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How Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry

Opinions — 20 May 2011

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How Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry

“The digital music business has been a war of attrition that nobody seems to be winning,” said David Goldberg, the former head of Yahoo music. “The CD is still disappearing, and nothing is replacing it in entirety as a revenue generator.” It’s no mystery that the wiring of our world has brought enormous changes in how we experience and use what’s been known in our lifetimes as intellectual property. The music business, in which I earned my living for the better part of three decades, is in freefall. More than half of the studios in Los Angeles that I’ve worked in are out of business or have gone off line, into the hands of wealthy individuals for personal use. I was surprised to hear half-a-year ago that the situation in New York is more severe. One of the more prominent pop music producers “joked” last year that these days you go to a record company office and the president of the company answers the door. Do a search for CD sales and you’ll find page after page of bad news. (See CNN’s report from early last year: (http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/) Purchased digital downloads haven’t kept pace despite Apple’s powerful presence in the technology world – indeed, Apple has become the dominant player by virtue of being the sexiest path to digital audio files. The most often cited figure is that 95% of downloads are free (i.e. illegal). And needless to say, our current fiscal dilemma hasn’t helped the average music lover have so-called disposable income.

What happened?

Writing from the perspective of May 2011, as we struggle to grasp whether we’re wallowing in the Great Recession or teetering on the brink of a plunge into the New Depression, its maybe a bit smug to contemplate a philosophical silver lining to all this mess. And I’m going to do it anyway.

My life has never been especially difficult: I’ve been lucky, I‘ve been broke, I’ve been persistent and succeeded, and I’ve failed. But I come from people who had real hardship, so its difficult to assess just how much one is suffering on a relative time-line (or the time-line of one’s relatives). I’m still in my home (although sometimes just barely) and many people already aren’t. Nonetheless, like any crisis its an opportunity to see; and we can see that seeds of this crisis were planted long ago.

One of the canaries in our common coal mine was my industry – the music business. And Wall Street destroyed the music business in the same way it has destroyed so many other vital industries, by gutting and eviscerating, rather than building. The record industry would like you to believe it began with Napster, with the rise of the web, with Stewart Brand’s aphorism that “information wants to be free.” There are dozens of issues around those points, no argument (except well-financed legal ones of course).

orourke How Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry

The libertarian humorist P.J O’Rourke complains with little humor that he is no longer an author, he is a content-provider. So have many of us become, primarily to the benefit of the ISP’s – they use us to sell bandwidth. You pay for that and not for what we create. OK, those arguments are sound. But they’re a little late. Downloading was only the final nail in the wooden kimono – that’s where it ended. The coffin was carefully built over a couple decades by a series of decisions made theoretically for the benefit of shareholders of the corporations which owned the record companies. I say theoretically because we need to have a debate about what we mean by “interest”, and as a result of the latest global financial debacle we’ve finally begun that debate; we’ve begun to ask ourselves just what constitutes self-interest.

A bit of history

The recording industry that most of us grew up with was started mostly by music fans, by individuals: the Ertegun brothers and Jerry Wexler, Frank Sinatra, Herb Alpert. Its not news that these companies outgrew their sometimes humble beginnings; it is news that there was a remarkable and unexpected explosion of growth in these companies. In the early 70s music spending (you and me) outpaced movies and sports by a large margin. The recent PBS documentary “Troubadours” cites figures for 1973 of $2 billion for music, $1.3 billion for movies and $607 million for sports – different days, indeed. 40 years ago, music was cultural power in a way nothing else was. The next couple decades saw a transformation into major business by many familiar changes, small and large.

One of these phenomena, which ultimately affected all sorts of businesses, was the rise of the MBA, the educational stream that taught enormous numbers of uncreative thinkers that making money was an end in itself. If I were to meet someone who argued that this was the primary trigger that began our downslide, they wouldn’t get an argument from me. Where money was to be made, MBAs infested it. But the gradual assumption of decision making power by MBAs in record companies was barely noticeable at first.

sony cd ad hires How Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry

Probably the most significant change of course was the advent of the CD. Many of us will remember it, or a least we’ve heard the tale a thousand times: “consumers” rushed to embrace the new technology in the mid to late 80s – repurchasing their collection, throwing aside those inconvenient and less-than-perfect LPs – and the result was a massive bump in the revenue stream of record companies small and large. Do we remember the narrative regarding pricing? Yes, initially, prices were high, much higher than LPs but that was because there were so few manufacturing plants. Economies of scale would bring prices down once the manufacturing had caught up to the demand. In the meantime, the revenue bump was an irresistible draw – money attracts money, its said.

