Split open and melt

Though I may be in Florence and totally submerged in Italian culture and politics, JMU has done a nice job to help keep us informed with recent current events by supplying students here with a library where I found the January 12-18 edition of The Economist, which has an interesting article concerning the continued demise of the major labels.

One of the most striking parts of the article to me was the opening paragraph, which described a 2006 study conducted by recording giant EMI. Teenagers were asked about their music listening and purchase habits and at the end were invited to take some free CDs as a thank you for doing the study.
None of them took any.

At first I thought this was a mean trick by the label to see who would steal the music and who would not, but after a moment of consideration at the final statement, "That was the moment we realized the game was completely up," I understood the point: Youth are not interested in CDs anymore. The market is up, or nearly there. It's all about the digital.

Though, I am still a sucker for a hard-copy CD, apparently the rest of the world is not. More distressing is the fact that unfortunately my opinion doesn't count for much when the millions invested in the industry are taken into account. However, the industry's downward spiral is only a symptom of the greater illness: greed.

As piracy goes up, CD sales go down. As CD demand goes down, CD availability grows smaller. As CD availability grows smaller, clowns like me who still enjoy a good ol' CD and case get tired of scrounging. And as we get tired, the majors loose out on one of their only faithfully remaining revenue sources: the die-hard music-lovers. And all of it could have been avoided if companies had taken the time to plan ahead and prepare for the storm while they had the resources as Tim Renner of Universal Music explained in the Economist article: "...the majors should have acted years ago. "Then they had the money and could have built the competence by buying concert agencies and merchandise companies," he says. Now it may be too late."

Paid-for-download services are increasing and more and more 360-deals are striking all the time, but the industry (as we know it) is on a ticking-clock.


Check out The Economist for more.