People Complain... Don't We All

I've had some great conversations about why the industry is in a slump. The explanations rest on a broad spectrum and the reasons are countless. One reason deals with downloading being the issue, another acknowledges the labels not moving with the times, and a major one is that technology has made record making too easy.

Well, I must say that I agree with all those statements. The issue with the labels not working to be ahead of the game is quite true. The labels were warned in the mid to late 90's that the access to music is going to be easier via the internet. Companies like Music Boulevard, CD Now, and Amazon, developed and pioneered the online CD, and LP sales. From there, even though better encoding was available, MP3's became the popular choice, why? Well, it didn't take up that much space and for those who forgot, it was not that long ago when computers 500Mb to 1 Gb. Thus, with the help of Napster and other Peer-to-Peer sharing, and the need of instant gratification, MP3's were the option of choice. Whether or not music should be free is another debate. Are writer's writing books for free? Are accountants cranking numbers for free? Other than donations, is anything free?

Another issue that labels neglected to realize is that the old way of conducting business, i.e. record deals, publishing deals, and royalties are not going to fly in this day and age. The labels waived the option to develop a new era of deals at the same time they did nothing about internet sales growth. They really thought that people would agree to pay $18 for a CD when the public knew the price to produce a CD was $0.10 cents. Typically, common sense would say lower the price a little bit at a time. Or a marketing plan of when a CD is first released the price stays a $15 for 6 months. Every 6 months there after, the price would decrease by $0.50 cents until it reached $12. I will admit any day that I am the least savvy marketer or business expert, so if I can come up with this....WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE LABELS!!!

Moving on to technology. It is great how easy the process is to record music. Editing and recalling mixes have become instant and thankfully the quality has gotten so much better with higher bit and sampling rates. On a side note, ironically enough, people have come to accept low-fidelity, bad quality music while the digital recordings are becoming more complex. Anyway, as recording music has become easier, more and more "crap" has flooded all music genres. With the help of myspace.com and youtube.com the overflow is not improving. On the up side, it has given an window to people with talent that would have been overlooked. Ultimately, the search for that one needle is now in a bigger and thicker hay stack.

My complaint is lack of artist development. People complain that music out now is horrible. That songwriting is a lost artifact. Well, my reason for that is the public. What do you expect when you don't pay for music? People lose jobs, specifically artist development and marketing. then labels and producers have no budgets to make "quality," "great sounding" records! You get what you pay for!!!