually liked.

Being able to audition online has increased my purchase frequency because I know I'm getting something I like. But I'm atypical, in that I actually buy music that I've discovered and liked online. I'm probably also atypical in that I mainly look online for less popular music (more than a few years old, or never released in this small market). Popular, current music is usually well publicised on release and I have no problems finding / auditioning it in shops or on the radio.

Nope. When the British Invasion hit all the Top 40 stations were playing English imports that were unavailable in the US. The Beatles first singles in the US were on Tollie, a small UK label and the first album was licensed by VJ, a blues label, after the UK imports started flooding the radio. It was only the flood of imports and the VJ release that force EMI subsidiary Capitol to release Meet The Beatles, a bit late to the table.

All manner of esoteric imports, jazz, classical, and pop were available in good records stores everywhere, even Norman Oklahoma where I grew up. We spent the summers in a little fishing village in Maine, where a lobster fisherman's wife exposed me to Edith Piaf.

Believe me, there was no shortage of imports. And plenty got played on the radio. Telstar and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates were UK releases that hit the US top 40 before the British invasion, for example.

There are other countries besides the US and the UK you know. And Piaf is probably the greatest known french singer of all time (or maybe brel).

I was not alive to shop in US record stores in the '60s but I spent enough time in record stores in the '90s to have a really good feeling for what was available at the time, at least in California.

You can make the case that MORE of the decline is due to piracy than auditioning, but none of it? Stretches credulity.
Perhaps because I grew up outside the US, the situation was somewhat different, but there was no way to audition much of the music I was interested in before buying it. If you strayed off the mainstream stuff, you'd be lucky to find what you were looking for without ordering it, and even then it was usually in the "imports" section shrink wrapped in plastic (at a premium price too). No way they'd unseal it before purchase.
As for radio, again, if you had access to John Peel or similar eclectic radio shows you were one of the lucky ones.

Even living in the US in the post-internet late-nineties, I remember being frustrated reading all these electronic/dance music 12" reviews in DJ magazines with no ability to actually listen to them. And good luck finding a good EDM radio show, but by then Clear Channel had taken over I guess. It's amazing to be able to now go to beatport or wherever and audition all the tracks there first, but it also means that I'm much much more discriminating in what I buy, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

My feeling is that the music industry made a lot of money by playing this game of only allowing the first listen after the customer had shelled out the cash (as well as forcing you to buy entire CD's for the one song you liked). If statistics were available, I'm betting that the vast majority of illegal music downloads today are only listened to once, if that, out of curiosity more than anything else. So even if all the draconian DRM measures to monitor users PC's and clamp down on piracy were strictly enforced, the music industry could never go back to the profits it was making in its heyday, simply because the auditioning cat is out of the bag.

really?

is that why labels spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars promoting songs to radio? what about all the music promoted to DJ pools?

perhaps you are unaware of all the time and money invested by record labels so that consumers CAN hear and sample the music, and the 90 second previews in Itunes are a testament to this fact.

now, if you're suggested that piracy is "auditioning" then you are sadly misunderstanding the difference between promotion and piracy.

this is just another variation on the "music sucks" argument which is completely 100% BONK...

I was at music college with a bunch of record buying fiends. I mean people who would spend $200 to $300 each time they went to a store.
People I knew rarely ordered records. You just kept looking, maybe you'd find it at another store, or maybe it would come into the original store with the next shipment.
The fact is, there is a balance. There was a ton of impulse buying in the 70's and 80's. You saw something you didn't know produced by Don Was (maybe) and took a punt. If the store didn't have the latest Parliament album you maybe said - "meh, whatever, I wont bother".
Today, there is widespread auditioning, but also widespread access to legally purchase most music you can think of, instantly, without waiting for an order to be filled.

Yeah, I agree. I used to spend between $50 and $100 a week on records and would do the equivalent of "oh, this was produced by _______? I'll just buy it." But I think on average there was probably only one record a month that I really went crazy for and scratched whatever itch I had at that particular moment.

Now if I think "oh, there's a new thing produced by _______? I should check it out" I just listen to tracks on spotify or youtube, or samples on itunes. And so I only have to buy that one a month that was the one I really wanted.

