Excerpt:

For four thousand years, there were two ways to make a living as a musician.

You could be a troubadour. That is, strap your harp or lute or hurdy-gurdy on your back and travel town to town. Set up on a street corner, in a market square, or in the corner of a pub, and start playing. Sing the epic or play the requests and hope you make enough money or charity to get a hot meal and a place to sleep before you move on to the next town. You are Homer, you are any one of a number of anonymous medieval bards, you are a vaudevillian or music-hall performer, you are Woody Guthrie.

Or, you could find a patron. Become a court musician, write and play for banquets, weddings, religious holidays, coronations. You work for the Catholic Church, writing masses and choral music, playing organ and directing the choir. You are Haydn, whipping off a symphony a week for the court concerts. You live your life in the service industry, with art as a by-product. You are Handel, you are Lully, you are Palestrina.

Then, a hundred or so years ago, a window opened for a third model: the recording artist. Now, under the right circumstances, you could stay home and mass-produce a widget that could, in a way, do your touring for you. Like the old dream, you could clone yourself, and send all your widget clones to homes and bars and radio stations all around the world to, for a small fee, play private shows for as many people will have you. You are the later Beatles, Harry Nilsson, Brian Wilson, Glenn Gould.

That window appears to have closed. The CD, the cassette, the vinyl LP, are all more or less devalued below the level of the T-shirts and other dry goods that orbit the burnt-out sun of the music industry. 

Which brings us back to touring --- which for most musicians, means playing smaller venues.  We're at the very heart of a big revolution in music!

From http://peterfeld.tumblr.com/post/2894761913/cds-are-dying-sony-closing-another-cd-production

shortformblog:

• 277 workers lost their jobs in 2003, after a Springfield, Ore. CD plant (run by Sony) closed
• 300 workers in Pitman, N.J. will lose their jobs when their CD plant closes on March 31
• one CD-manufacturing plant (in Terre Haute, Ind.) will exist in the US after that plant closes source

This is depressing but inevitable. When the number one album of the week sells only 44,000 copies, that indicates something needs changing.

Jeez, time for another snap stats lesson. Rankings are meaningless, here’s why: we live in a long-tail world where tastes are fragmented. For at least ten years or probably much longer, the vast bulk of people wouldn’t recognize the #1 song, haven’t seen the #1 movie or TV show or read the #1 book. That — by itself — doesn’t mean fewer people are buying music (though that is true too), it means we have more choices and the channels for those choices are siloized. In 1965 or 1975, everyone knew the #1 song, but there were fewer choices and they all played out over the same Top 40 AM radio stations, where you’d hear in succession the Beatles, Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder and the Carpenters. You can lament the segregation by taste and its impact on the culture, but the ability to be #1 with 44k sales doesn’t signal that the pie is smaller, just that there are more - narrower - slices.

TechDirt, 6/11/10

from the predicting-the-end dept

We recently had a post questioning whether the RIAA's legal campaign was a success or not. It seemed like there was plenty of evidence that it has been an incredible failure. Separately, we had a post about Radiohead's Thom Yorke, suggesting that the major record labels were going out of business in a matter of months. While we felt that was a bit of an exaggeration, one of our commenters, Ccomp5950 compiled data on RIAA label sales, along with some helpful notes about what other factors were going on at the time: 

Year: $ in Millions
1992: 9024
1993: 10046.6 (CD players started to get more affordable towards mid-year)
1994: 12068
1995: 12320.3
1996: 12533.8
1997: 12236.8
1998: 13723.4 
1999: 14651 (Work made for hire controversy)
2000: 14404 (Napster sued into bankruptcy)
2001: 13700 (Ipod came out October 2001)
2002: 12,614.2 (Price Fixing lawsuit hits RIAA)
2003: 11,854.4 (Grokster lawsuit, "induced infringement" introduced) (Mass lawsuits by RIAA start(AKA: The education campaign))
2004: 12,345.0 [Revenue Physical / Digital] (BMG gets out of the music business, sold to Sony later on: Big 5 becomes Big 4 for RIAA)
2005: 12,296.9 [91%/9%]
2006: 11,758.2 [83.9%/16.1%]
2007: 10,370.0 [77%/23%]
2008: 8,768.4 [66%/34%] (RIAA declares it's going to stop mass lawsuits with member money problems and EMI almost bankrupt)
2009: 7,690.0 [59%/41%] (Massive layoffs hit RIAA around Febuary: Blames piracy)

