How Music Got Free --> my book review

http://rnrchemist.blogspot.com/2015/07/book-review-how-music-got-free.html

Excellent, excellent book. It perfectly captures the moment when technology, industry greed and incompetence, and online piracy intersected and forever changed how music is produced, marketed, consumed, and bought (or in most cases these days, NOT bought). I found it utterly fascinating and quite exciting in some spots (especially when reading about the Feds investigating and closing in on the pirates). I recommend it to anyone who is a techie, music lover, or both (which would be just about everyone on here anyway )

I know this is a book that's been mentioned on here several times, but who else has read it?

 

I did. Excellent book, thank you for bringing it and I also highly recommend it. I mostly love the fact that it brings to the forefront the industry incompetence...a huge part of it all IMO.

 

Absolutely...incompetence and greed, both of which they were almost willfully proud of. Did you find yourself rooting against the labels and the FBI as much as I did?

 

Coincidently, just waiting for the postman to delivery a copy.

The author was on BBC6 music last Sunday. I only caught a portion of it when I was in the car but it was interesting enough. The show's available here for another few weeks... http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0615v8q

Forward to about 38 mins 30 secs for the interview start...

 

Sounds interesting--

When you refuse to give people what they want this is what happens.

 

Yep. Not only that, but when everyone knows you're making things (CDs) for as little as $1 and you continue to gleefully charge $14-18/disc...well, you've got what's coming to you, sorry. I'm not at all for breaking copyright laws and hurting the artists, but I've no love for the labels.

 

It seems like a lot of bad will could have been spared had the labels instituted a two-tier pricing system. Paying $18/disc for something brand new (that had to recoup recording costs, royalties and promotional costs) shouldn't be as painful as paying $18/disc for an old album that has already made its investment back. The $1/disc is pretty irrelevant when there are a lot more expenses than just manufacturing to consider.

 

Absolutely. The fact that record companies refused to adapt while continuing to cash huge sums of money while releasing bunch of "crap" albums is a shame. The arrival of big corporations in the business killed it in the long run.

 

Good idea, that would have been generous on their part. However, reading the book they took almost sadistic glee in repackaging material from older artists and selling it at the same price as new releases. No sympathy from me! Also, their decision to go hard after random file-sharers who only downloaded a handful of songs when even the head of the RIAA herself didn't want to led to a lot of well-deserved bad press. I can see them going hard after pirates costing them millions in leaked albums, but a single mom who downloaded three songs and now she has to pay $100,000? Ridiculous. (and yes, that actually happened)

Yup. And even when they tried to play catch-up with the technology, it was done in such an insincere/half-assed way that it was laughable.

 

That previous post was on the right lines though. By the mid 80's vinyl was becoming poorer quality, thin and poorly manufactured, almost forcing the consumer into new technology territory. Vinyl was priced at £6-7 per LP and Cd's at nearly £15 in the late 80's. CD's with the benefit of hindsight were a complete rip off. It's a bit naive to create CD's that undoubtedly could probably be ripped in an uncommercial arena. Once that technology was mass market the writing was on the wall. However it simply became a viral high speed incarnation of home taping. Funny how they never put any stickers on the CD's saying "ripping this CD is illegal and killing music"!!

 

I wasn't familiar with this book but looks like I need to place an order. Thanks for the heads up.

 

No but I watched 'Downloaded' the doc about Napster. I didn't think it was very good though. The most fascinating part was watching how seldom Shawn Fanning seems to blink.

 

Personally, by the time CDs hit in 1984 I had all but given up on domestic LP pressings anyway (and had never even considered cassettes as a possible alternative) and was almost exclusively buying imports (Japanese if possible) which were MORE expensive than CDs. (About $18 for a UK or German LP, $25-30 for a Japanese LP) Considering how huge the Japanese import sections had become in the stores here by then, I was far from alone. Demand for a decent quality product at premium prices was already in place.

 

Thanks for the review. I just ordered the book from Amazon via the link in the review. Should be here Tuesday.

 

Indeed. It was greed that killed the music industry.

