Music is in the Air
by David Patrick Stearns
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009 TAGS:
Like some lumbering Frankenstein monster, the recording industry rose from the dead this summer, thanks to the very technology that’s credited with killing it.
As so often before, the jolt came from Michael Jackson, this time on his June 25th death, which inspired a sales surge comparable to Elvis Presley’s, but with a speed not possible even a few years ago. By noon the next day, Jackson discs - at least the ones that defined him as a solo artist - could not be bought, yet downloads were endlessly available. Of the 422,000 Jackson discs that were sold in the week after his death, half were downloads. Some retail stores would burn you a homemade copy of Thriller for little more than the standard $8.99 download price. Might those sales have been lost otherwise? After all, the demand had a unique emotional immediacy that wasn’t so much musical as commemorative.
Nobody is saying that the recording industry is out of its coffin; the old days are too far gone. Sony sales plunged 95 percent from $2.2 billion in 2007 to $110 million in 2008. Jackson will help the bottom line of 2009, but not in the way he turned the industry around in the early 1980s, when disco music became unfashionable seemingly overnight. That sales surge - ongoing as news dribbles out about the King of Pop’s autopsy and final years - speaks to the recording industry’s idiosyncratic death and resurrection cycle, something not often seen in big business.
The fascinating 2009 book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Recording Industry in the Digital Age is a meticulously reported 301-page obituary by Steve Knopper, which illustrates that cycle -- amid the actions of extravagant, sometimes cocaine-addicted executives -- ending with the seismic domination of the download, which slipped out of the industry’s control before its chiefs could decide how to harness it. Disc copying and illegal sharing of music files meant that sales decreased even as consumption was increasing. One person can make such a big difference in a label’s fortunes that in June a Minnesota woman was told to pay $1.92 million to six recording labels for illegally downloading 1,702 songs (the fine is being appealed). Consider also the changes these invisible music files made in the urban landscape: Knopper reports that since 2003, 2,700 retail outlets have closed, including the once-ubiquitous Tower Records.
The problem is that music was treated too much like a commodity with a rational shelf life rather than as an unpredictable purchase guided by emotion. Unlike, say, shampoo, music is a product that touches people’s souls. And those souls become tired, even revolted, when a marketing mentality imposes a sameness on what’s recorded year after year.
Example: The disco bandwagon overstayed its welcome so long, and invited passengers so indiscriminately, that musical dinosaur Ethel Merman recorded her old hits dating back 40 years with a disco beat to cash in on the trend. The results were embarrassing. Disco’s limited possibilities had been fully explored early on, but few people in power noticed. Radio deejays and consumers took matters into their own hands, holding huge, public bonfires to dispose of their unwanted albums.
Technological innovations have made music more sonically vivid (compact discs) and much more convenient (MP3 files accessed from the Internet). Yet industry moguls resisted such improvements because the old way of doing things seemed to be working just fine.
Knopper reports that by July 2000, Napster, the file-sharing program, had 20 million users - a concentration of consumer attention and energy that the industry sought to destroy rather than harness. While Napster was tied up in litigation, young computer geeks were devising ways around copying barriers. Many chapters later, even a surefire seller like Josh Groban’s Christmas album has disappointing sales thanks to compact-disc duplicating machines and MP3 files sent over the Internet. Why pay compact disc prices when a pretty-good-sounding file arrives by gmail?
Invisible files are problematic only for gift-giving, which points to the most fundamental change since violinist Fritz Kreisler and Enrico Caruso made recordings. Music is no longer a physical object, so it’s easy to think you shouldn’t have to pay much -- or anything.
In fact, the rock group Radiohead spent years on its In Rainbows album only to release it, for a limited time in 2008, as a free download. The giveaway created an excitement that, thanks to the disc’s high quality, accelerated what’s usually a years-long journey into classic-album status. A year later, because old technologies don’t disappear overnight, In Rainbows exists in five physical forms, from a lavishly packaged set with a concert DVD for $55.98 to a vinyl LP version for $16.98. Yes, vinyl. As Kate Hudson exclaimed in the rock film Almost Famous, “It’s all happening!” But not quite in the same way. When music does arrive attached to a physical object, chances are the reasons aren’t functional, as in years past, but decorative, more in the spirit of a coffee table book.
