

Music Industry Sales Rise, and Digital Revenue Gets the Credit - rubikscube
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-records-first-revenue-increase-since-1999.html

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mikegioia
_“If there is a lesson to take away, it is probably that the earlier you can
embrace new business models and services, the better,” said Paul Brindley,
chief executive of Music Ally, a consulting firm in London._

Oh really? That lesson wasn't learned when VHS was created? Or cassette tapes?
Or CDs? Or DVDs? Or e-books? Or when millions upon millions of their customers
preferred to download music instead of purchase a disc? What the hell were
these guys doing for the last 15 years?

It's great that they're "embracing digital". That phrase is used by every
aging exec in every industry now. The real question is how will they handle
kids who create youtube mashups of songs. I guarantee they still file DMCA
takedowns for years to come when in fact, THAT is yet another "new business
model and service" that could help the music industry.

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hkmurakami
_What the hell were these guys doing for the last 15 years?_

Lobbying.

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christiansmith
I suspect this will turn out to be a "dead cat bounce"[1]. The record industry
still hasn't figured out that its customers are actually the musicians, not
the audience. Musicians aren't expendable laborers, they're businesses that
need various kinds of services in order to deliver to their own customers
(audiences). If the labels really want to make a meaningful place for
themselves in the post-filesharing universe, they first need to correct this
perversely inverted relationship.

[1] <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deadcatbounce.asp>

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sanderjd
I don't follow the music business, but I'm certain there are companies that
have had this insight and will be major players in the next generation of the
industry. Anybody know who they are?

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jeremysmyth
_“At the beginning of the digital revolution it was common to say that digital
was killing music,” said Edgar Berger, chief executive of the international
arm of Sony Music Entertainment. Now, he added, it could be said “that digital
is saving music.”_

This is what I want to hear from music executives, along with other commentary
in the article that mentions subscription services like Spotify.

The sooner the industry realises that what customers want is _ease of access_
, above and beyond _piracy_ , and that piracy isn't actually a threat if you
give customers what they want, then the sooner we can get beyond this war on
digital media that's been a blight on computing for the last decade.

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mikegioia
Why the hell does it take 14 years to come to this realization, when ALL SIGNS
were pointing towards digital saving the music industry?

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christiansmith
Pride, avarice, sloth and wrath. Did I miss anything? ;-)

~~~
hkmurakami
Fear, incompetence, risk aversion, agency problems, etc.

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ivancdg
The damage has been done. The major labels (major now only in terms of
increasingly dubious marketing clout) now spend most of their 'creative'
energy scouting do-it-yourself musicians rather than producing great
music...which was, initially, what distinguished them from the little guys.

This leveling of the playing field was supposed to be a great thing for
everyone except the majors.

But as a listener, I bemoan that the output quality of the majors has dropped
so much (especially in classical music). In order to get access to first
class, interesting music, it is becoming increasingly necessary to do tons of
research.

The bigger picture is this: would you invest in a business that celebrated
_not_ losing revenue for the first time in over a decade? I wouldn't.

Edit: thank you, pgsandstrom

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pgsandstrom
They haven't been losing money since -99, their revenue has been shrinking.

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ivancdg
Thank you, I made the correction.

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ericcholis
So, in other words, instead of pioneering the digital age of music they spent
the better portion of last 14 years fighting it.

However, kudos to the consumer for forcing such a monolithic industry into
changing for the better.

~~~
hkmurakami
_So, in other words, instead of pioneering the digital age of music they spent
the better portion of last 14 years fighting it._

If Sony couldn't embrace digital music when it first arrived in the 90's, then
I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that less technically forward
thinking firms didn't jump on board readily.

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nailer
> If Sony couldn't embrace digital music when it first arrived in the 90's

I know Phillips created the CD, but Sony did it's bit embracing digital with
its DiscMan products in the nineties. The issue is more about whether they
embraced the internet as a means of distribution. ;-)

~~~
hkmurakami
Right, not to mention their draconian anti-cd-ripping policies.

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islon
Digital was never killing music. Stupidity, greed and failure to cope with
reality were killing music. (By music he meant the phonographic industry).

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snarfy
Billboard #1 songs of 2000-2009
<http://www.digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/best_billbord6.html>

Now, compare the previous decades. 1999 is the last time they made anything
good (and even that is questionable). They can blame piracy or the internet
all they want but really it's their product that sucks.

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logn
This is around the time that Clear Channel bought up lots of stations. Combine
that with piracy which I think caused people to seek out old/existing music
they were previously familiar with, and it stagnated the new music. You simply
can't have Clear Channel and media conglomerates choosing the hits and expect
good results. I think the Internet now does a much better job of generating
organic growth of talent and hits, and AM/FM is largely irrelevant.

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randomdata
Even for new music, I remember in the same timeframe always saying that there
was no need to buy the CD, I could just turn on the radio and hear the song I
wanted to hear within five minutes. The internet was an easy scapegoat, but I
agree that broadcast radio was the real downfall of the industry during that
time.

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newishuser
Reporting Revenue is a hugely political affair. There are many ways to
manipulate that number and it's not really a direct measurement of the health
of the industry. It's only real use is for pointing at and shouting "look at
what new fangled technology is doing to us. we must restrict everything."

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intopieces
>It's only real use is for pointing at and shouting "look at what new fangled
technology is doing to us. we must restrict everything."

Absolutely correct. Tim Wu illustrates this beautifully in "The Master Switch:
The Rise and Fall of Information Empires." Basically, disruptive technology is
nixed because it's cheaper to defend your entrenched method than to sail off
into unknown waters, open to competition.

My favorite example from the book is Bell Laboratories, who invented a machine
that could answer a telephone and record what the speaker was saying in the
1920s, but killed the project because they believed that people would stop
using phones.

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erikschoster
I wonder if these numbers take into account direct sales to musicians on
services like bandcamp. I assume the article mostly (entirely?) refers to
publicly reporting music distribution & publishing companies. If so, there's a
significant part of this story missing.

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mindslight
Increased funding for heavy-handed lawsuits, coercing ISPs to monitor and
interfere with subscribers, lobbying for more personally invasive laws, and
pushing locked down "trusted" computing. Yay!

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grimey27
Surprising to me that vinyl got no mention here. I know it's only a relatively
small bump, but vinyl sales have been on the rise year over year for the past
few.