At the end of the 80s, the last truly independent large company, A&M Records, was sold by owners Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss to Polygram for a reported half-billion dollars (which seems a relatively small figure 22 years later). Polygram was primarily a film company.

One album I worked on cost around a quarter-million to make. If you also factor in the performer’s first attempt at a record (which was shelved) and the cost of videos and touring, maybe a million dollars was spent. But the album generated a reported $200,000,000 in grosses. A film might do the same, at an up-front cost of $50,000,000. If you think only of the numbers, a hit album could generate as much income as a hit movie at a tiny percentage of the production cost. With those kinds of numbers, throwing money at a large number of record productions is a reasonable investment strategy compared to making movies. But just as money attracts money, money is addictive: shareholders want to see constant growth and a steadily improving stream of quarterly reports. They get used to it or they get gone. And the 1996 Telecommunications Act opened all doors to all comers.

Company after company was purchased, merged, long-time employees dumped, profits extracted. Competition was reduced. From the Common Cause report: Unintended Consequences and Lessons Learned – The Fallout From the Telecommunications Act of 1996: “Instead, the public got more media concentration, less diversity, and higher prices.“

Those shiny little discs

CD2 How Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry

The end of the millennium saw other unanticipated factors. Those shiny little discs, such a boon to record companies a decade earlier, were manufactured by companies who had no interest in the data embedded in them. These manufacturers did in fact experience, and a pass along, economies of scale. But how much sense did it make for a music lover to buy a single CD for almost $20 along with their $6 espresso and yet find a stack of 100 blank CDs available elsewhere for $10? A true music devotee understood that they weren’t really paying for the disc, they were paying for the art. But the great mass of music buyers are not connoisseurs – they want ease, they want convenience, they want a good deal. The artifact was no longer a good deal for anyone but shareholders and executives. In my view, buyers started to rebel.

I recall a conversation with a record exec in the late 90’s regarding value: my perspective was that if these labels didn’t start returning a sense of value to their customer base, they were in trouble. Asked rhetorically what I thought would be the right response to the situation, my answer was of no help: records. Vinyl. I didn’t see anything else they could do to re-engage the customer but to provide something unique and special. But it speaks to a self-awareness of the situation the labels were in – some people they knew they were losing their audience and the owners of pieces of their company, large or small, were demanding positive results every 3 months. Its easy to see in hindsight what the response was: no risk, nothing gambled, no careers developed, louder and louder recordings to get attention compared to the last one. There are of course sound ways to apply the shareholder approach to business; I’m not arguing against the entire system. But when either the executives or the shareholders themselves have a specifically short-term definition of interest, when the value of and for the customer that supports the profit isn’t considered, then the system breaks down, and breaks the industry down with it. A business, no different than any other kind of organism, is completely reliant on the health of the environment it functions in. When the business damages its own environment, it can’t expect to survive in good health.

stiglitz3 How Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry

The Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz cited Alexis de Tocqueville in a piece in Vanity Fair recently. He wrote: “Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.” ( http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105)

But record companies were busily engaged in royally insulting their customers throughout the 90s. Despite steady inflation, prices should have come down once blank CDs were showing up everywhere for pennies apiece. Music buyers knew they were paying far more for the physical artifact than it was worth for the one or two songs desired. This is usually not a problem for the hardcore fan, but the industry had long since lost its way in knowing who they were or what they wanted. The music lovers at record companies who began as fans had been squeezed out by MBAs in all the mergers. And in order to come up with positive quarterly growth they apparently saw no other way out (except perhaps to cash out themselves and go to another industry). This implicitly antagonistic relationship wasn’t unique to the record business – but unlike most other industries, it was about to become possible to completely bypass the established distribution and revenue systems. With the advent of Napster, despite the slow-grinding legal process, a disengaged customer, trained to value past catalogue over new product, was suddenly liberated to freely distribute music on his or her own. And the cards started tumbling out of the house they made.

Another little tale from the trenches: 5 or 6 years ago I had a conversation with an A&R (1) executive at Universal. I asked him what he would do if I brought him a truly astonishing 45-year-old singer. He said. “Nothing.” But, I persisted, its people like me who actually still are willing to buy music, who will spend the money. He responded, “But I don’t know how to reach you.” And yet, in an NPR story about music sales last year (http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/01/06/132694660/2010-was-a-very-bad-year-for-trying-to-sell-music), we read this: Some people still buy physical albums. Like, for example, people who buy Susan Boyle records. Another name for these people might be older purchasers, but it’s hard to know and we wouldn’t want to make anyone upset, since they’re basically single-handedly keeping the music industry afloat. This is an industry that has abandoned its foundations, and has willfully walked out a window, and is dangling by its fingertips to a ledge.

