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Accidental Wisdomby George Ziemann -- April 10, 2010 I used to edit an entertainment newspaper, which would run anywhere from 12 to 32 pages each week, depending on how much advertising there was. So I always had to maintain a pile of extra stories that I got off the entertainment wire, write ahead of time, etc., to fill up the space alloted for actual content. At 28 or 32 pages, I might get caught a little short, so I learned how to do stream-of-thought writing to fill space. Now that I'm older, I really only write like that when I'm pissed off and on a rant, which doesn't happen as much as it used to since I'm now properly medicated. I actually give things some thought as I write them, instead of just pouring out the thought I already had. As a result, sometimes when I reach the end, especially if I am trying to convey a thought to a hostile audience, I have gained a new perspective that I hadn't even considered before. I wrote most of this somewhere yesterday (to said hostile audience), but I don't think I can plagiarize myself, so here are a few things that have come to mind. It's actually kind of long, but each piece of this puzzle is important and I don't want to leave anything out. The Great Sales Crash
There are several reasons for this. People who work at record labels and artists who were selling a lot of CDs in the previous decade will quickly tell you that it's the Internet, mp3s, downloading and iPods. Napster started up and it's been downhill ever since. Don't even try to tell them there may be other possibilities, because they'll have none of it. A bunch of damn thieves are stealing their stuff. Their problem is that you can't see the forest if you're one of the trees. I'm not saying downloading hasn't caused the business problems. I just don't think that they have a handle on why. I also see a lot of other possibilities that factor in as well. Idiots At the Helm -- Just a few of the actions taken by the major record labels over the last 10 years in an attempt to escape the Spiral O' Death that's sucking them down the drain.
I think that's sufficient. With the exception of "Fire Everyone," all of these things have one thing in common -- they attack, offend, and or/insult people looking for music, with the people that paid for music and got DRM most likely to have been the first to be dissuaded from future purchases. The Replacement Cycle is Complete -- Everyone who wanted to replace one of their old vinyl records with a CD has either done so or the record labels never brought it forward to CD. Fading Careers -- If you're an artist who isn't making as much money from CD sales as you were 10 years ago, maybe you've peaked. How often do you put out new material? Are you touring as hard as you were 10 or 15 years ago? Or did you decide to kick back a little because the money was rolling in on a steady basis? Is your record label still pushing you like they used to? There are a few hundred factors like that that you've got to look at before you blame everything on mp3s and iPods. You know, all the things that have been going on in the music biz since it started. It's never been a guarantee of lifetime employment or income. When you started playing, didn't everyone tell you you not to take up music as a career? Tastes change, genres go away (or at least in hiding). Last year's hot new sound is, like, so last year, dude. And if you've been around long enough, maybe you outlived your audience. No one stays in high rotation forever. The Economy -- Gee, what's happend in real life over the past decade? Unemployment, foreclosures (with a second wave on the way), bank failures, a stock market tumble, tight credit, hurricanes, floods, the list goes on. When music sales were at their peak, the the sales charts matched up very close with a scaled chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They started diving together, too, but the DJIA got better, at least for a while. Sales are still in freefall. The Wars -- How many members of the American military, mostly in their 20s or 30s (which would seem like a prime music-buying demographic) are currently on the other side of the world? I didn't see an iTunes Middle East and I'm guessing it's even harder to find a record store in Baghdad or Kabul than it is in Phoenix. Video Games
-- In the 70's, listening to music was a ritualized behavior
for me, primarily because I hung out with musicians. We didn't
listen to music, we studied it. This involved sitting
passively (with a joint and/or beer in hand for maintaining this
passive state, repeat as necessary), no matter how intently you
were listening. Any conversation was usually about the song being
played, although sometimes we would watch TV with the sound off
and a record playing, especially if it was a football or baseball
game, which we could figure out just fine without Howard Cosell's
pithy remarks. I had non-musician friends who did this, too.
They just weren't as likely to ooh and aah over a drum fill or
a guitar riff.
