NY Times: Right And Wrong On Music Industry Failure

Charles M. Blow, responsible for "visual editorials" for the New York Times, has put together a shockingly expressive graphic and an accompanying op-ed piece that tell the story of the decline in product revenue, from a financial standpoint, of the music industry.

In the op-ed, Blow writes, "The problem is that if people can get the music they want for free, why would they ever buy it, or even steal it? They won't." I think that's true, but I also think it misses the point. The problem is that the music industry has whittled down the public's perception of its product to just that - the music itself - when it used to be so much more.

What's changed is the purchaser's perception of what they were purchasing. The CD was a wildly successful medium, for which customers paid a premium and which artists actually took a cut on their royalties to provide - even after it was clear that CDs cost a lot less to produce than LPs ever did.

The seeds of the music industry's destruction were buried within the CD's success. It taught a generation of music buyers that the only important thing about a release was the music itself. Instead of a well-designed package with liner notes, lyrics, and any other goodies borne of the mind of a creative team, customers got used to receiving a small plastic disc accompanied by an ever-cheaper case and a small booklet with tiny text on it serving as the "package".

When the music itself became the only product, and then Napster came along and proved that the distribution of the music itself could be accomplished for a price far lower than what the record companies were charging, the game was up. It's ironic that 1999 was the best year ever for music industry sales, because it was early the following year that they managed to shut down Napster - an entity that was probably doing more to promote a wider spectrum of the labels' output than any other medium.

I can't argue with Blow's view that there's a sunset rapidly approaching for the Music Industry As We Know It, but I think the idea that it's "free and legal streaming" that's killing the industry is less than reasonable. After all, there has been a free and legal way to listen to music, at very high quality, for a half-century: FM radio. Now, of course, FM radio is playing fewer songs than ever before, and people who listen to FM know they'll hear their favorite songs as long as they're willing to stand them. As soon as those songs burn out, there'll be other songs they don't need to buy to take their place.

Blow quotes a few studies, all of which point to the fact that music purchases among teens (the big bracket for the Music industry) are down and that, while file sharing is down, streaming service usage is up among the same age group. Ah-hah, sales go down, streaming goes up -- we've got ourselves a suspect in the Murder Of The Music Industry.

Those statistics may correlate, but they ignore what really counts, at a basic economic level: What do the people with money want to spend it on? And what is the Music Industry doing to see to it that it gets spent on their products?

The primary question really is: What's a teen with $20 in their pocket at the mall going to spend it on?

Probably on a DVD. Or a video game. Both will keep them entertained for hours.

With a maximum of 74 minutes playing time, three-quarters of which is usually filler, it sure as hell isn't going to be a CD.