Letters to the Editor
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it's all about control
Of course what these big media companies truly fear is losing control over the business. And I think the horse left that barn a long time ago. Because the internet allows artists to connect with fans and find an audience by networking online they don't need the record companies to enslave them. They can record an album in their basement using their laptops, master it, and release it all on their own. They don't even need to bother making CDs anymore for the most part.
I agree the variety out there these days is pretty staggering. I have been listening to all sorts of Thai indie/rock for the last year or so. All of it discovered online one way or another, but I have been buying actual CDs direct from Thailand via the Net or in person while I was there on vacation. I suppose that would be a problem for people who care about lyrics since I don't speak Thai hardly at all, but for me the vocals more or less just become another instrument. The problem with those CDs is that piracy is so rampant in Thailand that the big company releases are all DRM'd so I can't rip them to mp3 which kind of pisses me off, but I know why they have to do it.
Every couple of years some new technology or other is going to kill the music business. What is happening now is the democratization of the music business, and it's about time.
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The Arc of Time
It's important to remember that the "music industry" is a tiny blip in the history of music and culture. So, for the last 100 years there has been a business model taht involved record labels promoting musicians and taking most of the profits; doesn't mean that its the only or for that matter even a good way of handling things. Before the "Music Industry" musicians made their money through patronage and live performance; after the music industry new business models will appear and disappear, but musicians are not going to stop making music, and people are not going to stop listening to it.
The other side of the technological revolution that is destroying the music industry is that it has brought the costs of production and promotion down to the point that a band can afford to do it themselves. The reason the big labels are dying is because, well, they increasingly just aren't needed.
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listen up
Music industry whining drives me mad. Rewind 15 years or so: after much hemming and hawing and reading reviews, I buy a CD in a record store. I can't listen to it because the record store only has a few listening posts and they choose what's playing, not you. I get home and ugh, I hate the music. But I read about another one that sounds good, so I take the CD back and exchange it. I put the new disc on my portable CD player (cutting edge!) and listen to it - not bad. I like most of the tracks. But it's frustrating - it took two days to buy!
Now, by contrast, I can listen to music all day on last.fm, find a load of stuff I like and download it. I have 20Gb of music on my mp3 player, an amazing mix of pop, post-rock, nu-jazz, hip hop, emo, whatever, and listen mostly on shuffle. I buy hundreds of tracks. I haven't listened to new music so constantly since I was 17 - in 1969.
The music industry are shooting themselves in the foot if they can't even keep up with old ladies like me. They are sad old suits and deserve to lose out if they think they can force the world to play by THEIR rules. Their naked greed and control-freakery turns people off and away. Instead of trying to stop the future happening, they should embrace it and join in: add value to their downloads by including hi-res artwork and video clips, for example. Or drop download prices and restrictions and see sales soar.
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Music - Lawyers = Still Music
In the old-school music industry setup, artists earned a relatively small percentage of their album's sale price (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/6558540/walmart_wants_10_cds)
This was fine when the labels added value to the product by providing production expertise, marketing and distribution, but there is no economic reason for this now.
The continued existence of these companies is basically un-capitalist because they're claiming a right to charge for something that doesn't add value. iTunes is no better. The only sustainable model will be one in which the artists are paid a more reasonable share of the profits and the only other profits are earned by websites for hosting at a competitive rate.
This will yield a more diverse music industry. Years ago there was a great article in Wired about this with the quote: The bad thing about the death of the music industry is there will be no Michael Jackson circa 1982. The good thing about the death of the music industry is there will be no Michael Jackson circa 2002.
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Freedom of choice
You know those WAMU adds of stuffy old guys complaining about how their world has changed. Yeah, that comes to mind after reading this article. Maybe these record execs have oversized sunglasses and ironic t-shirts, but the whining is still the same.
I love the freedom of choice I've found in the digital age. Like Andrew, and other posters, I've been listening to new music more than ever. I found a great Brazilian band on a compilation CD I bought in Asia, found similar sounds through pandora.com, and downloaded more than a CD's worth of individual tracks that I actually enjoyed on iTunes from various, no-name,no major music labeled, artists. Amen.
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Its the business MODEL, not the biz itself
This is what the media giants hath wrought upon themselves. Used to be, people got into the music biz for this virtually unheard of reason: love of music. Money and girls were the perks, but not the reason for making it your life's passion.
Used to be, the most successful labels barely broke even. If the tech bubble burst of the late 90s signaled anything, it was that you really shouldn't judge your business model by mid-90s success. That decade was a fluke.
People these days aren't stupid and the transparency into the workings of the music biz that the internet provides has done more to chip away at sales than any online music downloading. David Geffen needs to be awash in billions of dollars so that I can pay $17 for a CD that should, at worst, cost me $10? Especially since that's what you pay for the music on iTunes? Well its Geffen (and his ilk) who might need to be the ones recalibrating their needs now.
What I see as the future of commercial music is reversion to smaller, homegrown labels: sometimes the artists themselves, sometimes a loose conglomeration of like-minded artists and fans. The media giants will have a place in distribution and retail outlets (I can't badmouth places like Virgin, I like their stores too much) but they're going to have to accept a much smaller profit margin and percentage of the proceeds because artist-run labels aren't going to accept the fraction of a percent that they were getting under the big guys if they're the ones doing all the footwork.
For the record (no pun intended), I'm an aging genXer who can't fathom owning my music in a digital-only format. To me, buying and owning music is an experience: from the bin digging (my wife won't go to music shops with me anymore), to the CD art and inserts (nothing smells quite as good as a just-opened CD), to actually owning something physical (that can be covered in full by my homeowners insurance). The magic of the internet has also enabled me to never pay full price for a CD ever again.
I rip them myself so I get to decide the quality of the rip. My MP3 "backup" isn't a 128-rip burned to a CD that if ripped back into iTunes will be somewhere in the quality range of a severely beaten 8 track - and I won't lose my entire 1700 CD collection to a virus or file corruption. And have you ever try to sell a downloaded MP3 at a used record store? Make sure you bring a digital recorder so we can upload the peels of laughter to YouTube.