It’s no secret the music industry is in serious trouble.
Years ago before CD-Rs and mp3s, major record labels were able to fetch upwards of $25 for a new CD release of a well-known artist – essentially holding a monopoly in the marketplace. Those days are long gone.
The sales of CDs have fallen by 20 per cent over the last year, forcing record companies to lower prices of their records and return to the drawing board for new marketing approaches. This trend is likely to continue in 2009, but the fact remains that society will continue to consume, create and share music.
Nietzsche once said, “Without music, life would be an error,” and whether or not you agree with that old fart, surely music is a part of your life to some degree. But just how are we as a society consuming music? iPod? Turntable? Tape Deck? Walkman/Discman? Car CD deck? The methods to which we can incorporate music into our lives are plentiful, but many of these technologies are now seemingly “out-dated” or redundant.
Contrary to popular belief though, you’d be surprised by how many people are using older formats like vinyl these days. According to Neilson SoundScan, 1.8 million vinyl albums were purchased in 2008 – surpassing the total number of vinyl sales since 1991, when the organization began tracking consumer habits.
Neilson SoundScan tracks the sales of music in Canada and the United States and publishes yearly reports tracking approximately 14,000 point-of-sale purchases at retail outlets. Without getting into Gladwell-ian trend analogies, it’s certain there is a shift occurring in the way music is consumed by the masses.
Similarly, record companies will have to react to these shifts in how they distribute the music itself. As an old African proverb states, “When the music changes, so does the dance,” and that has never been more apparent than in today’s music market. If we look at the history of music formats, this has already happened about six times with vinyl, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette tape, DAT (Digital Audio Tape), CD and finally the ubiquitous mp3.
These shifts in format were all received differently by the public – the main motivation behind them was to make life easier for us – that’s right, easier. But it seems like an annoyance – having to box up a stack of well-used LPs, and the trusty turntable, to make way for a new “hi-fi” system that plays cassettes with “Dolby noise-reduction” and other ill-fated technologies. So this could make for numerous trips to Sears or Future Shop during one’s lifetime.
This is all, of course, only for those who give a damn about keeping up with the Jones’. Many don’t. A great deal of people never swapped formats, never thought their Beatles LPs were worthy of a trash bin or garage sale fate.
To understand the music industry’s nature, from a consumer, retailer and online media perspective, The Concordian spoke with individuals who are involved in the industry in New York and here in Montreal. Beginning with the most common source of music today, the Internet, it was important to contextualize the current scheme of music distribution as seen on mp3 blogs.
An mp3 blog is a website hosted by Blogger or WordPress, or a private domain, for instance, that features individual songs with accompanying write-ups. The songs are sometimes available for free preview on the blog, or linked to another source for streaming/downloading. The blogs are usually small with no more than a handful of contributors posting new mp3s of songs that are usually not available for sale, or remixes that haven’t been officially released. Enter the terms: “blog-house music,” “blog-house DJs,” and “blog-house remixes,” specifically describing certain music styles and trends.
These songs and remixes flooding the Internet get into the hands of bloggers by way of promo copy CDs that are ostensibly used for radio and DJ promotion. However, there is generally no vested interest in peddling the songs to the public. “People are writing about music just because they like it – that’s incredible,” Anthonly Volodkin, founder of Hype Machine, told us.
Volodkin founded the website in 2005, because he thought a need existed to organize and redistribute the music featured on these blogs. The site aggregates mp3s from thousands of blogs making them available for free preview, and has four contributors, three based in New York City and one in Florida. Hype Machine is the perfect starting point to make sense of all the content out there.
“People’s [attention] span of how much media they can consume is so limited that it doesn’t take much to overwhelm them,” Volodkin says. While you’re enjoying the thousands of songs and remixes from artists such as Animal Collective, Girl Talk, Little Boots or El Guincho – all artists featured on the site’s front page at print time – you may wonder about whether any of the featured music is ever sold. But next to each mp3 on the site is a direct link to iTunes and Amazon.
“The visitors that do show up, a lot of them do end up purchasing things, and I’m happy we can assist that,” Volodkin says. He estimates the number of individual songs purchased on iTunes and Amazon from HypeMachine users to be between 10 to 20 thousand. So people are still buying music, and labels are surviving, but having to adapt.