What’s dead or alive in this crazy industry? Hard to tell. Some quarters even call LPs a growth industry. Yet mass market hits seem to be largely gone. Small, cottage-industry endeavors (some call them boutique labels) are alive, but often with profits previous eras would have disdained, though those profits are less disbursed over middlemen. Classical consumers hang onto physical CDs partly because of the historic information about the music enclosed in beautifully designed and written booklets. The once-edgy REM produces lavish box sets full of the band’s own artwork. Though collectors may order items from far-flung websites, entities like ArkivMusic.com burn discs and print booklets when ordered, addressing ultra-niche demands with a huge catalog, a business model in which a best-seller now sells around 400 copies. And it works -- no stock to be warehoused and no intermediate retailer taking a percentage. In pop music circles, artists finance their own recordings, disseminate them with do-it-yourself Internet promotion and reap the profits.
What are the major labels doing in response? Charging less overhead? No, more. They have invented something called a 360 deal, in which they take a cut of everything -- from music to T-shirts sales at concerts - in exchange for the sustained marketing clout that remains their exclusive domain. That makes sense for a band like the Miami-based sextet Tiempo Libre: Its new Sony disc, Bach in Havana, comes out of a 360 deal, but the band’s New World-meets-Old World fusion needs a big-label promotion to present the music as the next Gipsy Kings rather than some oddity.
The death of the musical object leaves industry people fretting about something larger: Will music lose its value? And underneath this concern lies a supreme irony: Will the pervasiveness of music result in the death of silence? Silence makes you hungry for more music. It allows you to hear in more detail. When music was still attached to a physical object, more of a decision was involved in listening. If people just turn on an iPod and listen to pretty much anything while walking down the street, doing laundry or enjoying other activities that previously didn’t have sound injected into our ears, could the death of silence translate into the death of music? It’s easy to foresee music being swallowed up by the incessant urban rumble, barely distinguishable from a passing subway and treated just as casually. Maybe it’s happening already.
TAKE OBIT'S FUNERAL POLL
Funerals are changing. Ever since Jessica Mitford's landmark muckracking book, The American Way of Death, exposed some of the more nefarious practices of the funeral industry, people have been choosing to forgo costly cookie cutter funeral packages in favor of more personalized ceremonies that seek to honor and celebrate the life of the departed in addition to mourning his or her death.
These days, as economic realities force funeral homes and entrepreneurs to offer more burial options, a family's choices are richer than ever. We, at Obit, are interested in what you think of this trend. Your thoughts will help us guide our editorial direction regarding funeral planning and end-of-life choices. And don't worry, your responses won't be written in stone. We are just trying to get a feel for what our readership thinks about this somewhat morbid topic that is getting more and more attention from the mainstream media.
TAKE THE POLL
As so often before, the jolt came from Michael Jackson, this time on his June 25th death, which inspired a sales surge comparable to Elvis Presley’s, but with a speed not possible even a few years ago. By noon the next day, Jackson discs - at least the ones that defined him as a solo artist - could not be bought, yet downloads were endlessly available. Of the 422,000 Jackson discs that were sold in the week after his death, half were downloads. Some retail stores would burn you a homemade copy of Thriller for little more than the standard $8.99 download price. Might those sales have been lost otherwise? After all, the demand had a unique emotional immediacy that wasn’t so much musical as commemorative.Nobody is saying that the recording industry is out of its coffin; the old days are too far gone. Sony sales plunged 95 percent from $2.2 billion in 2007 to $110 million in 2008. Jackson will help the bottom line of 2009, but not in the way he turned the industry around in the early 1980s, when disco music became unfashionable seemingly overnight. That sales surge - ongoing as news dribbles out about the King of Pop’s autopsy and final years - speaks to the recording industry’s idiosyncratic death and resurrection cycle, something not often seen in big business.
The fascinating 2009 book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Recording Industry in the Digital Age is a meticulously reported 301-page obituary by Steve Knopper, which illustrates that cycle -- amid the actions of extravagant, sometimes cocaine-addicted executives -- ending with the seismic domination of the download, which slipped out of the industry’s control before its chiefs could decide how to harness it. Disc copying and illegal sharing of music files meant that sales decreased even as consumption was increasing. One person can make such a big difference in a label’s fortunes that in June a Minnesota woman was told to pay $1.92 million to six recording labels for illegally downloading 1,702 songs (the fine is being appealed). Consider also the changes these invisible music files made in the urban landscape: Knopper reports that since 2003, 2,700 retail outlets have closed, including the once-ubiquitous Tower Records.
The problem is that music was treated too much like a commodity with a rational shelf life rather than as an unpredictable purchase guided by emotion. Unlike, say, shampoo, music is a product that touches people’s souls. And those souls become tired, even revolted, when a marketing mentality imposes a sameness on what’s recorded year after year.
