Musik Article: Musik For An Internet Generation

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posted by ergoayreon

It is a hard time for the record industry. They are seeing their profits minimized Von illegal file sharing and less people are willing to buy their CDs. Many of them try to counter this Von the age old capitalistic idea of “if people are buying less merchandise, we will make them pay for what they buy.” The problem is that because the content is available for free on the Internet, this tactic will only scare off Mehr and Mehr buyers.

Recording artists seem to be Mehr aware of what is going on. In the past Jahr alternative rock god Radiohead and industrial-rock giant Nine Inch Nails have both released their albums on the internet for free oder a small fee. For Radiohead this release was In Rainbows, which was available for any price Du wished to pay. Unfortunately, they have not released any Internet sales numbers. However, the physical release of In Rainbows sold 122,000 copies in the UK during its first week.

Similar figures for Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV and The Slip exist. Ghosts I-IV, which was released in several different formats, including a free download of the first 9 tracks (Ghosts I) and the full package for 5 USD. Then the price went up through several different versions with extras, ending in a 300 USD limited edition boxset, which was handsigned, numbered and contained a vinyl pressing of the album, Weiter to the CD. Nine Inch Nails reported over 750,000 download and purchase transactions within the first week. The 2,500 limited boxsets sold out immediately as well, generating 750,000 USD of the total 1.6 million USD in the first week. The Sekunde Nine Inch Nails album to be released to the Internet, The Slip, has been downloaded 1.6 million times during its first two months.

Weiter to huge bands, who are Mehr able to take a risk, a lot of small bands are taking their songs to the internet. Rapper Saul Williams released his Sekunde album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust on the Internet with the help of Nine Inch Nails’ front man Trent Reznor. A free version and a 5 USD version were available. After two months, almost 160,000 people downloaded the album, 28,000 people choosing to pay. Compared to the 30,000 copies Williams’ debut album sold since 2004 this is a huge increase in popularity for the rapper.

It seems that the Internet is becoming the new record store. A lot of bands put their Musik for listen on sites like Myspace and Last.fm. Dutch band Silence Is Sexy released their Sekunde album, This Ain’t Hollywood, on the illegal file sharing market recently. Singer/songwriter Jonah Matranga has let people pay what they want for his merchandise since the late nineties.

The examples are endless. Illegal file sharing is turning Mehr and Mehr into a place where bands can showcase their new material. Many bands put their albums up on illegal sites, for Fans to download. If this is going to continue, we might soon see the record industry adapting to these changes, oder go down with the ship. Free downloads generate much attention. Mehr people are likely to buy the physical release of the downloaded material, oder go and see the band on tour.

We are at the advent of a new musical revolution. This time the gras, grass of Woodstock is exchanged for the meadows of the Internet and the Motto has changed from Free Liebe to Free Music.

meelottie and Sappp like this

harold Since the record labels are posting their artists' music online, I'm not sure where you think the crisis is. Are you saying that the pay-for-download model doesn't work? I find your examples very good, but I'd be interested in seeing examples that illustrate that CD sales are also down, which seems to be a necessary part of the argument you make. I think there [i]was[/i] concern in the recording industry, that people downloading music means lost CD sales, but I don't think that was ever terribly accurate, and I believe the recording industry has largely adapted to that in the last decade. To some degree, the people who download music wouldn't buy the CDs anyway, although many of them do pay for the downloads. The NIN example you cite supports this: most of the money earned by the album was through sales of a CD boxed set, and Saul Williams' sales of his downloaded album show that a significant number of people who download do pay (although you need look no further than iTunes to confirm that). Judging by the large scale presence of every record label online - particularly on any site that features paid downloads - I'd say that at this point the record industry has already adapted to the changes. The internet is just another method of distribution for their product, and there isn't a lot of overlap between consumers who buy CDs (who tend to care about audio quality) and consumers who buy downloads (who generally don't care as much). There are people who are very concerned about these events, but they aren't the record companies: it's the distributors that have a lot to fear. Both the companies that manufacture the CDs and the companies that sell CDs are worried. But even this can't be laid at the feet of online downloads - it's more an issue of conglomerated sales markets. Big stores like Wal-Mart, Virgin and Target deal in such large volumes of material that they essentially form monopsonies, which force the manufacturers & distributors to drop their prices, and specialized retail stores (music stores such as the Wherehouse) can't compete, so they go out of business. This is why you see fewer and fewer small music stores or small music store chains anymore: markets for physical CDs are shrinking to giant retail corporations. But this doesn't mean that fewer CDs are being sold (it could even be that there are more CDs being sold, because the stores are forcing the prices down), just that there is less variety of stores where the consumer can buy them.

ergoayreon All my examples are recordlabel-less bands, save for Radiohead, who were only labelless for a short while when In Rainbows was on the Internet. The trend I was trying to point out was that a lot of artists take to the Internet to release their music, instead of going to the labels. I could indeed have put in numbers about CD sales and mentioned iTunes, but this was an assignment for school, so I had a limited amount of words. Thanks for your comments though :)