Sour Notes
For the last two years, we’ve been hearing sob stories from the multinational media conglomerates who control the global music business about how sales of their product are in the tank, due, they claim, to the pernicious plague of online file-sharing. “Napster Killed the Radio Star” has been used as a headline so often in these stock stories that I loathe to even repeat it in print, except as an object lesson in how insipid the whole debate has become.
Yes, I agree that when more and more of your customers are getting your product free rather than paying for it, that may tend to hurt sales. But in 1999 and 2000, the years when Napster took off as a cultural phenomenon, music sales actually went up. Proponents of digital file sharing plausibly suggest that swapping tunes brings lesser-known talent to the attention of new fans, allows people to sample the sound of new records before choosing to buy, and, in the right hands, can be a great tool for successful marketing of commercial products. The technology, as futurists are fond of pointing out, is neither good nor evil: it is all about how it is applied.
That said, may I present 6 alternative theories about the causes of the latest slump in musical sales, which, while not presenting as easy a target as digital file swapping, might be worth considering before the music moguls succeed in convincing legislators to turn the majority of their customers into criminals by enacting draconian anti-Napster laws.
- The Global Economy. Um, we’re like, in a recession right now, OK? Sales of practically everything suck. Young people who don’t have jobs aren’t buying tunes. Do the math.
- Previous levels of CD sales were artificially high. In the 80s and 90s, a lot of people bought back-catalog CDs to replace their old record albums and tapes. These are one-off sales – the Eagles and the Kinks aren’t making a lot of new fans these days, and once everyone who wants a copy of Hotel California on CD has got one, those numbers will tend to drop off. Well, it’s been 15 years. The market for catalog titles is saturated, and that’s gotta hurt.
- CDs cost too much. You can make an argument that the high prices of current discs are justified because of the high cost of talent, production and marketing these days. But (especially in light of point #2) why should anyone ever pay more than $5.00 for a new CD of Highway 61 Revisited or Kind of Blue? These albums were produced 35-40 years ago, for peanuts in the first place. Those artists who are still alive often are not due very much in royalties. Packaging and media costs are negligible and marketing is nil. It’s just record-company greed, pure and simple, and the laws of supply and demand are catching up with them. Lower the prices, take a little hit on profit, and catalog sales may pick up.
- The used CD market is cannibalizing sales. This point speaks for itself. Who would buy a new CD for $17.99 when they can find the same title in the same packaging used for $8.99, with no difference in sound quality? Unlike digital sound files, which are “intellectual property,” the CDs themselves are actual property, which can legally be transferred between owners without additional payment to the creators. It would be very tough, if not impossible, for music companies to outlaw sales of used discs.
- New talent has less staying power. Most of the big rock acts of the 60s, 70s, and even 80s had long, lucrative creative careers. Elton John put out probably a dozen albums in the 70s, and if you liked one, chances are you’d like the others. And his case was hardly exceptional. The artists and the record companies could count on loyal fans to form an economic base of support for established acts, lowering the marketing costs and providing stability to sales projections over the long run. Nowadays, record companies have strip-mined regional music scenes so extensively that talent doesn’t have a chance to gestate and mature properly before acts are signed to major deals. Bands signed too early run short of material, or can’t sustain themselves creatively over the long haul. New groups, have to be carefully and expensively introduced to the public. If they can’t turn that investment into a longer career, the unit cost of promotion goes up and fan interest becomes harder to sustain across the board. The only rock band of the 90s to have any legs whatsoever is Pearl Jam. The shelf-life of hip hop, dance and bubblegum acts – which dominate the charts these days – has always been short.
- Music today is less relevant to the culture. Successive “movements” – in terms of attitude or aesthetics – defined popular music from the 60s to the early 90s. This was more than commercial manipulation of the market. Music was one of the critical ways that young people defined and differentiated their identities in the larger culture. Since 1991, the year of Nirvana, there has been no authentic cultural dynamic to popular music other than various fads and personalities transparently cooked up by various arms of the media. Kids will buy the music they like, not the music they’re told to like. Until an authentic movement forms from the grass roots to drive some excitement, sales will remain flat. And they should.
3:46:21 PM 
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