World music sales slide despite digital dividend Digtal music sales rose eight per cent worldwide during 2011. Good news for Apple, owner of the download-centric iTunes Music Store, but not for CD sellers: the industry as a whole saw revenues slide three per cent. Industry organisation IFPI said recorded music sales revenues fell from $16.7bn in 2010 to $16.2bn in 2011. …
Surely one of the advantages of download music sales for content providers & copyright holders is that the distribution costs are substantially lower than for CDs.
And of course when it's revealed that net revenues for music sales rose as a result of lower costs the Recording Industry Ass. of America and the like will stop bitching about file sharing killing the music industry.
And then I woke up...
I haven't heard anything new worth the space on my hard drive since Phish, so I now own most all of Phish's released albums. Purchases in recent years has been limited to things like replacement for my damaged copy of Dark Side of the Moon.
Sales are down because there is no new music worth listening to, much less buy.
Yes and in Mozart’s day there had been nothing worth listening to since Beethoven and in twenty five years time today’s kids will complain about the poor quality of the then contemporary music and what rubbish their kids listen to.
The more things change the more they stay the same!
The other important question is how many singles and albums were released this year compared to last year? And have they factored in the current state of the global economy with regards to people not being able to afford to buy as much music as previously?
I know I've cut down on my spending on music due to the rising price of essentials like food, bills etc. And also because I haven't heard much good music recently but that is subjective obviously.
Music. What's that?
The entertainment industry has consumed itself with greed. I don't listen to music anymore. I don't buy music anymore. I don't download music anymore. I don't care about the pieces of music "data" that I still have.
The fall to oblivion began with the introduction of digital audio. It sounded so clear. It promised to last forever. The enjoyment in the listening became lost.
Okay, so there were technical mistakes made with the early introduction of digital audio. Time, experience and degrading the digital information via DACs which added noise and strongly compressed playback formats such as MP3 brought some of the enjoyment back to listening.
The downsizing in reproduction fidelity was accompanied by the movement to ear buds and personal plugged in listening. Sorry, but a room filled with high fidelity music is so much more useable ... or wearable (one could work and play in a room filled with music) ... than those damn ear buds or headphones.
Only MP3 scaled up doesn't sound so wonderful as records or improved uncompressed DA ... and who needs uncompressed DA to listen through ear buds.
Finally the whole charge per song for hobbled MP3 compressed samples with constraints disincentives and stipulations of 'license-to-device' and 'limited-time-license' makes the ownership experience very unsatisfying.
There is no reason to collect a personal library when all the crappy intangible material is available "on demand", a click away from downloading for a handsome transaction fee, only to disappear forever in some 2 TB hard disk with a million other files, that eventually gets bricked lost or thrown out 6 months to 10 years hence.
I have spent 10s of thousands of dollars on music in my life. Records were horrible. Tapes were worse. CDs promised perfection and eternity but proved to be abrasive cognitively demanding storage media which failed to live up to it's promise of durability.
Now I am offered crap MP3 Low Fidelity 'locked license" rubbish to stuff up my bodily orifices under dire threat of prosecution and incarceration should I attempt to assemble an heirloom collection. .. Why bother collect rubbish that can be acquired instantly in a virtual format without any sense of tangible presence?
Why pay $$ for exactly the same items I paid $$$$$ several times over in the past with the assumption of having a personal library of a scarce valuable limited tangible piece of history.
As far as I am concerned the entertainment industry can go pickle their entire endless limitless inventory and choke on greedy royalties supplied by other customers.
I don't listen anymore. I don't watch anymore. There is no longer enjoyment from it.
The thing that annoys me most is that they present what are a very good set of results during a recession and then complain all the time. In a recession one might expect people to buy less generally and for filesharing to have gone up. Therefore, one might expect a really significant downturn. Instead, there's a slight downturn, but miles better than most other 'retailers' and yet they still can't resist the urge to take a pop.
Children. Never happy with what they've got.
We might be buying less music but we're buying more movies, games and top up/contracts for phones.
There is only a limited amount of disposable income and it's been a long time since the only thing for teens/20's to spend there money on was music.
I woudl be very interested in seeing the figures for how much money is spend on entertainment as I'd expect this figure has gone up over time, with music having a reduced percentage.
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