Sound Logic?

Via the Wall Street Journal, more music industry woes, largely brought on by themselves:

In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.

The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for more than 85% of music sold, has far eclipsed the growth in sales of digital downloads, which were supposed to have been the industry's salvation.

The slide stems from the confluence of long-simmering factors that are now feeding off each other, including the demise of specialty music retailers like longtime music mecca Tower Records. About 800 music stores, including Tower's 89 locations, closed in 2006 alone.

The conventional "wisdom" has it that digital downloads are killing CD sales, which may be somewhat true, but even more conventional wisdom has it that music today sucks so badly, which is why CD sales are down.

I'm not entirely convinced of either of those explanations. To the latter, I have found that there is actually a lot of really good and diverse music around today (arguably more than when I was a teen, driven by affordable music recording/editing technology which has meant that artists don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a professional recording studio to record something halfway decent), you just tend not to hear it unless you go looking for it (which is why I love Internet radio). Terrestrial radio screwed the pooch when it decided to play only what people want to hear--which means that they have to have heard it before to want to hear it, which creates a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario. On the rare occasions when my iPod automobile tape deck adapter keeps popping out and I am forced to listen to the radio in the car, even a "decent" station like WEQX (out of Manchester, VT) will rarely play anything really good and new and interesting.

Second of all, the "science" of tracking CD sales is a tad dubious, and always has been; it's hardly a comprehensive survey of all music outlets, and given the diversity of music retailers on the Internet, I wouldn't be surprised if many many CD sales are simply not recorded. For example, I buy 90% of my CDs online from CD Universe, which is cheaper than even Amazon and, since their warehouse is located in Connecticut, I can usually get my stuff in a day without having to pay for express shipping. I also tend to find obscure CDs at independent music stores in Boston or NYC. Some I buy from indie labels or artists' Web sites directly.

Thirdly, most of the "really good music" (IMHO) is on small, independent labels. In fact, of the 21 new releases I bought in 2006, only 6 were on major labels (Columbia, WB, Geffen, and Capitol--and they were typically records by longtime "classic" artists like Bob Dylan or Paul Simon), compared to 8 on indie labels and another 7 on independent labels but manufactured and/or distributed by majors. Small labels tend to go unnoticed by the RIAA (which is why they hate Internet radio, methinks, since Internet radio tends to benefit small, independent artists more than bigger ones).

The recording industry has screwed itself by focusing its energies on digital rights management (DRM) and suing teenagers, rather than realizing that the Internet and P2P networks are a great source of free publicity (kind of what radio used to be). What the music industry needs is some 21st-century marketing acumen and not phalanxes of lawyers and whingeing about how music consumers are all pirates and thieves. The music industry needs to start thinking "long tail" because anyone who seriously likes and buys music couldn't care less about the latest creature from "American Idol" (the number one album, apparently)--not that I have ever actually seen "American Idol," but I'm happy to indulge my prejudice that it unwatchably sucks.