Quote:
Originally Posted by
qwanta
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?
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.