“The exact way music labels really use mp3 blogs varies, one of the most obvious is to gage the effectiveness of the albums they’re releasing,” Volodkin told us. “Part of the goal of Hype Machine is that you can discover music in a way where you aren’t being pushed things,” he adds. This makes for a pragmatic yet democratic music experience, where the marketing is the voice of everyday people, making the songs they genuinely enjoy popular.
Getting back to real life, and leaving behind the digital realm’s ones and zeroes, there are still innumerable independent record shops in most cities. Here in Montreal, a popular record store called Primitive sells thousands of used and new vinyl LPs and singles. We took a trip down to St. Denis to speak with Ralph Elawani, a clerk who has been working at the shop for the last year and a half, who is also a record collector and musician.
“People use CDs to put their glasses on,” he told us. “I don’t think people value CDs anymore.” His store does carry CDs, however they are mainly used, older re-issues or from independent labels. Elawani said the sales of vinyl at Primitive have remained constant, but the clientele has changed. He said kids as young as 14 are coming into the shop looking for the music their parents used to listen to. “They ask us for classic rock, you’d be impressed at the number of Bruce Springsteen [records] we sell, Bob Dylan, The Beatles will always be a big seller.”
The demographic of record buyers is more unique than it has ever been, and many are drawn into vinyl for a different experience that mp3s can’t offer. “If you have a good sound system, it’s not the same at all. The mp3 format is not as good as a cassette, CD or vinyl,” Elawani says.
In the last few years, record companies have seen the demand rise for vinyl, and are re-issuing classic LPs by bands like Nirvana, Metallica, Radiohead, and older acclaimed records like A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
Many of these LPs are being digitally re-mastered, and pressed on high quality 180 gram vinyl. This type of record is thicker, and has wider grooves – translating into a deeper, full sound that is rich and uncompromising. These reissues are actually sold more often at independent records stores like Primitive, with two out of three LPs sold at those types of retailers, according to SoundScan.
Record companies, both independent and major, are including bonuses with many of their releases. Understanding you cannot always have time to sit in front of a turntable and ruminate over that angular sax solo or monstrous drum solo by Bonham, the companies are starting to include USB keys or download coupons for high quality mp3 copies of the albums.
To get a more “French” perspective, this being Montreal after all, we went deep into the Plateau to speak with Guillaume Legaré, a manager at the independent record store Aux 33. I asked him what he thought about independent labels releasing albums with unique packaging and artwork, compared to your average run-of-the-mill CD jewel case. “It’s still an indie thing, majors don’t do it. No matter what you do, those who don’t care about the format will download it, I don’t think the iPod people care about it.”
At the store there were stacks of records at the front selling for 10 cents each – many were the usual suspects: Anne Murray, Elton John, Barbara Streisand, etc. Legaré told us the clientele is two thirds French to English, but he conferred a similar observation noted at Primitive – the kids are showing interest in the once-considered egregious format. “Some really young teenagers come in here, looking for AC/DC Led Zeppelin, and they’re like, ‘hey, this is cheaper than a CD, and it has this cool cover art,’ they’re attracted to that nostalgia.”
But what about the artists? How do they feel about the current music industry, since after all, they are the reason we have the music in the first place. spoke to an artist by the name of Chuck Blazevic from Halifax. He is a 23-year-old composer, multi-instrumentalist and record collector, who records under the name Dreamsploitation. We wanted to know if Blazevic found today’s music industry “watered-down,” since never before has so much content been so freely available.
“With persistence and hard work, good music will always surface. There has always been, and always will be, lots of music being made – a lot of similar sounding stuff, a lot of uninspired stuff, but also a lot of brilliant genuine art that will be recognized, if it resonates with its listeners,” said Blazevic. “So, no, I do not think the industry is more ‘watered down.’ I think it is easier now than ever to find what you are looking for while learning about new sounds along your journey. I wouldn’t be listening to anything I listen to now if it weren’t for the Internet.”
When we inquired about the possibility of new recording artists sustaining themselves in today’s market, Blazevic said, “Being able to make money doing music has always, and always will, require more than quality output made available on the Internet.”
“You still need sufficient promotional resources, regular touring, networking, fearless ambition and restless activity. The current bottom-end resources for musicians using the Internet will not substitute for these things,” he said.