And then there's the music part of it. All of the games have music that usually changes in response to where you are or what's going on. Along with other audio cues, it makes the idea of playing the game with a CD playing at the same time (or even listening to an iPod) inconvenient. There is a ton of music in a video game. So someone is getting paid to write it and play it, which I always thought was a good thing. And I've heard some instrumental tracks in games that I would have paid for on CD or from iTunes if a) they were even for sale, and b) I had a clue who they were by and what the name of it was. And then came Guitar Hero. More music than ever, you could identify it, and you could play along. Reality Check #1An honest look shows that there are far too many factors in play to just blame downloading. Taking that position requires such severe tunnel vision that you have to ignore a hell of a lot, just writing it off as peripheral activity that has nothing whatsoever to do with CD sales. All of it -- the economy, the war, the interactive competition, the normal ups and downs of an artist's career, their display of insulting antagonism to their customers. Has nothing to do with CD sales. Right. The Accidental Wisdom is RevealedOkay, it's time to step back and take a different look at the forest. And I mean wa-a-a-a-a-a-y back, maybe climb up a mountain to you can see the entire thing and how it relates to the world around it. First thing I see up from here are the filesharers. Don't have a current number, but there used to be about 30-35 million of them. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 307 million people in the U.S. today. Only 10-11% of them are filesharing, leading us to the following important fact and resulting question it brings up: Why can't you sell any damn records to us either? We don't appreciate the attitude, the accusations, the insults and, when you really think about it, the extremely arrogant sense of entitlement required to believe that just because we bought your last record, we're automatically going to shell out for every one you make at the same time you're calling us thieves. Fat fucking chance. We hear who the whiners are, we know who has a good attitude (Radiohead, NIN, Janis Ian, Tom Petty, Dave Matthews, for instance). I can honestly say that some of the things I've heard artists say has made their music unpleasant to listen to. I'll be listening to a song that I used to love, but all I can think of is what they've said in the recent past and think, What an asshole. Then it's time to change the station or, more likely, hit "Next" on my iPod and try to remember to uncheck that artist from the playlist the next time I sync it. Buy their next record? I don't think so. This brings us to the lawsuits, which nabbed 40,000 or so, leaving a mere 34,960,000 to go, so they might put a dent in it in 20 or 25 years. Probably still unaware of, or simply not caring about, what a horrible PR move it was in general, they began focusing on college students instead of continuing the random approach that they began with. This was a change in the character of the legal action. Another obvious fact, which is generalized but applies to most students who aren't rich kids or trust fund babies. They've never had any money. Seems as if concentrating on them as primary targets would not be the wisest course of action if your plan is to "teach them a lesson" and collect big bucks. Of course, the RIAA is smarter than that. They knew college kids didn't have any money. They expected one of three things to happen:
In addition to all of that nonsense, there is a second, canyon-like flaw in thinking that the activity of what anyone still young enough to be in college is hurting CD sales.
Uh-oh. That's going to be a tough reality to chew on. The college students aren't the ones who stopped buying music. It's the rest of us -- the loyal fans that carried the industry through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. We're the ones that paid for all the cocaine and hookers. We're the ones who made them rock stars. All of those college students? If they've got extra money to spend on music, it probably came from us. It's our kids they're hunting for. Yeah, that'll make me run right out and buy a record. Here's the truly crazy part of all of it. That's a pretty long list I just went through. While each and every item could have a negative effect on sales... primary cause of the CD slump. That's right. None of them. Oh, there are a couple of challengers on the list, and Guitar Hero probably gets the prize for being closest, but it only exposed the problem to a whole new group of music fans. As a result of Guitar Hero, my 13-year-old has arrived at the following conclusion: This is something I generally do not say, because I know the music is alive and well, hiding out until the dinosaurs die, maybe in Jersey. Besides, I'm 55. I'm supposed to think today's music sucks, drink Geritol and watch Lawrence Welk. My daughter and her friends would rather listen to the Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, Beatles, Stones and Ozzy than current "mainstream" pop music, as one can easily tell from the t-shirts they wear and what's on their iPods. When the teens reject the mainstream, it's obviously not really the mainstream. If you think about it, even a record that sells a million copies isn't exactly "popular" when only one-third of one percent of the population is interested. Only three percent of us bought last year's Beatles collection and it was the biggest seller in quite a few years, as far as I know. This brings us to what I think is the only reason downloading might be preventing people from buying. They download it, listen to it once, and realize that there were only one or two songs they liked on an album. So they buy the two songs and skip the album. The whole "try before you buy" approach isn't a threat because people want to steal music, it's a threat because the labels can no longer trick people into buying an entire album that's only got one halfway decent song on it, that being the one that they paid to have played repeatedly on the radio. The good news in that today's teens want rock and roll back. The bad news is that the people that should be giving it to them are offering up acts that use autotune in the studio, lip-sync live, strip down to their undies, using this and equally well-dressed dancers as a substitute for the experience of watching a band that sounds even better live than they do on record, delivering a performance and displaying virtuosity that makes you walk away with the feeling that you've just witnessed an event instead of a canned performance from a plastic cut-out doll. they're going to have to start making some again. It's really that easy, provided the lawyers and accountants who run things now haven't downsized everyone who used to know how to make a decent album. And to be totally honest, I don't think they can tell the difference. Music stopped being a priority the day they decided to start trying to make DRM, which was a year or two before Napster even reared its head. All the time, effort and money has gone into preventing that wayward 10 percent from hearing a song for free and completely ignoring the other 270 million of us that might actually buy a record if we ever heard anything that wasn't shallow, vapid, and/or aimed at pre-teens, who have even less money that the poor college kids. Some of the record labels used to be true houses of music -- Atlantic, A&M, even Warner and EMI. That's all over now. Citibank is expected to take over EMI in June. While that sounds grim, it could be the become the first record label in the world that has ever attempted (much less adopted) honest, accurate, generally approved accounting practices. But can bankers tell the difference between good music and crap any better than the lawyers and accountants? Wait a minute... they are accountants. Someone has to revive the idea of delivering good music. Then they have to go out, find it, get it recorded, tell people about it and give them an opportunity to hear it. Put it in people's faces somehow. instead of the mindless drivel they keep producing, some of which almost makes "Disco Duck" and "My Ding-a-ling" seem like high art forms in comparison. to make it sound "loud for the radio." Learn it. Love it. Live it. |