POSTSCRIPT

rosanne cash How Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry

Not quite 40 years since music was a powerful cultural force, the landscape has changed, radically (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/video-games-score-5-of-u-s-household-entertainment-budget/). Music has become a small percentage of what we consume. For myself, for other musicians, I have no predictions for what the future will bring. Last summer I saw my friend Rosanne Cash give a talk  and when asked about the state of music her reply was that there is no money in recording royalties for musicians anymore, only on the road. But the Great Recession has taken a toll on that too. As I hope I’ve made clear, I do my best to take a philosophical view – that this is a reset. Perhaps by making music itself nearly worthless to Wall Street, music itself can flourish again. There are many signs of that. Footnote: 1 – A & R = Artists and Repertoire: these are the folks who traditionally found and signed artists and connected them with songs.

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About Author

Dan Schwartz

Dan Schwartz, musician, writer, producer and Audiophile has been making music from a very early age. Many will know Dan as the assistant producer, bass player and band member of the Tuesday Night Music Club who, along with Bill Bottrell and Sheryl Crow, produced her most famous album with the hit song "all I want to do". The album has since sold over 10 million copies. On the other hand, Dan is very proud of his work with the remarkable Rosanne Cash, playing bass on the Black Cadillac Album. Dan was also a reviewer for the Absolute Sound Magazine for many years, owns a pile of phenomenal analog recording gear and instruments, including complete and original large modular Moog synthesizer that PS Audio CEO McGowan is quite envious of and has one of the best sets of ears in the business. Dan lives in Los Angeles California. He still has all his records.

(21) Readers Comments

  1. DOB

    May 20, 2011 at 6:49 pm

    Phewf!!! So that explains it!
    And all these years I thought it was all my fault.

    Although Roseanne said there’s no money in making masters, I would say there’s no money in making masters for the consumer market. Madison Avenue still pays some hefty license fees. I remember sitting in a Warner Chappell writers meeting when they told us The Doors had just turned down $22 million for a 10 year license for the Cadillac STS “Breakthrough” campaign. And it sounds like Roseanne is as driven by the bottom line as Wall St. and the rest of us.

    We in the music biz were certainly the coal mine canaries for the Wall St. strip-miners, but without investors and investment bankers to fund labels, musicians would never have made any records at all. And a record should be just that; a historical record of a historical event. If your performance isn’t a historical event that is so unique and spectacular that one feels it should be recorded for later generations to hear, like say a Robert Johnson performance or some Smithsonian field recording, maybe it’s better left unheard. At the end of the day, how many great records were really made compared with how many really bad records.

    And with advances in technology, nothing is stopping us right now from making great records and selling them out of our guitar cases on the Santa Monica Promenade, except for the fact that we were spoiled by the amount of money we used to make and feel a false sense of entitlement to being monetarily compensated for it now to the same degree.

    But that’s not the way business works. It’s about trends. And if record companies thought they could have made more money putting peanut butter on little plastic discs instead of music, then that’s what they would have done. As it is, we were fortunate to have made more money than Mozart did for largely mediocre music by comparison.

    Still, an enlightening article. So thanks.

  2. dwaved

    May 20, 2011 at 9:24 pm

    I agree DOB. And I don’t think anything you say here contradicts the points our brethren author makes. Investors and businessmen, as “connected” as they may have been, created the music biz and built it so good that the professional gangstas decided it was a goldmine. They then built it so good and big that they couldn’t keep up with the fast pace of art and culture. Case in point.. on this, the eve of the rapture, I’m reminded of a song written by a 19 yr. old kid from Brooklyn named PF Sloan called “Eve of Destruction”. It came out in 1965 and within a few weeks of being written and recorded, was a No. 1 record. It was a one hit wonder for the singer (Barry McGuire) which shows us how, back then, the pulse of the music scene was quick and the “hip” were at the front of the curve, leading the way. The “businessmen” didn’t care to be involved creatively and the path to the consumer was immediate and local via radio. A label rep could literally walk into the station, throw a case of scotch on the DJ’s desk and get a song played to see what kind of reaction it would get. And if it reacted well, more dough was spent. Contrast that to breaking a song in 2000 via Clear Channel. Really it’s just a matter of becoming too big and complicated to keep up. And so “Chocolate Rain” and “Friday” on youtube are probably the closest we can now come to something like that DJ’s desk. But there’s no real money making business plan attached to that yet.

