Iain Dale has a guest blog today: The Death Of The Record Industry.
This is mostly about file sharing and the major label’s attempts to eradicate the sharing of music.
Firstly, they will never do this. They are fighting a losing war. They’ll target one method and another will be invented. Encryption is starting to become common place so you cannot tell what is being downloaded and anonymising functions are sure to be on the way if the record industry makes life too difficult.
The record industry is not adapting to the Internet very well. Rather than seeing file sharing as a great way to advertise, they want to crack down on it. Rather than admitting that CDs and legal downloads are over priced, they want to keep the prices high.
They do not want to change their business model, so rather than adapt to market conditions, they do what most big business does, they go cap in hand to the government and the government gives them what they want.
Personally I will celebrate the death of the major labels, they do not work in the interests of the artists as they claim. Only a few artists ever make much money from them as this article by Steve Albini shows.
There’s plenty of alternative models which could evolve if allowed, and they would offer greater opportunities to artists and music fans.
Currently there’s two groups of musicians who are pursuing the new world of music. Lots of small, new bands, are using myspace, facebook and file sharing to spread their music and try and get fans who will buy their CDs and records and their merchandise.
Then there are a few big artists who experiment with new ways to distribute their music. Radiohead get lots of press, but they aren’t sticking with their experiments. More interesting is Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
Having finally escaped from the clutches of his label (after telling Australian fans to steal his music due to high CD prices amongst other things), he’s set out on his own.
Since then he’s released a 4 disc set of experimental music, a more standard album and released an (excellent) album by Saul Williams.
His own music has been released under a Creative Commons license which encourages sharing and remixing. The masters have been released and an official site has been put up for remixes.
The 4 disc set is available for download for $5 or as a standard CD or as a deluxe package (there was also a super-deluxe package which is now sold out).
The most recent album was released for free, as a thank you to his fans for sticking with him. A digipack with a DVD has also been released and is no doubt selling well.
This activity is far more than in the past when its taken 5 years for him to release an album (part of the increase in productivity is almost certainly down to sorting out other aspects of his life too)
This has had interesting results. The money raised from the Saul Williams album has been disappointing, more people opting to just download the album rather than pay for the high quality version, but it remains to be seen what the marketing value might have been.
The Nine Inch Nails material however has been very successful.
The band is also now touring, and no doubt making money from merchandise.
Its good to have big name acts trying out methods of marketing and distribution with today’s technology. They can pioneer these methods, seeing what works and what doesn’t. Others with less money and fame can then modify and experiment with less risk.
I hope that we will also see communities of artists and fans develop to help promote and distribute music. More established artists taking newer ones under their wings a bit will also encourage the development of music (this already happens to an extent with many bands getting a leg up touring as support for major bands at the headliner’s request).
This could all lead to revitalised music industry with more variety around.
