Posts tagged music industry
“ We’re now seeing a repeat of this scenario, but where the distribution industry — the copyright industry — has the audacity to stand up and demand special laws and say that the economy will collapse without their unnecessary services. But we learn from history, every time, that it is good when an industry becomes obsolete. That means we have learned something important — to do things in a more efficient way. New skills and trades always appear in its wake.”
Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee | TorrentFreak
This is brilliant. Read it now.
As I don’t live in the US, Great Britain or Germany, I have to pay to listen to last.fm radio. It’s a bloody no-no.
(via glasgow-kiss)
Ugh, I’m absolutely with you on that. After they introduced the pay scheme, I stopped listening to last.fm’s radio (luckily, I have Spotify, which I prefer anyway). This two-tiered system is blatantly unfair; either have everyone pay (which I think is the realistic option), or have no one pay.
It’s as if you were to walk into a McDonald’s, and based on your passport, you either got a free burger or you had an employee punch you in the face and spit on your mother. Or something like that.
Bandcamp announces transaction fees, community rejoices
Pretty counterintuitive, right?
The Laws of Internet Physics suggest the community would be frustrated, angry, say that Bandcamp are sellouts and almost certainly compare them to Hitler.
But because of the clear, honest and direct way Bandcamp has communicated in the past about their work (their FAQ page is fantastic), and the work itself, people are excited for them to benefit.
I have not met the Bandcamp team, but their work continues to inspire me. What they’ve done shows that they want to artists to benefit, ahead of the business, market and competitive benefits they would like for themselves. That’s refreshing.
I wish more people in the music space (and elsewhere on the web, of course) adopted this as the model for their work, instead of building me-too products that are marketed on empty rhetoric.
“ Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as “vanity” titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.”
Digital Self-Publishing Shakes Up Traditional Book Industry - WSJ.com
Or, how about a more accurate analogy: this is exactly what has been happening with the music industry over the last decade or so. Soon, there will be “indie” authors self-releasing their books in digital formats only, and book bloggers pointing the masses towards the hottest reads of the moment.
Let’s hope that writers learn from the errors of musicians and refrain from releasing their works for free - if they’d like to quit their day jobs one day, that is.
Why Steep Learning Curves Are Worth It
My interview with 99%, an entrepreneurship blog by the awesome Behance network
Inspiring words, Anthony!
attention industry: What You Didn't Learn From The Music Industry.
No one learned from the music industry, which was my worst fear about the whole debacle.
As the first industry to really feel the brunt of the shift to digital distribution, the amount of fear, floundering and failure that we all witnessed from the major labels, the aging executives, and the dying business model made a certain amount of sense. To the people who grew up digital (or the digital kids, or generation y, or ‘us’) a new approach seemed obvious, but we didn’t have the greatest tool necessary for success yet - we hadn’t seen anyone fail.
That said, we’ve seen the decline of the music industry to the point where major labels are more laughable than laudable, and no one seems to be learning. And so, for news, for film, for television and for industries like books and magazines that will be forced into competing in a world of digital distribution in the coming years, here is the short version.
I’ve been waiting for someone else to get around to writing this for ages.
Funny how this happened in the music industry a decade ago, when suddenly artists began to look at the label cost, which in this case is the “PUBLISHER IS PAID”, and realized that, hey, maybe we don’t really need those guys anyway…
“ When you rely on instrumentals, you have to be rather good to keep it going.”
[sic] Magazine: The noughties – a decade in music – part one
I love this approach to best-of lists, it just feels so personal. Of course, it helps that I agree with most of the choices, and two of the bands in the top 20 are friends. Anyway, it’s a rare piece of intelligently-written music journalism.
isay:
“These days”? That’s how it’s always been. The album as a format is pretty bogus and, not surprisingly, created by record companies. We’ve just followed it out of habit up until this most recent generation. Technology has given us the capability to break away from the uglier truisms of much standard-bearer media and I think the “2 good songs, 10 filler songs” formula is dying off more each year as bands find it easier and more effective to release material a song at a time and stick to what works, essentially trimming the fat.
Beg to differ, but this has become more of a trend since the MP3 player went mainstream and iTunes became an accepted way of selling music for the companies. Listen to an album from the 60’s, 70’s or even the 80’s and early 90’s and you will listen to albums which are far more complete as pieces of work, they were designed as complete works to be listened to in a sitting. Not as something to be listened to on a Walkman or an iPod.
Its not piracy but the fact that everything is now so immediately available that is killing music.
How is music dying, exactly? Every week I find new albums to be excited about, and if I didn’t have a full-time job and a faster Internet connection, I’m sure I could easily find an album per day.
There have always been bands that could produce cohesive albums that were meant to make a statement as a whole (think Pink Floyd, The Flaming Lips) and bands that never aspired past the one-hit wonder. But the immediate availability of music is making the non-major label scene thrive in ways it never has before: artists can now release songs on their blogs as soon as they’re recorded rather than having to wait to finish an album and have a label release it. Artists with talent but without an album to their name can go on tour based on online buzz alone.
I wouldn’t argue that the album is obsolete, simply because musicians still need some way to make money - but with the number of musicians working full- or part-time jobs and touring on the side, that’s become less and less of an issue these days.
“ More than half of the “best-selling” e-books on the Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-reader, are available at no charge. Although some of the titles are digital versions of books in the public domain — like Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” — many are by authors still trying to make a living from their work.”
With Kindle, Publishers Give Away E-Books to Spur Sales - NYTimes.com
OK, please tell me someone else has noticed that the book industry is mimicking the music industry circa 1998. Soon, unknown writers will start going digital-only, and publishers will start whining that their revenues are falling because no one buys books anymore, even though everyone is actually reading more.
Luckily, this will all be miraculously solved by Apple’s iTablet or whatever in a couple of days, so there’s no need to panic.