  3. MisterH

    May 23, 2011 at 1:20 pm

    Dear Dan,
    You offer an interesting perspective on the “destruction” of the old music business but your analysis begs this fundamental question:

    “Why is the demise of that business model of concern to anyone other than those who directly profited from it?”

    Should my takeaway be that I must feel outrage because Roseanne Cash can’t count on mechanical royalties any longer?

    Should I be pining for the days when the “giants’ of the old music business like Mo Ostin, Clive Davis and Ahmet Ertegun pulled all the levers?

    Your assessment seems to be that had it not been for greedy MBA’s the paradise that you claim is lost would still be thriving and giving us music lovers… what exactly?
    - There is no shortage of music.
    - There is no shortage of talent
    - There’s still an abundance of forgettable garbage as there was in the glory years you want back.

    Let me offer you a counter-argument to your list of grievances and to the sins ostensibly committed by greedy banksters:

    - Technological change (digital) was the decisive blow to record company pricing and business models and the artificially high barrier to entry it created. As you acknowledged, you don’t have to buy an album of 13 songs to get the one track you like.

    - Aspiring musicians don’t need to expend an amount of money equal to a first time home purchase to get an album made. Digital technology has put creative production tools in the hands of musicians and producers that 30 years ago could only be accessed by the most successful and well-heeled artists and record companies. [whether or not anything worth listening has been created as a result is another question entirely]

    - In the better days for which you seem to be yearning, only the big labels had any chance in the retail distribution chain. Independent labels and solo entrepreneurs had very little hope of getting much in the way of retail presence.

    - In fact, when one looks at the structure of the old record business one sees a very small, insular and tightly controlled cartel. Aspiring artists had only one path to getting heard: you had to be signed by a major label. So please tell me again why I should mourn their passing?

    Finally, I don’t understand your linkage to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. First, none of the key provisions in that legislation had any direct connection to the music business. It dealt with common carrier policy, cross-ownership limitations and new policies and fees for Telecom sub-carrier licensing agreements. Stranger still, you cite Common Cause’s verdict that the act resulted in “greater concentration of ownership, less diversity and higher prices” when in fact the exact opposite has happened. Despite what the economic illiterates at Common Dreams may believe, prices for services are in fact lower and competition abounds; especially compared to what they were in 1996. Local phone services, long-distance carrier fees and high-speed internet services cost much less than they did in 1996. As to the “less diversity” complaint, I am not sure what that’s about. Perhaps the people who spend their time calibrating a diversity index can explain it to me. I don’t seem to recall a whole lot of diversity in the music business of 30 years ago.

    In fact, I could take your entire argument and apply it to the motion picture business or commercial network television. They too are finding that their old business model is being rendered obsolete as consumers find other ways to spend their money and leisure time.

  4. Dan Schwartz

    May 23, 2011 at 1:36 pm

    Your counterargument is my argument.

    People see what they want to see.

  5. May 24, 2011 at 11:13 am

    Excellent article, what existed before the CD and the internet was far from perfect but more people and musicians made careers from the Music Industry. Today most musicians cannot make a living and the very few wealthy executives and musicians take a massive percentage of the dwindling amount of money made.
    See todays article in Digital Music News

    “The Music Industry: It’s Becoming a Third World “Country…http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/052311third

  6. Dan Schwartz

    May 24, 2011 at 11:28 am

    Thanks for that link. A page away I find this statement, about a guy from the neighborhood here:

    “In 2007, for example, Cohen scored a cool $4.7 million. By the summer of 2008, Cohen cashed shares totaling $6.8 million, enough to prompt a near-10 percent decline in broader share values.”

    And there it is.

  7. May 27, 2011 at 9:54 pm

    Thanks for this article. It brings together a lot of things I have read, and makes a lot of sense. For what it’s worth, Roseanne Cash’s statement about touring is common wisdom among performing musicians these days.

    And to MisterH, I guess my takeaway is that yes, you should feel outrage that Roseanne Cash can’t count on mechanical royalties. Because she should be entitled to them, because a lot more of her music is in circulation than was paid for. You can make the argument that it isn’t worth the price, or whatever you like, but whether we want to blame consumers who pirate directly, or the chain of events (and people) who made that possible, the point is that recorded music is primarily unprofitable because people don’t buy it, but instead steal it.

