consolejockey

Even though the whole RIAA vs. Napster thing is a spent issue, I feel the need to write something about it. The point I hope to make in the following paragraphs is that the slump in the music industry is due to many things, one of them being MP3 file sharing, but the main ones being poor business practices and bad music.

Fact number one, pop sucks, its packaged, style over substance, formulaic crap. What are the chances that Britney Spears will grow as an artist, that her sound will change and evolve. Not much. Same with the Backstreet Boys, or any of the other bazillion pop idols and bands out there. You buy one of their albums, there no reason to buy the next, it’s just going to be more of the same. Even though the public is gaga over pop, they have realized that there’s no reason to stay loyal to a band. This fact then feeds back into the music industry, which rushes to find the next flavor of the moment. The Spice Girls only had three albums before they broke up and the third was a total flop. Britney is on number two, and the Backstreet Boys are on number three (and they’ve already released a best of). How much longer will they last before they are replaced by the next big thing?

Fact number two, before MP3s (and the price drop of CD-ROM burners), if you wanted to get a hold of an album for free you had to know someone who had it and was willing to make a cassette copy of it for you. This was not a huge hassle, but it was enough of an obstacle to keep most people from trading music like mad monkeys (and trust me, mad monkeys are the worst about that kind of stuff). When MP3s came along, all you needed was a fast connection, usually courtesy of your school or place of work. In minutes you could download entire albums, at near CD quality.

Wait, let me step back a bit. Fact number one-point-five, music trading did exist before MP3s, in the form of cassette trading. Back in the days of 14.4bps modems, the trading of bootlegs on cassettes occurred through snail mail. I used to trade U2, Talking Heads and Pink Floyd bootlegs with people I met both locally and though the Internet. But this was by no means a net driven phenomenon, I knew people who had been trading bootlegs for more than a decade, though classified ads placed in the back of Rolling Stone Magazine. The music industry threw fits about this kind of trading, in much the same way it throughs fits about companies like Napster. Record labels would actively go after the companies that mass produced and sold boot legs, though they could not do much about those of use who copied and traded them on cassettes.

I got really into the trading of bootlegs, to the point where I would trade them just to have them. I’d listen to them a couple times and throw them in a box to never be heard from again. After a while I realized this behavior wasn’t productive, and I started only trading for boot legs of high quality recordings of really good performances. At this point I realized that if bands would just record and release a few performances off of every tour they did, with no post production, they could almost shut the boot leg industry down. Many of us who traded just wanted to hear more of the bands we liked, and raw live performances are usually just as interesting a studio album. Basically if the industry just found a way to embrace the trend, they could have made some money and hurt the illegal industry that they despised so much.

This is really fact number two, when MP3s became popular the flood gates opened, what used to be a niche group trading only bootlegs, became a large population trading everything. But the same practices are there, people often download music just to have it. They listen to it a couple of times, archive it and never listen to it again. Also present, the industry has yet to find a way to embrace the trend.

Now lets get to the point. I mention the things above to bring up the fact that just because someone downloads a song, doesn’t mean they would have ultimately bought the album it came off of. The RIAA would like us to believe that each download is money lost to them, but that’s just not true. In some cases, the person who downloaded the song never really wanted it to begin with. In other cases, people will download music, then actually go out and buy the CD, to have the higher quality hard copy, or to have the official copy and support the artists they like.

This is not to say that MP3s haven’t hurt the industry, or more accurately, this is not to say that MP3s have had an effect on album sales. I believe they have busted a simple tactic that the music industry has relied on for decades. Often the singles played on the radio and on MTV are not representative of the whole album they are a part of, in either quality or tone. I believe in pop music this is especially the case. This bait-and-switch tactic is totally ruined when you can download half the album for free, and see just how bad/different the non-singles are (not to imply that the singles are really that good). Many albums that, in the past, would have been purchased on the basis of one or two songs, are now left on the shelf. This lack of CD buying is not really something you can blame on MP3s, though, it’s something you can blame on the poor quality of the current wave of mainstream music.

I’m not trying to say that nobobdy downloads music so they don’t have to pay for it, many do. But mainly they download the singles and the hits (and sometimes the hard to find). Going back to the industry’s inability to embrace new trends if the record execs were smart they would realize that people are downloading the singles and skipping the rest. The record labels should start only producing the poppy hits that the teenage/twenty-something CD buying mainstream wants, and only releasing the music for sale online. Why produce a whole album when you know that; for one, it’s pop-cheese and two, some of the pop-cheese is bad and is only there as filler to complete the album. Songs could be produced and distributed much more quickly and cheaply. A steady stream of Britney’s pop hits could be posted and sold though her web site, maybe four or five a year, alleviating the need for expensive launches to renew interest in her every year and a half when she releases a new album. Actual pressed CDs could be reserved for “best of” albums. For pop music, such a sales and distribution model seems like a perfect fit.

Some artists, such as Pearl Jam and King Crimson have released official bootlegs, the industry has made some attempts to embrace popular trends. Slowly but surely, we will see more music sold and distributed online. I have to wonder if the RIAA will catch on, stop blaming the MP3s and the Internet for their woes, and start seeing them for the opportunities that they really are.