Elbows Music Blog Community

and nothing changes since oink closes when it comes to leak. now there is a tweeter channel, bunch of forums and private torrent.



and sale of CD drops 19% last year.

miss OiNK so bad

the glory days of Internet piracy

And vinyl's up. Not big numbers, but up none the less! But yeah... the album's pretty much dead.

The record industry business model since the introduction of LP has increasingly moved toward selling unit of merchandise instead of thinking about consumer experience. This is particularly true in the CD era.



It is far more profitable to sell 100K+ CD than filling 5000 concert seat, nevermind 100-200 small room performance times 5 venue tour. with introduction of MTV, creating a media superstar and selling  millions of CD is a global enterprise. It's the business model. the idiots in charge forgets to ask why we want to listen to music in the first place.



IMO. when it comes to modern recording, we are in truly novel situation. This never happens before, We are not in situation where we simply changing format, from vinyl, to cassette to CD... to iPod.   but entirely new ball game. similar to introduction of broadcast radio,  music television, or even recording device itself. It's different era, that's why the major label has such difficult time adjusting. The public idea of what consuming music has changed, while the big label business model is still stuck in the 90's.



just like radio and LP makes it possible for music fan to enjoy music without listening to a concert in person. Or how TV change the perception what live music performance suppose to be.



something happens right now and this is so big that most major labels dont know how to handle it. They try to cling to old model while nobody knows what will happen.



--------------



my take:



1. consumer expectation of what "recording music" suppose to be has now changed in major way. we have moved passed the CD-mtv-media product era. the Madonna-Michael jackson model. This is internet era.



2. a kid that listen to 10-20 albums has different musical sophistication than a person that listen to 100-200 album. and somebody who listens to 1000-2000 albums is in different league ..... what happens if a person listen to 10-20K as afforded by the internet?



3. music is not a single "activity" anymore (going to concert, buying record, going out,etc) but a class of information experience. It is about going to concert, reading blog, digging wiki/internet, google, tweet, etc.... it is much more active information exploration than passive $20 bucks a pop consumption.





------------

so within this context current labels exist. The idea of selling CD/LP won't go away. just like small venue concert didn't go away with introduction of recording music or broadcasting radio.   Or mtv didn't kill radio. radio didn't kill sheet music. and Home taping didn't kill music. (stupid execs kill music)



It's just different.



The entire idea of consuming recording music, the experience, is once again shifting in major way.



People will still buy CD but it will only be much smaller part of  recording music experience. largely nostalgia and remnance of old form of music commerce. and IMO should be classified as environmental crime with all that plastics.



-----------



ok. that part is easy. Any blogger could have concluded that one way or another. The big multi billion dollars question is...



what now? what exactly constitute new listening experience? and more importantly to labels...how to make bucks out of it.



I don't know.  I only know what I want.



I tend to like the idea of small super iPod that act likes a giant university library.  It can stream live performance (just like radio/TV), it can hold recording music, it can give me all "information related to the music (art work, analysis, context, encyclopedia entry, computational map, etc)   I want to be able to share, connect, talk to all people I want to talk to in regard to that music and the data can be transferred to and from any other electronic device I want.   Maybe the device itself will turn into collaborative music device.



basically, anything and everything about music inside my music player.



the music, the creative force, fellow fans, the network, ... historical records.... everything inside my portable device...



and why not? I saw where computer technology is heading. I know what is possible. Just like a person in the 50's dreaming of listening to music while driving a car. Or a kid in the 80's thinking how great being able to listen to music while walking around.



I want my 2TB continuous highspeed wireless pocketable computer multimedia device NOW!!!!  I will pay good money for this.

@ bond - yeah, I completely agree. It is such a hard decision, I mean I am not in it to *really* make money but I also don't want to take a bath in the endeavor. Ultimately I want what works for the artists and the label. CDs and running 1000 just make soo much $$ sense, but if nobody wants them, then is it really making CDs the right thing to do? The artists need discs to sell at shows because that just is the way to go, vinyl would sell but not with the same amount of ease and #s. Digital will sell the most and is the easiest to set up, but there really needs to be a physical component in my opinion. I am willing to put a couple grand personally into a band I think is worth it, so maybe a CD/vinyl/digital is the way to go (at least until I have 6,7,8 bands that want releases at the same time....).

Oh well...its for the love of the music, right? ;-)

Oh well...its for the love of the music, right? ;-)

yeh.. nobody's getting into the indie label biz for the money.

For us, the choice hasn't been CD vs. Vinyl, but rather Vinyl vs. Spending that $1500 on promotion. If we only have a few grand to spend on a record, we're going to release it as cd + digital first, spend the rest on promo, and see what happens - if we sell 500 copies in the first few weeks, then we've covered our investment and can do a vinyl run, even if it loses money. But promo has to come first - otherwise no one's going to hear of the record you've got 3 versions of. It may also make more sense to save vinyl for a different release from the same band, maybe a 7" single before or after the record comes out. You won't make as much money on a 7" as you would w/ an album, but it will give cd-haters something to buy at the merch table.