    And why is that a problem? Well, because it either comes from or accompanies a general disrespect for the work that musicians do. Making music isn’t free, but people now expect music to be free or cheap.

    Yes, records still get made, because musicians care deeply about making records– an art form apart from live performance– and will go into debt to continue making them. From a business standpoint, artists do it to have something to promote and tour around (which can sometimes make money), but many I know would just do it anyway because they love to create recordings.

    You could make the argument that lots of visual artists create art and don’t get paid, and that is valid. However, most of them don’t achieve “success” in terms of name recognition while being endlessly ripped off. They are either relatively unknown, or getting paid. I suppose I’m bothered by the fact that so many musicians are doing their jobs, creating great recordings (on their own dime), hustling their asses off at gigs and on tour, and then being ripped off.

    But, I suppose we live in a culture, currently, that allows much more unfair things to happen (great wealth disparity, lots of hungry children, limited access to healthcare),so I’m not super surprised. Just want to point out that sometimes the golden days people long for are simply ones when it perhaps was a little harder (though not impossible by any means) to steal from people, and when the cult of the bottom line as a moral good was not worshiped so completely.

    Don’t mean to sound completely cynical. I think excellent music is being made, but the health of the art is in spite of, not because of, many of these developments, in my opinion.

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  9. Larry

    May 31, 2011 at 3:49 pm

    Enjoyed the article in a Schadenfreude kind of way.

    Your a good writer but if you sling guitar for the likes of Rosanne you must be one hell of a player.

    Rosanne Cash is an American Treasure and shoud be getting every penny of royalty money available. I for one want her to keep recording.

  10. SB

    May 31, 2011 at 5:25 pm

    I’m not in the music industry, but Mr. Schwartz’s description sounds accurate in effect. I’m not sure I agree with the underlying reason though.

    Having worked with a lot of MBAs over the years, I don’t think Mr. Schwartz’s generalization of intent is useful (these kinds of generalizations rarely are). The MBA creed (at least as I was taught it in the 1980′s) had nothing to do with making money as an end in and of itself. Sure, there are plenty of people in any field (including general management MBA’s) that do mediocre, or improperly understood self-serving acts.

    One key concept in most MBA curricula is applying statistics and decision-science to business management scenarios. When this is done in a thorough, considered way, it often produces benefits for all parties involved. When it is done in micro-optimized ways, or ways that do not consider outside factors, it leads to false results.

    To me, the info Mr. Schwartz presented feels like MBA’s micro-optimizing decisions without maintaining awareness that if everyone acts the same way, the ship sinks. It feels like MBA’s trying to create a series of repeatable successes the way we usually do . . . analytically, methodically, and with serious risk management. Great for commodity-strategized businesses, but . . .

    Sounds like a really crappy way to create art, though.

    Okay, I guess I agree with Mr. Schwart after all!

  11. Dan Schwartz

    May 31, 2011 at 5:32 pm

    Here’s a lift from a professional forum in which the article is being discussed:

    “I remember years ago – in another life when I was studying for a business degree – reading in a management text book this rather interesting piece of information.

    “I paraphrase here:

    ” ‘When a company that is creatively driven changes tack and becomes managed by the bean counters…in 100% of cases that business will fail.’ “

    • MisterH

      June 3, 2011 at 6:44 pm

      Sure, most of us who live for music would agree with the “sentiment” you’ve expressed about ‘bean counters” vs. true music lovers. The trouble is, sentiment in this regard is meaningless when you’re attempting to build a logical argument that explains the reversed fortunes of the music industry.

      Your assertion is that “Wall Street Destroyed the Music Industry. Nowhere do you offer specific evidence that ties the current malaise to anything bankers or MBA’s actually did other than I suppose being unhip and more concerned with making a buck instead of making great art. How exactly does that make them the cause of what ails the business?

      And what exactly ails the business? Both yourself and other commenters on this thread all seem to agree that the core problem is two-fold:

      1) Total retail sales (both digital downloads and CD’s) have continued to decline. Result: songwriters and performers’ income from mechanical royalties has taken a big hit. Record labels are a a mere shadow of what they used to be.

      2) “Digital” has made it easy for people to acquire recorded music without paying for it. Result: artists and publishers are not being compensated for their work.