Sources: 
http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html (statistics from 90's to 2001)
http://76.74.24.142/81128FFD-028F-282E-1CE5-FDBF16A46388.pdf (Statistics for 97 to 2007)
http://76.74.24.142/A200B8A7-6BBF-EF15-3038-582014919F78.pdf (2008-2009)

It's a great list, but I felt it could be even more powerful as a graph, so I just threw the following together, based on the info above:And, that, right there, does a nice job painting a picture on the decline and fall of the RIAA and the major record labels. A few points are worth highlighting:

• If you're not familiar with the "works for hire" scandal, you can read the full background here. Basically, a Congressional staffer by the name of Mitch Glazier snuck a tiny unnoticed amendment into a much larger bill in the middle of the night -- supposedly at the request of the RIAA -- without telling anyone. It effectively changed the definition of music recordings into "works made for hire," which was really important, because it meant the RIAA labels could hang onto musicians' copyrights for much longer, avoiding termination rights that let musicians reclaim their copyrights. Just a few months later, Glazier left his low-paying Congressional staffer job for a $500,000 job with the RIAA, which I believe he still holds ten years later. Thankfully, people quickly recognized what he had done and Congress had to go back and fix Glazier's sneaky wording. However, it is worth noting that the peak of this chart is right when Glazier inserted his infamous four words.
• As we discussed last fall, now that musicians do have termination rights, they're lining up to use them and take their copyrights back from the labels. They can start getting the copyrights back in 2013. If you're looking for a date when the bottom totally falls out for the RIAA labels, that may be it. When the rights to their back catalog starts to drop out, this chart looks even worse. The RIAA won't give up easily, of course. The latest stunt they're trying to pull is to "re-record" albums, claiming that it creates a brand new copyright, that gives them another 35 years before termination rights are applicable. That is, of course, ridiculous, but the RIAA will likely try to fight it out in court for many years to extend that 2013 deadline by a few more years. Of course, all that money on legal fees could have gone to innovating, but that's just not the RIAA way.
• Note that digital music sales is not even close to being a savior. The total is still dropping rapidly.
• Of course, many have argued that the rise and fall may have a lot more to do with CD replacements of previous formats -- and this chart certainly suggests that could be an explanation. The big jump happened right when CDs became affordable, and people needed to go out and replace their vinyl and cassette (and 8-track!) collections. After a few years of that, it makes sense that the market should drop anyway.
• Once again, it's important to point out that the chart above is not the entire music industry, but a limited segment of it: the RIAA record labels, mainly comprised of the big four record labels. It doesn't take into account all of the other aspects of the music business -- nearly every single one of which has been growing during this same period. It also doesn't take into account thevast success stories of independent artists and labels doing creative business models and routing around the legacy gatekeepers.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers said on Monday that it had filed copyright suits against 21 bars, nightclubs and restaurants across the country, including Doug’s Burger Bar in Imperial, Mo., and The Vibe in Riverside, Calif.

The performing rights group, which represents more than 380,000 songwriters and publishers, said in a statement that each of the businesses did not have the required license to allow performers to play copyrighted songs or have failed to make the payments required by the license.

Any venue that hosts musicians who perform any of the 8.5 million copyrighted songs overseen by the performing rights group, which collects royalties for song writers, is supposed to pay an annual licensing fee.

“Having music in an establishment is an enhancement that draws many patrons to these venues. A music license is a basic cost of business recognized in hundreds of thousands of bars, restaurants and other venues across the U.S.,” Vincent Candilora, the group’s senior vice president of licensing, said in a statement. “The 21 cases filed today aim to heighten awareness among music users and the public that it is a federal offense to perform copyrighted music without permission.”