The Decade the Music Died

Whilst freelancing, the state of the music business, and the rapid decline in record sales, was never far from my mind. The advancement of technology, in particular the popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing, has put record sales into freefall. The ‘grand old’ recording studios are finding it increasingly difficult to stay open, and anyone looking to build a recording studio and run it as a business venture is, for the most part, about to commit financial suicide.

It was thought, not so many years ago, that ‘reference quality CDs’, i.e., recorded at 96khz as opposed to the current 44.1khz, would be the next big thing – consumers would be listening to music recorded with unprecedented sound quality. The idea has not, as yet, caught on. In fact, interestingly, the opposite has happened. People are now listening to less-than-CD-quality MP3s on computer speakers or tiny headphones or, worse still, on mobile phone hands-free mono speakers! It just doesn’t add up! Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of pounds are spent hiring session musicians, producer, sound engineer, recording facilities (often themselves containing tens / hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of recording equipment) to record a single. This then has to be marketed, again with thousands spent on advertising and PR, artwork and distribution. It gets to iTunes and costs 75p. Lets say, for arguments sake, a song has cost £100k to get to iTunes; by my reckoning (not accounting for royalty cuts, publishing splits, etc) it needs to sell over 130,000 copies to break even! Its got to be bloody good! (As of March 17^th, Duffy’s single ‘Mercy’ has sold 40778 copies, and is so far the most popular single of 2008!) Now, until recently – namely until the boon in popularity of iTunes-type facilities, a single was, in marketing terms, merely a calling card for an album. Album sales were that which generated the big bucks. Nowadays, of course, consumers don’t need to buy the whole album – just the tracks they like. So how is it possible for a record company to financially justify the cost of producing and marketing a single?

Even the sales figures are fairly academic when the phenomenon of piracy is brought into the equation. I’m not sure of actual numbers, but I’d be willing to bet that for any given ‘legitimate’ sale on iTunes for any given chart track, there’d be multiple instances of illegal cloning and ‘sharing’ of that same track.

Even without considering piracy, the amount of music which record companies themselves are releasing as free downloads, is unprecedented. Look at Prince, Radiohead, the Charletans, to name a few – releasing their albums practically for free! Aren’t they devaluing the marketplace further?

In pop music, the only sure-fire way of making a living is by gigging. If your music is available in digital form, and if it is any good, it will get stolen many, many times. The amount of people listening to it will be far more than how many paid for it. Fact. It will not be long before entire albums are merely calling-cards for live shows.

The future of pop music has to lie in live performance. After all you can't clone a good night out and share it on Limewire!