Good music industry article

A good (if a bit dry) article on the failed economics of the music industry that gets to the root of the problem:

[www.bubblegeneration.com]

One point the author missed is the increase in greed among the music buying public. The author discusses risk aversion by music consumers, which seems rational, but why should music be any different from books or movies?

For example, the author feels 30-second clips of each song are insufficient "insurance" to avoid purchasing music of no or reduced value. But if you take a 12-song album, you are getting to hear 6 minutes of a (let's say) 48 minute LP. Consequently you typically only get to see a 2 minute trailer of a 120 minute film. And you only have time to read maybe 10-20 pages of a 300-400 page book in a bookstore before you have to decide if you want to buy it. So based on a percentage of the total size of the product, music would appear to offer much more "insurance" to a consumer than books or movies in terms of what the consumer is allowed to review prior to making a purchase.

Let's assume for the sake of the argument that 100% of illegal file sharing occurs because music consumers do not want to make bad purchases. Obviously that's not the case but if it were true, why should music lovers get a better deal than book or film lovers?

A music lover might ask "How's the new Elvis Costello? I don't want to buy it if it's not good." Fair enough, but people seem to have little difficulty deciding if they want to see movies based on short trailers. Plenty of people pay good money to see bad movies. I don't want to waste a dozen hours of my life reading a bad book, but that's kind of the way it works isn't it? You buy the new Stephen King and if it drags halfway through or the ending sucks you just kind of shrug and move on to the next book, because that's the way it works with books. You don't start downloading illegal PDF's of all books that interest you because you're bitter at the publishing industry.

Maybe the music industry needs a second retail window like books (hardcover/paperback) and movies (box office/rental) have. Maybe all CD's should be released in limited runs for a year or so and then only be available digitally for about $5 an album? I doubt the industry would ever go for that but that might be what it has to come down to.

Of course, once upon a time it was possible to hear an entire album played on the radio. And occasionally that album was mostly great, encouraging you to go out and actually buy it. But then that pretty much went away and all we got to hear were the few tracks that the industry wanted to promote, played to death on top 40 radio, complemented with irritating radio "personalities" and interminable advertisements.

*Sigh*

Footnote: At this very moment National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" has a interview with Washington Post's Radio Columnist Marc Fisher and the end of his weekly column "The Listener" in the Washington Post about the world of radio. His comments are pretty much in alignment with the words above that I wrote last night:

Washington Post's Radio Columnist Signs Off
[www.npr.org]


Here's the blurb from the NPR site:

Talk of the Nation, June 4, 2008 · The Listener, Marc Fisher's weekly column in the Washington Post about the world of radio, is coming to an end. Over the course of 13 years Fisher has chronicled the highs and lows of AM and FM radio, and described the increasing decline of local radio in the face of new technologies.

Fisher's farewell column, "Weakening Signals," ran Sunday. "The Listener signs off at a time when radio's future is fuzzy," he writes.



Post Edited (06-04-08 15:59)