[BC] music industry woes

[Robert Orban]

At 12:18 PM 10/21/2007, you wrote:
>At 01:05 PM 10/21/2007, Robert Orban wrote
>>An old friend of mine was just laid off from Universal's marketing 
>>department in Los Angeles, along with his boss and 11 other staff 
>>members -- Universal nuked his whole department because the 
>>company's sales downturn made it economically impossible to 
>>continue running it. Mark had been working there for over 5 years. 
>>Don't delude yourself; file sharing *is* hurting real people and so 
>>far, digital downloads are not making up for lost CD sales ;-(
>
>         Bob, I won't debate whether file sharing has or hasn't
>         hurt. Whether it is that or just the fact that current
>         "music" is not as attractive to buyers - or some other
>         issue - your anecdote is as indicative of the music
>         industry's problems as the broadcast industry's issues.
>
>         If sales are down, you don't kill off the marketing
>         department. You find out what sort of marketing will
>         work for the product.
>
>         I would think, unless your friend and the others were
>         all making multi-million dollar salaries that this was
>         a short-sighted cost-cutting move by someone worried
>         about *their* job, rather than a reasoned approach to
>         help the company succeed.

I hear a lot of this kind of thing. However, music *listening* is 
higher than ever -- the argument that "today's music isn't appealing 
to consumers" just isn't true, even though it may not appeal to those 
of us in the 55+ demographic. The problem is simple -- you can't 
compete with "free." The last statistic that I saw indicated that 
paid downloads were less than 2% of total downloads; the rest were pirated.

It may be that the future of the music business is going to have to 
be oriented much more toward live performance and 
advertiser-sponsored television, with audio-only tracks serving 
mainly as promotion and otherwise sold in deluxe packing that can't 
be pirated in an attractive way. But this is going to impact the 
budgets that can be applied to music production. With the advent of 
music production occurring entirely inside of PCs and Macs, any 
amateur can make a mediocre record and we are not likely going to 
have any dearth of material to listen to. However, high-level 
professional music making ("professional" meaning "you get paid to do 
it") takes time, training, and lots of dues paying. Where are the 
next Quincy Joneses, George Martins, Ahmet Erteguns, etc., going to 
come from if they can't get paid and can't spend full time on honing 
their craft?

I've seen this first hand because I know several independent 
producers. It has gotten very hard for these people to earn a living.

Bob Orban