Remember the first CD you ever bought was? I’m not talking about the first CD you had as a hand-me-down or you received as a gift. I’m talking about you saved your allowance up and bought it yourself. Don’t laugh, but for me it was Hootie & the Blowfish’s second album “Fairweather Johnson.” It was released in 1996 and I used birthday money to buy it and play it on a boom box stereo I got as a birthday gift. It sold only three million copies and was sworn off as a commercial failure (Hootie’s debut album to date has sold 19 million).
Fast forward to 2010, fourteen years later and artists would kill to see three million albums, hell, they would give their right kidney for one million. The best-selling album last year was Taylor Swift’s “Fearless,” selling a little more than 3.2 million copies for the year, about the same amount as Hootie’s “Fairweather” ended up selling to date. The industry has changed so dramatically that in the last fourteen years that in 2009 there were only 12 albums that sold over a million copies. In 1996, the best-selling album was Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.” It sold 16 million copies by itself, outselling the top seven albums on the Billboard Year End list for 2009.
So what happened?
Well, a few things. The first is the most obvious and the most debated: file sharing. In 1999, Napster burst onto the scene and changed the music industry forever. It was the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing program making it easy for people to look up and download songs in mp3 format. Although Napster was forced to shut down in July 2001, the file sharing continued with other programs and means. The music industry reacted to Napster and other file sharing culprits in witch-hunt fashion, taking on not only companies and organizations that create and proliferate file sharing programs but individuals as well. Remember the RIAA trying to charge a 12 year old kid with piracy? It was some story like that, I forget the details and I don’t know what to put into Google to look that up.
Basically people got a taste of free music that didn’t take any work. Kind of like taping a song off of the radio, only having access to the artist’s whole CD library and every band they have ever toured with and will tour with while doing so. And once someone gets all that music free, it’s hard to stop wanting more free music.
Then the iPod/iTunes came along. Since the mp3 became the music file standard, it needed a player to replace a Walkman tape player or a portable CD player. Both debuting in 2001, over the course of the first half of the decade, the iPod took over. And iTunes did solve the problem of how to make money off of the mp3, but the mp3 world made it easier for the consumer to pick and choose songs they liked. They were no longer forced to buy a complete album when they just wanted the single. With the ease of use and the popularization of the iPod and iTunes, it became the biggest music distributor in the country. Apple passed WalMart for that title in April 2008 and has never looked back since.
So we covered file sharing and the freedom of the mp3. Another reason for the sales decline despite the success of iTunes has been the choices consumers have now to gather their musical content. Satellite radio, internet/streaming audio, and video sites like YouTube have given all of us a way to access music. No longer do people wait till it comes out on commercial radio or the video is played on MTV before they know what is out. And since at least two out of three of those are usually free, someone will be able to listen quickly and decide if it is a song they like and want to own. In the case of streaming audio, sites like Pandora let you pick what style you want to listen to based on an artist name or song title. Their formula will churn out like-sounding songs. There are others like Yahoo! Music or Slacker Radio categorize everything by genre and you can listen from there. And best of all, you can enjoy your favorite songs and artists without paying (unless you go with a premium version of those services or if you listen to subscription based Sirius/XM Radio).
And then the final and maybe most telling situation would be that music just isn’t what it used to be. I was at Adrian’s house for a cook out for my brother and some of us were playing Guitar Hero World Tour. I was singing Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” when Joey Betts made a great point. He said that fifteen years from now, kids won’t have songs like this from this time period to play on a game. He used this example “yeah, a got that Eminem track! Yeah! Let’s play that!” Although I do like Eminem, he does have a point. There is not a real universally loved rock song to play along to from this era. Or maybe that isn’t the best example.
The point is that music isn’t something one goes on a tear buying anymore, especially albums. Artists put out albums more or less to just push something to support a couple of singles. Some artists like T-Pain have now vowed to stop releasing whole albums, and with good reason. I mean unless you are an artist like Jay-Z/Kanye West/Eminem/Lil Wayne/Drake/Beyonce/Taylor Swift/… you aren’t going to push a million copies of your record no matter how much promotion or public appearances you make.
So if you are a record exec or an industry insider, what do you do at this point? Where do you go from here? The industry was obviously really late on reacting to the file sharing trend and waited until Apple popularized the iPod in order to get any stake in it. One thing they have to do to get any semblance of the industry they had at the peak of the compact disc of the mid-1990s is really capitalize on the different times of formats and forums people get their music from now. But now the real questions they have to ask: is it too late to save the album? The music industry?
-----July theMeatLife Download: Neon Trees - "Animal"-----
