“The Music Industry Is In Trouble”
In the interest of full disclosure, let me first say that I have been a Counting Crows fan from the very beginning.
Charlie Gillingham, the keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist from Counting Crows recently answered some questions about the state of the music industry on the Crows website.
The post is titled “The Music Industry Is In Trouble.”
Charlie seems to lay most of the music industry’s problems at the feet of the personal computer and digital downloading (although he says this is not the case). In the post, he makes a number of points that don’t quite add up. Let’s take a look at a few of them,
“Retail record stores have been steadily closing their doors for the last ten years, culminating with the demise of Tower Records this last summer.”
Yes, this is true, but it isn’t all because of online piracy - and Charlie basically says as much before saying,
“It would be a hell of a coincidence if computers weren’t involved — the timing is just too perfect.”
Obviously, some of it is piracy, but Tower Records is struggling because of the reasons I outlined before. We are in a period of transition between the CD and the mp3 (or some derivative). Factor in Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and you have the downfall of Tower records and other smaller outlets selling audio CD’s.
“It was clear from the beginning that people just plain liked storing their music on their computers. People don’t really want to have hundreds of CDs in bright plastic jewel boxes. They just want to listen to music. All those CDs clutter up the living room, it’s impractical to carry them all in your car and it’s impossible to carry them all when you’re jogging. As soon as it was possible to use a computer to store music, people started doing it. As soon as it was easy, everybody started doing it.”
For some reason, Charlie paints this as a negative. The fact that we don’t need to carry CD’s or tapes around anymore to listen to music should be seen as a positive development. It is just a matter of harnessing this technological development, instead of fighting against it.
Charlie goes on to say some very questionable things about iTunes and the iPod,
“In fact, the only place where no one is stealing music is from the iTunes Store. iTunes has excellent top-to-bottom DRM (digital rights management). You can’t steal music from it.”
While it is true you can’t steal music from the iTunes Music Store itself, you can strip the DRM from the songs in about ten seconds after buying, which is just like an unprotected CD (Also something that Charlie also pointed criticism at), and then upload those once protected songs to P2P network. I won’t get into the arguments against DRM right now; It makes for a long enough post on its own.
“(Maybe we should only release our music on iTunes and just chuck the CD altogether). But then the problem would be this: not everyone can afford to buy an iPod.”
First of all, you don’t have to have an iPod to use iTunes. For a long time, I used iTunes even though I didn’t have an iPod. You can always burn the songs purchased from iTunes on to a CD.
It is unclear throughout what Charlie’s main point is. Especially in the notes when, and I’m really not sure where this comes from, he says,
“As I say above, I don’t think downloading is the real problem either.”
It seems to me that he lays the bulk of the blame on the downloaders and the software industry. And while some of this is true, the real blame has to go to the recording industry itself. They have yet to figure out a way to give people a viable, easy-to-use, DRM-free, alternative to the CD (a DRM-free iTunes would work), and until they do, they will struggle.
The artists and record labels that learn how to harness the power of the Internet and digital downloading will be the ones to succeed. To think that the bulk of consumers are going to go to their local Tower records-like store and buy DRM’d CD’s at $15.99 is foolish.
Yes, the price of music has gone down, and in the near-term this will hurt the recording industry, but in the long-term, the exposure and convenience the Internet and devices like the iPod provide could be a boon for the recording industry, like it has never seen before. (Techdirt with the link)