I imagine it would be kind of a hybrid of a la carte cable tv or even netflix/la-la. The more you pay for in a "plan" allows greater access to the archive, but in the end, I imagine it will be a "plan" similar to a mobile phone bill or what will shake out next in TV programming (a la carte on-demand).

I hope. ;-)

There's also this: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6979380.ece

I can't find any detail on exactly why he was acquitted, and I can't see any real difference between this and the Pirate Bay case.  All I can find so far is some vague comments about him only being charged with 'Intent to Defraud', but seeing as he had no actual illegal music files himself that was difficult to prove.  Intent to facilitate fraud becomes a stickier issue, both in terms of the law surrounding it and the ability to prove his intentions, when the fraud itself was just a side effect of the network he set up (or so he might argue).



Nevertheless, he was profiting, and it is pretty clear that the network he built had the sole purpose of trafficking in copyright material, so I am really curious to know on what basis he was actually acquited because, frankly, I can't see how he had a leg to stand on, particularly in the light of international precedent.  Mind you, I suppose it could be down to the vagaries of UK law, but I'm still in the dark.



It's interesting though, because here is someone who was making money by operating a file-sharing system.  Not blog-based advertising dollars, which I assume are pretty much always rather meagre, but genuine cash.  In terms of a really fucking stupidly obvious model for 'making money out of music', which we all seem to be scratching our heads over, surely a licensed, subscription based version of this would be feasible to implement.  It's a closed system, and presumably easy enough to track traffic volumes, so you could even use tiered billing quite easily. 



Maybe because of this and the recent emergence of the likes of Spotify the political will to prosecute this is waning in the face of the will to exploit it.  It would be nice to think so, but probably naive.



(Wendy, did you get my email the other week?  Are you still blacklisted?)

By the way - my personal views on it are similar to Wendy's - sharing for profit means the profits should go to the bands/labels *not* exclusively 3rd parties.

So Tim, without knowing all the ins and outs, would you hazard a guess and say they might have screwed themselves by going for the harsher charge?

Hmm, I always understood that British copyright was even more restrictive, but maybe that was a misread.

Well fucking get to media law then, and stop complaining.  We need an insider who knows this shit!

From what I can gather, IP law should have you tearing your hair out.  Good luck.

It is, indeed, fucking amazing.

I've been looking for some sweet Spaniard ottomans.

What is iTune?

I agree, but I can see how, with how huge FB & Twitter are today, some kid wouldn't bother with blogs and just get their new stuff from their friends. My oldest is like that, loves music, plays music, recently had her first gig, music is her life kinda thing, never even thinks to go to a blog, or pitchfork, or any of that. She gets her new music from her circle...

Makes sense, I guess?

No, yeah, I get ya! I do the same thing, I think what I mean is "for real friends"... Keeping my oldest (she's 17) as the example, she's got her school friends in Arizona, she's got old friends from Florida, and she's got relatives and what not. She on FB with all of them, right? So, her boyfriend will share a Gaga track or new video on Facebook and then she'll see it. Her source for music will be her actual Facebook friends and maybe the bands she fanned or liked or whatever they call it now for FB pages.

So, if before extreme social networking, you had 100 people and maybe half would out finding music because sharing music wasn't as easy, right? The other 50 would either not care about new music (yay top40 radio?) or get CDs from friends or whatever.

Now, it's a hassle to even find music you like (too many options & sources) so only the super music geeks of that 100, say 10 of them, would go "find" the music, the 40 others would get their music from that 10, and the other 50 are still just listening to crappy top 40!

lol.

My numbers are jacked up and coming out my ass, of course, but it's kinda the gist of what I'm thinking is going on?

These kids are "busy" now, and going out and finding music when half your friends are constantly feeding you music you like already seems silly & pointless. I think they still do on occasion during down times or whatever, but I think it's only the hardcore music geeks really doing it actively. And of them, most probably have a music blog now! lol!

;)

I think earfarm was the one with the recent article on how music blogs are dead, but not really. I don't agree with his sweeping statements on blogs, but I think I get what he was saying and some of it ties in to what I'm poorly trying to say...

ah... found it >>> http://earfarm.com/band-of-the-week/feature/11714

Much better written, thanks!

My only push back is The Man comment, I think it's more time & convenience then some authority thing. Why mess with blogs, reading through all that crap, when the people whose approval I care most about, my friends, are sending me the music I, not only like, but, for some I imagine (peer pressure, desire to belong/be part of the group, etc), "should" be listening to, you know?

I don't think it's a matter of worry, just recognizing that where people get their music changes over time. Based on a lot of articles I've read lately (as well as the study referenced above) it seems like (some) teens are essentially shifting back to the way we did it before blogs were a twinkle - they just happen to be using Facebook and Spotify instead of mix CDs. It's certainly nothing I'm worried about or spending too much time on, just something I've noted.

Also Tsuru, I guess I didn't phrase it very well, I wasn't really thinking in terms of authority...more 'squareness', I guess. Datedness. As in, blogs are no longer the shiniest, fastest way to get access, just as the old music mags aren't anymore.