Chris "The Long Tail" Anderson posts some interesting numbers about most sectors of the music industry are going up, other than CD sales:
The Long Tail: Everything in the music industry is up! (except those plastic discs)
What they should have been doing (and indeed been doing the past twenty years) is moving into related spaces like concert promotion, merchandising, etc. Maybe. Or maybe they should just accept that they were a business institution that made sense in an era when information transference was expensive, and that they no longer make sense, and slide gracefully into their twilight years. There's something to be said for that, though calmly accepting death is not an attitude that usually goes over well in the corporate world.
The Long Tail: Everything in the music industry is up! (except those plastic discs)
To which I answer "which music industry?" You don't mean just the one that sells CDs, do you? Because it's a big mistake to equate the major labels and their plastic disc business with the industry as a whole. Indeed, when you stand back and look at all of music, things don't look so bad at all.This demonstrates to me that the record labels' victory over Napster in 2001 was, in the long run, a bad idea because while it bought them some time from having their industry be completely reinvented, it also gave them a false sense of security in that they could still maintain control. Although they made some half-hearted attempts to create new distribution channels and switch to new formats, their efforts lacked urgency. And at the same time, they engaged in many attempts to fight CD piracy, like making CDs so hard to read my computers that they coudn't even be officially called "CDs" that only alienated consumers and further drove them to alternative channels (or made them give up on music entirely and instead spend their money on DVDs, video games, etc.)
What they should have been doing (and indeed been doing the past twenty years) is moving into related spaces like concert promotion, merchandising, etc. Maybe. Or maybe they should just accept that they were a business institution that made sense in an era when information transference was expensive, and that they no longer make sense, and slide gracefully into their twilight years. There's something to be said for that, though calmly accepting death is not an attitude that usually goes over well in the corporate world.
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