Example: The disco bandwagon overstayed its welcome so long, and invited passengers so indiscriminately, that musical dinosaur Ethel Merman recorded her old hits dating back 40 years with a disco beat to cash in on the trend. The results were embarrassing. Disco’s limited possibilities had been fully explored early on, but few people in power noticed. Radio deejays and consumers took matters into their own hands, holding huge, public bonfires to dispose of their unwanted albums.Technological innovations have made music more sonically vivid (compact discs) and much more convenient (MP3 files accessed from the Internet). Yet industry moguls resisted such improvements because the old way of doing things seemed to be working just fine.
Knopper reports that by July 2000, Napster, the file-sharing program, had 20 million users - a concentration of consumer attention and energy that the industry sought to destroy rather than harness. While Napster was tied up in litigation, young computer geeks were devising ways around copying barriers. Many chapters later, even a surefire seller like Josh Groban’s Christmas album has disappointing sales thanks to compact-disc duplicating machines and MP3 files sent over the Internet. Why pay compact disc prices when a pretty-good-sounding file arrives by gmail?
Invisible files are problematic only for gift-giving, which points to the most fundamental change since violinist Fritz Kreisler and Enrico Caruso made recordings. Music is no longer a physical object, so it’s easy to think you shouldn’t have to pay much -- or anything.
In fact, the rock group Radiohead spent years on its In Rainbows album only to release it, for a limited time in 2008, as a free download. The giveaway created an excitement that, thanks to the disc’s high quality, accelerated what’s usually a years-long journey into classic-album status. A year later, because old technologies don’t disappear overnight, In Rainbows exists in five physical forms, from a lavishly packaged set with a concert DVD for $55.98 to a vinyl LP version for $16.98. Yes, vinyl. As Kate Hudson exclaimed in the rock film Almost Famous, “It’s all happening!” But not quite in the same way. When music does arrive attached to a physical object, chances are the reasons aren’t functional, as in years past, but decorative, more in the spirit of a coffee table book.
What’s dead or alive in this crazy industry? Hard to tell. Some quarters even call LPs a growth industry. Yet mass market hits seem to be largely gone. Small, cottage-industry endeavors (some call them boutique labels) are alive, but often with profits previous eras would have disdained, though those profits are less disbursed over middlemen. Classical consumers hang onto physical CDs partly because of the historic information about the music enclosed in beautifully designed and written booklets. The once-edgy REM produces lavish box sets full of the band’s own artwork. Though collectors may order items from far-flung websites, entities like ArkivMusic.com burn discs and print booklets when ordered, addressing ultra-niche demands with a huge catalog, a business model in which a best-seller now sells around 400 copies. And it works -- no stock to be warehoused and no intermediate retailer taking a percentage. In pop music circles, artists finance their own recordings, disseminate them with do-it-yourself Internet promotion and reap the profits.
What are the major labels doing in response? Charging less overhead? No, more. They have invented something called a 360 deal, in which they take a cut of everything -- from music to T-shirts sales at concerts - in exchange for the sustained marketing clout that remains their exclusive domain. That makes sense for a band like the Miami-based sextet Tiempo Libre: Its new Sony disc, Bach in Havana, comes out of a 360 deal, but the band’s New World-meets-Old World fusion needs a big-label promotion to present the music as the next Gipsy Kings rather than some oddity.The death of the musical object leaves industry people fretting about something larger: Will music lose its value? And underneath this concern lies a supreme irony: Will the pervasiveness of music result in the death of silence? Silence makes you hungry for more music. It allows you to hear in more detail. When music was still attached to a physical object, more of a decision was involved in listening. If people just turn on an iPod and listen to pretty much anything while walking down the street, doing laundry or enjoying other activities that previously didn’t have sound injected into our ears, could the death of silence translate into the death of music? It’s easy to foresee music being swallowed up by the incessant urban rumble, barely distinguishable from a passing subway and treated just as casually. Maybe it’s happening already.
TAKE OBIT'S FUNERAL POLL
Funerals are changing. Ever since Jessica Mitford's landmark muckracking book, The American Way of Death, exposed some of the more nefarious practices of the funeral industry, people have been choosing to forgo costly cookie cutter funeral packages in favor of more personalized ceremonies that seek to honor and celebrate the life of the departed in addition to mourning his or her death. These days, as economic realities force funeral homes and entrepreneurs to offer more burial options, a family's choices are richer than ever. We, at Obit, are interested in what you think of this trend. Your thoughts will help us guide our editorial direction regarding funeral planning and end-of-life choices. And don't worry, your responses won't be written in stone. We are just trying to get a feel for what our readership thinks about this somewhat morbid topic that is getting more and more attention from the mainstream media.
TAKE THE POLL
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