 

Or when they proposed solutions it punished ALL consumers (root kit issues with Sony, inability to rip music you purchased for personal use because of,copy protection)

 

Aside from the fact that argument could be applied to most products in the world, it clearly doesn't take into account promotional, distribution and storage costs (not even considering the money sunk into producing albums) which are going to massively outweigh the manufacturing costs.

 

That's very true, of course, and thanks for bringing that point up. At the same time, it was common knowledge in the industry that a lot of the artists didn't see much of the windfall from their album sales, and by the time the poop hit the fan (for want of avoiding the forum's swear-censor!) in the late 1990s, fans and artists knew how much they were both being ripped off by the labels. I can't remember the exact number, but it was in the book IIRC, and I've seen it elsewhere, that basically when you were paying $15 for a new CD, it cost the label $1 to make, and of the remaining $14, the artists saw a pittance of that. Hence the shift to where we are now where the bulk of acts make their money from touring/ticket sales/tour merch.

Cheers, guys! Please do share your thoughts after you've read it...for me, it's the discussions about all things music on these boards that keep me coming back (and why I love this place).

 

This is a good point particularly for new artists where promotional costs would often be more or an established act where they were contractually required to spent it the larger problem, though, had to do with them continuing to charge those amounts for catalog titles where none of that applied. Yes, there was the cost of remastering, redesigning packaging, etc. but it's come out that the industry made more money per CD than they had ever made on any other format. This, along with the way the industry completely misread what to do about file sharing, copying, etc. by attacking consumers helped do them in.

It's certainly a complex issue but even taking I to account everthing you mentioned, they had a massive ROI and money blinded the. To the need to adapt and change with technology.

 

What's crazy is they merely didn't just miss the boat...they were WARNED, even by internal RIAA and other industry folks, and they brushed it off with the attitude that they were untouchable and it wouldn't affect them. Incredible that more people didn't lose their jobs over that colossal blunder in misreading the emerging technology than actually did...

 

Does anyone know how this book compares to Steve Knopper's "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age"?

 

In 1994, when Aerosmith released "Head First" on CompuServe, I told a co-worker that downloads would finally be the digital replacement for the 45 single since the industry couldn't seem to settle on a CD version. He told me, "WAV files are too big. That doesn't seem practical." I responded by saying, "As the technology advances, someone will make it work."

Enter Karlheinz Brandenburg.

 

Back in the day, well even now, people complained about cd prices. The same cd could be bought at other places (with or without a sale) for less money.
So one has to blame stores like Tower for pricing them too high. For many years, supply was (generally) high with demand being high as well.
Even now, one can scour the Internet and find the album for less money, little to no shipping.

Of course, labels might have set a price point for the cds. I only worked in a used market, so i'm not sure if they did/didn't.

 

A lot of people forget that the record industry was in bad shape before CDs hit. Just like today, they were blaming everybody but themselves for the reason they were loosing money. They said that the reason they weren't selling records was home taping and lobbied for a surtax on blank cassettes. Then CDs came about and everyone wanted to replace the old LPs in their library with new CDs and the record companies were making money hand over fist. When people finally got all their old formats replaced with new then music sales died off once again. Once again looked around for someone to blame, this time it was down loaders.

I think for the majority of music users something like Spotify or the Apple store is perfect. I've known many people over the years who used to buy a CD for just one song. Now that you can get that one song for 99 cents there is no reason to buy an entire disc of stuff you don't want.

If the record companies hadn't been thinking that people are going to continue to buy CDs at the same pace for ever, then they would have been in a better position to adapt to the changing market. I wonder how come the porn industry doesn't seem to be hurting and the music industry does. People seem to download both for free but I don't hear porn producers saying that down loaders are killing their industry.

Chad

 

Good point. I very rarely bought new CDs at Tower Records, Record Town, or other big chains like that. Mainly at my local shops (Bull Moose in Portsmouth and In Your Ear in Plymouth) or Circuit City and Best Buy (back when both stores used to have great selections and big sales, and back when Circuit City existed!). Also got a lot at Strawberries (local New England chain of record stores), Newbury Comics (ditto), and this great catalog (the name escapes me) my dad used to get that sold new CDs dirt cheap because you were ordering directly from the warehouses.