Of course I used to listen to a ton of stuff in store, but I guess maybe I wasn't really that careful? I would take big piles of used CDs and vinyl up to the listening station and comb through it all but I still ended up with stuff that never really clicked with me. I do the same thing in Spotify now. I drag lots of albums over into playlists of things that sound cool to me that I think I might want to listen to. But only about 10% of those end up being albums I listen to over and over.

But again, this is a tiny niche of music nerd we're talking about here and I'm sure it's statistically insignificant compared to piracy in the grand scheme of things.

Even in California in the '80s and '90s, although, as in many things, California tended to be a bit more shallow, especially S. Cal. In S.F. in the '70s and '80s there were scads of specialty record stores where you could find pretty much anything. And I mean ANYTHING, from obscure German classical recording to various ethnic recordings to esoteric small label jazz releases to punk rock records that were only pressed in the hundreds or thousands and came from all over the US, UK, and Europe.

Of course, being from the LA area your opinion is influenced by that region's rampant trendiness and, well, lack of substance.

You should have seen the record stores in New York! You could find stuff there that didn't even exist!

Not really. It's in a record company's interest to put the hit out on a single if it'll sell more product. It's the artists themselves that want their creation listened to as a whole as conceived and intended, not chopped up piecemeal, which they regard somewhat like cutting out the Mona Lisa's smile and throwing away the rest of the painting.

I don't know what the exact figures would be, but if 90% of illegal downloads were by "collectors" or people "auditioning" (which I suspect is probably being generous), the music industry is still losing over half their proper amount of sales to piracy. I'm actually inclined to think the real figure is closer to 50%-65% percent, with variation for genre.

One of the reasons I think that it's closer to 50% of downloads is that people who claim they're "auditioning" almost never buy what they're looking for after they "audition" it. Why should they? They already have it. Something that may help with that problem is new services like Pandora that are taking the place of radio.

The problem with Spotify is that they don't have and can't get everything because their compensation is so crappy that labels and distributors are pulling their entire catalogs.

I believe Liebowitz was talking primarily about the 'sampling' effect of p2p infringement, though I think the argument holds true for sites like YouTube. Being able to play a song the whole way through, instantly, in the comfort of your own home/workplace/etc, as many times as you want, will have a different effect on sales than being able to audition a song at a record store or hearing the song on the radio. In the first case, it acts more as a substitution for purchasing the song than as an exposure that may increase demand for the song. But yeah, these things are difficult to measure conclusively.

haha nice try. I'm actually from the bay area though . But yes, in general used record shopping in California definitely has it's own particular qualities and big gaps of stuff you can tell nobody was buying back in the day. New York must be one of the best record shopping cities in the world alongside London.

It occurs to me that what you're looking for in a record store is limited at any time by what you know about. And I think maybe that's part of the experience that qwanta was getting at. There was this time in the late '90s and early '00s when there were a lot of people writing about music that was still hard to find. I suppose there was a gap between the time information about obscure music was available on the internet and when the music itself became available on the internet, and people who came of age in that gap had the experience of wanting to get their hands on all of this unobtainable stuff.


I keep hearing that but I've never heard of any of the labels that pulled out and I'm still finding a seemingly unlimited supply of music I want to listen to, so I'll stick around for now. But then it seems particularly suited to my interests: old "catalog" stuff from the '50s-'70s and new indie releases.

Actually the decline of record sales occurred way before the internet and the CD.
Album sales declined except for a few Greats and those Greats still sell well today.

It has something to do with the buying public and what they like.

Record Companies re issue those Greats regularly as they make them money.

I'm talking about broad popularity across the generations.

Tracks with the life sucked out of them aren't really what the buying public wants even if some Publishers/ Record Labels are promoting them.

Most Record labels still haven't pieced together the relationship with a Musical Director and Orchestral backing and a talented Singer.

They seem to put their talent in with a Producer and his penchants for plugins.

I'm sorry but that's just factually wrong.

Record sales experienced steady continuous growth for at least three decades, peaking in 1999. Sales began a rapid decline brought about by broadband Internet access and mass scale file sharing, otherwise known as piracy.

The record industry has suffered a 60% decrease in sales since its peak in 1999.

Those are the facts.

That's not "auditioning" or "sampling", it's stealing.

And yes, stealing certainly DOES have an adverse effect on sales.

Strange then that Beiber, Usher, GaGa and Rhianna are some of the biggest sellers today.

Actually you're completely wrong about that. I'll let rack gear fill you in with his collection of charts, graphs, and sales figures.