Wake Up, Music Industry! This is the Twenty First Century!

by on 12. Sep, 2003 in Everything

Those of you who responded favourably to my desire to own an iPod deserve a quick mention. I have to admit that I was quite pleasantly surprised to see what I did, although it beats me why you can’t get me what you want to get me, this year!

While still on the topic of music, allow me to set off on a rant which I have been postponing for a long time now.

You may have heard about the recent subpoenas sent out by music companies to poor unsuspecting kids (about 260 of them) who were using file-swapping services, like KaZaa, to download their favourite songs without paying for them. While I understand a music company’s right to protect its copyright, what I just do not understand is why the record companies’ business model for buying music refuses to change with the times.

Back in the 80s when that brilliant invention from Philips, the Compact Disc, was first introduced, life was very different from what it is right now. PCs were nowhere as ubiquitous, people didn’t have CD writers, there was no Internet, the MP3 revolution hadn’t happened and gadgets like the ultra-cool iPod did not exist. Economics dictated that it be priced at a whopping $17. Fair enough, considering that at that time, when Reagan was President, CD volume sales were pretty low. By 1993, CD makers shipped 495 million units and made $6.5 billion and by 2000, the figure had almost doubled to 942.5 million units with a revenue of $13.2 billion. One would expect that the price of the CD would drop with the skyrocketing supply and the plummeting cost of manufacturing the CD.

Nothing of the kind happened, of course. The Times recently pointed out that the price of a CD had not been cut since its introduction in the 80s. It isn’t any surprise, therefore, that record sales have been dropping 26 percent since 1999 and an increasing number of people, with all the wonders of technology at their disposal, are tired of paying through their noses for each album that has barely one or two songs that make the listening worthwhile.

Why don’t music companies change the way music is made? Why is there a need for albums which you can only buy as a package? Why can’t a customer be allowed to buy just one song and pay for it? The success of Apple’s iTunes music service (which recently sold its 10 millionth song) is a testament to what people really want. You might argue that the percentage of American homes with broadband connections good enough to download a lot of songs might not be significant when compared with actual size of the music buying population and I agree. But that is just a proof of concept – what if you set up stores where you could walk in, hang out (appear cool too if you are a teenager and it matters), listen to 1-minute clips of any song you pleased and when you decided to buy something, left the store with a custom-burnt CD with all the nice packaging and cover art which makes it attractive in the first place?

Whatever it is, record companies need to wake up to save the industry and stop trying to tackle the problem by just filing lawsuits.

The research for this post came from an article in The Register and an editorial in the New York Times.

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  • http://ash.webhop.net/ Ashwin N

    In India, most international music CDs are priced at Rs200+ ! Everyone knows how cheap CDs are and if they price their CDs as high as this over their manufacturing cost, they shouldn’t expect great sales.

  • http://www.livejournal.com/~shortindiangirl Anjana

    Hmm, hadn’t thought about this before since I am not an avid listener of music. Just rambling out loud as a first time thinker on the topic…

    I like the idea of supporting an artist whose music I like. I also like the idea of listening to other songs by the same artist that I might not have tried to listen to otherwise. After all, this is their marketing strategy for themselves… to sell their art through other successful pieces by forcibly packaging it to you together.

    IMO the music industry is commercialized in the United States through the radio. As you said on April 18th 2003 (Save my soul from the radio),radio stations often just play the songs that they are trying to “popularize”. There must be some consumer research out there that says that familiarity and (consequently) association is an important factor in popularity. And that therefore, popularity can be cultivated.

    Thus if you allow the music industry to only buy single songs, then it would be very hard to get artist’s new work to be recognized.

    The radio industry would have to restrategize. They can’t play the most popular songs, because most people would own it already. They would instead have to take effort to find new good new music and play it and hope that their audience likes it enough to sit through their commercials. The music industry would not be able to control them anymore. Radio stations in turn would have take greater effort to be able to find a new way to run profitably. You see where I’m going with this . . .

    And if not for the radio and [V], we would have to rely on the Seiskel’s and Ebert’s of the music world to introduce us to new songs.