      I ask your indulgence by engaging in a simple “what-if” scenario:
      What if the “Wall Streeters” who you believe caused this had never set foot in the record biz at all? Do you believe that the current conditions and outcomes as described in 1 & 2 would have been any different ? If so, I’d sure like to read your theory on that

      • Dan Schwartz

        June 4, 2011 at 12:16 pm

        In response to the “What-if” question – as its put its so devoid of important parameters that it really can’t be answered the way its asked. There are too many aspects missing. But I’ll go this way with it – IF the Wall St. mentality hadn’t infected the business as it was, then I think there is a chance that the people who had built it and understood it would have been fully aware that the product that they produced and which kept its customer base engaged, was music. As it happened though, once the model changed, the primary product of the industry became share price – the customer being addressed was no longer a music lover, but a stock buyer. And that led to very different choices.

  12. John Paver

    May 31, 2011 at 7:11 pm

    I want to start by saying that I appreciate the insights shown by all of the people from the writer of the article to the high level of the responses from those commenting. I also want to state that as a consumer of artistic product such as LPs, 8 Tracks, Cassettes, CDs, DVDs and now SACDs, that you are overlooking one important item……, Me, the typical buyer.

    The Musical Industry including the organizations that produce new content, the companies who produce better and better equipment for replay and the watchdog groups who offer their critical assessment to allow me to make the ‘easy decision’ all overlook one item. We are not idiots.

    Does anyone in the Industry stop and think that we attach value to what we are receiving from you? If we as consumers use venues as Napster to acquire a song we have heard some 2,000 times on the pop stations could it be that we feel we may have paid enough for that copy? Think about it. If I build something and patent it and get a fifteen year run on production and licensing, do I still deserve or require the initial high returns on an item that has had its development costs covered a zillion times over?

    Through Apple? A lesser quality download?

    Nonsense.

    The fact that most people using the iTunes Store don’t know any better is nothing more than a continuance of preying on the public to squeeze every last shekel out of the public.

    I am not annoyed by the callous attitude that the music industry has used to justify their pricing and greed, but they should be on notice that you can’t get blood from a stone after a while.

    I dunno, I think that the industry should be turned on its ear and allowed to crash and burn like any other business that has gotten out of control.

    Of course, we will probably see some Obama money dealt out to prop up another poorly run operation…..

  13. JJ Falkowski

    June 1, 2011 at 1:34 am

    I hear, the only to blame are the Wall Street, downloads and record executives. But what about the “content” itself ? Most of the new releases are crap, sorry. Why the public should buy them ? Of course, there are exceptions, including beforementioned Mrs Cash, but they are few and far between. Sure, the sales of the CDs and music in general are diminishing, but how many versions of Beethoven’s 5th or remasters of Pink Floyd can we possibly have ?

  14. larsmusik

    June 1, 2011 at 8:53 am

    Congratulations on a well-thought-out essay Dan. You have done better than most who tackle what is by now a standard journalistic set piece, the “what went wrong” article. (By comparison, see the May 2011 Stereophile page 3 ditty “When the Music’s Over,” a lame effort by a usually reliable writer.)

    People who write about the death of the music industry often point in the general direction of three culprits: (1) The greedheads did it; once the MBA types took over, we were done for. (2) Digital did it; once the music was easily and infinitely replicable by anyone, we were done for. (3) The musicians and their handlers did it; today’s music sucks. Bring back Steely Dan.

    Of these three points, (3) is the most easily dismissable. There’s still good stuff out there. I’m tired of hearing rants from people who left their ears and hearts back in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s. Get over it. Maybe you will have to work a little harder to find music you can love, so, OK, blame Clear Channel for that. But part of it is that your standards have risen, your tastes have changed. (This is a nice way of saying you’re now more mature, and you’ll need to start monitoring yourself for unseemly geezer outbursts.)

    Points (1) and (2) make more sense. Undoubtedly the rise of a more efficient management class, dedicated to quarterly profits and M&A as a dominant strategy, helped squeeze out people in the business who actually understood and loved music. But it couldn’t have happened without the digital revolution taking place around the same time. Together these two phenomena created a Perfect Storm for the industry, a kind of destructive synergy that led to the cataclysm. (I think this is Schwartz’s view as well.)

    But you know what? Maybe we don’t need to focus on all that anymore. We would be better off if we looked ahead somehow. Maybe the death of the record giants will mean more people listening to local music, to live music. Maybe it will mean people developing more insight and discernment as fans. Maybe – just maybe – it will lead to the end of Clear Channel and the Disney/Orlando Entertainment Axis of Evil too.

    I could live with that.

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  18. Dan Schwartz

    October 14, 2011 at 8:37 am

    I’ve begun to think that the model of a locked down internet that Steve jobs was busy developing may be the solution for being able to make money by selling music again.

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