Perez Hilton On The State Of The Music Industry
Perez Hilton's recently offered his highly insightful comment that "The Music Industry Is Still Hurting! BADLY!" He cites the statistic that, "U.S. sales of CDs plummeted 20% in the first 3 months of 2010."
His reaction was "Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!" and he asked his "faithful" readership, "What can be done to turn things around????" Their answers:
- "We keep getting one hit wonders, talent show winners and crappy artists shoved down our throats."
- "Get off the old business model and maybe embrace the digital age. & "It's called ITunes."
- "Quit promoting inexperienced and label-extruded pop acts." & "scour the landscape for some real musicians…"
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Won’t Google getting into the music biz fix everything?
and there is always Glee….
WOW. Last person who needs to speak about the industry. He is right about acts being shoved down our throats. i Tunes is not the digital age. At least he is speaking up on it to his audience. I don’t see it as a horrible state of the industry, just a rebuilding period.
Wow, I’m glad he could find the time to offer some valuable insight. This DEFINITELY needed to be posted here on Hypebot.
Justin, that's part the humor. What I found interesting about the post is just the outside perspectives of regular people. You and I have very specialize knowledge and are sometimes disconnected, I would think, from what regular people think about all these changes. Simply because we have such specialized and up-to-date details about the happenings in the industry, where most of these people who sent in comments likely don't. These are just their gut-shot reactions and that's what makes them interesting to me.
Music Industry, whats that? I think what we have left is the music hobby. Look this guy is an idiot, but he’s readership is huge, and they happen to think the same thing that most IN the so called “industry” know themselves. Music is a BAD, in fact HORRIBLE business to invest in, In fact I would never invest in music if it wasn’t for the fact I’m so passionate about it. Maybe we musicians should listen to the regular people out there, after all we make the music and they listen or not, and they happen to be sick and tired of the old music industry shoving crappy music down their throats, can you blame them.
It was interesting to see the comments in Perez’s post mention that they want whole albums. I love being able to play an album from start to finish (especially Pink Floyd’s Meddle), but I was under the impression that the general public was OK with singles via iTunes.
While, on the other hand, you have the Topspin model which focuses on the sale of the full album, which I like, but it still comes down to the music. If you notice the musicians using Topspin, in my opinion, they tend to be artists with fan-base that listen/buy albums, not singles.
Understanding fans stills seems a little convoluted while the music industry is in transition. My guess is that a company like Grooveshark will provide the industry with deeper insight on what the hell fans want and how.
We shall see.
Fair enough. I just really make it a point to keep that poodle’s name and face out of my media diet. Your site, though.
Lol, didnt warner give this cat a label deal?
Its funny that ten years later people are still seeing this as the “re-building phase” of the music industry. How absurd is that? It gives the impression that within a decade techs and business professionals can’t figure each other out. I don’t buy it. The problem isn’t the quality of artists. Particularly in the US crappy one-hit wonder pop acts have been force fed to us since the Disco and hair band eras. The industry has two problems. First, people no longer see the need to pay. Period. I don’t see that changing any time soon. The scare tactic of suing individuals isn’t working (because you’ve still got good odds you won’t be caught)
Another major issue I see is the emergence of indie labels. The digital age has given rise to many buzz-worthy “stars”, but none of these labels have the proper knowledge on how to develop an artist once he/she has broken. Nor do they have the resources to sustain these artists (i.e. budgets for tour support…hell some don’t even have a budget to give an artist an advance…as though an artist can live on a mention in Fader or RCRD LBL) This is particularly true in the electronic genre: Cook Kids, Spank Rock,Rye Rye, Kid Sister….Shit ton of buzz and then what? 2 years later still waiting on a Spank Rock follow-up and a Rye Rye debut. Very similar thing happening with hipster rock. Too many damn bands with no development. Each week Stereogum and Pitchfork are advertising a new hipster band as though these kids are honestly going to rush out and buy 20 albums per quarter. Not gonna happen. These sites are pushing bands that don’t even have a bonafide hit, radio play, tour, or anything sensible that a regular joe/jane can latch on to.
Really I guess indy labels are guilty of the same thing as majors ultimately, they cram these overnight semi-sensations into every blog they possibly can making these guys appear ‘hot’ when these bands can rarely deliver the goods. Labels have turned into marketing machines with nothing to market and nobody to sell anything to. Its sad.
Kyle, even though I wouldn’t consider myself to be too much of an “outside people” kind of guy, I’m mostly reading this blog as a music lover and occasional DJ. So here’s my view “from the outside”.
iTunes and its competing download stores are supporting the wrong format: Mp3 is a downgrade in sound quality, which is quite obvious to anybody who has replaced a track downloaded from the Napster of old by a used CD. I refuse to buy downloads from them because
a) you do not get the best sound quality possible (lossless a/k/a the master, which is on the physical format such as CD)
b) you do not get any album credits with a download (but these are important for making further new music discoveries)
c) you do not get a backup when downloading (whilst when ripping a CD, you always have your backup in case the computer crashes)
Points a) and c) clearly show that downloads provide less longeivity to the music lover than the CD. Initially, it was the high price of CDs that drove people towards illegal file sharing. The downgrade in sound quality and longeivity that comes with mp3 albums is most likely promoting file sharing more than giving potential customers any reason to stop doing it.
Point b) makes less people look beyond the surface of how recorded music is made – and in turn keeps them from searching out what they like all by themselves with the help of the net. Without album credits, less different albums are being sold and more attention is directed to those products that are promoted the most. Yet, these heavily promoted songs are also the ones that are traditionally most prominent and shared on illegal file sharing sites for free.
As a music lover, I like the distinct sound of favourite musicians. In 1960s LA, record producers did something right when they had studio guys like the Wrecking Crew cutting tracks for numerous different headliners: they created a sound that was akin to a corporate identity of the music of the times, whilst at the same time, the music that came of it was as stylistically diverse as it could be – and as stylistically diverse as format radio would never play it in the current 2010 era.
With the computer industry currently eating up market share on a large scale in the music industry, do-it-yourself is booming and keeps selling more and more electronic gear to independent musicians dreaming the (American) dream of evolving from myspace page artist to huge arena headline performer on a nationwide basis. It’s kind of like the gold rush of old when shovel makers used to make the most profit instead of the actual gold diggers themselves.
I as a music lover, I could not care less if an album was recorded by an artist at home as long as its great music. In fact, it would probably be even better if it were recorded by pros in a good sounding room at an established recording studio with professional musicians whose sound and playing I love.
But I do care about the sound quality that is offered to me at the sales counter. Mp3 albums are inacceptable at the current pricing at least and are only worth being downloaded as free teasers for the actual full resolution product.
Hence, I recommend to every DIY artist to please make available your album as an on-demand CD-R including liner notes and album credits. You would not believe how many kids actually read the liner notes of the cool album artwork they buy and remember the names they read in there when they come across them again. I guess there is no better promotion than a good collaboration.
Thank you very much for that thoughtful comment, you’ve left me with much to think about.