How Music Got Free --> my book review

It affects jazz musicians as well. The reason there is so much incentive to stay on the road rather than record new music has a lot to do with pricing, even for those acts that still sell "albums". This is because ticket prices for older acts have outpaced inflation, while the price of albums (especially downloads on Amazon, for example) have lagged inflation; this is especially true in the high priced market that classic rock acts operate in. Think about this:

For those of us old enough to have purchased the Concert for Bangla Desh, we all know how much in ticket sales was generated from the two shows at Madison Square Garden, because there's a picture of the check for the proceeds on the back cover of the booklet that came with the album -- $243,000 (which makes sense - 36,000 tickets @ $6.75 per ticket). In 2012, the Rolling Stones played two shows at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ (very similar in size to MSG) - total box office receipts were over $14 million (or nearly 60X what was generated by the two Concerts for Bangla Desh).

In order to generate that kind of money, the Stones would need to sell 1 million copies of a new album (at roughly $14 a copy), which they probably wouldn't be able to do today. Similar economics apply to other acts, although the amounts are smaller. It gets a little more complicated if you believe that new music will generate greater ticket sales.

 

^ Yea....

And when The Rolling Stones in Honolulu, 1973, were $6.75 for the most expensive tickets too ! You know that ! AND...a person could actually own a home in Honolulu on a salary of under $25,000 - $30,000 back then !

 

As my dad always says, those were the days when a dollar was a dollar!

 

drbryant and I BOTH attended the Stone's '73 show out there. I didn't know him at the time..he was a punk of only 12 years old. I wasn't much older, 15.

Albums cost as much as the cheaper and midline seats (BIG TIME artists !!! at concerts back then)....about $3-$4. Try THAT now.

 

You'd think they could use proper grammar in the title.

 

Goddamn! That's be like paying $15 for a decent (not great, but decent) seat at an arena show today.

 

"How Music Became Free?" Doesn't have as nice a ring to it

Maybe it means "got free" as in how it broke out of its (metaphorical) prison? Then it works...

 

I just finished this book yesterday, read it all in 3 days - and I'm not much of a book reader. Great story, well-researched and -written. You always hear these scapegoats being used to singularly blame for the fall the music industry - mp3s, Napster, file-sharing, iTunes, etc. But really, after reading the book, I get the bigger picture that it's impossible to just blame a single factor. In fact, it was a confluence of different events, circumstances, people, politics and tech that all came together at right time to create this rapid change in how music is consumed. Napster didn't kill music, it just took all the esoteric, underground pirating by scene groups, and made it mainstream and easy for the average person to use. File-sharing didn't kill music, any more than iTunes did by making single songs available to purchase, which also drove down sales of full albums. And one can't overlook the importance of the big record companies merging into fewer huge multimedia conglomerates around this time too.

All of these factors and a lot more all had to happen when they did for things to turn out the way they did. The author seemed leave me with a sense that the dust has settled, and now we're all paying for streaming. But I don't think that's the case at all. It's still changing, and the music industry is still spiraling further into financial ruin because of streaming. It's bad enough that they already allowed the album to practically die by selling individual tracks as downloads, so now instead of that $10 album sale, they make $1 single sale. The more streaming gets pushed, they won't even sell the $1 download anymore. Instead, it's replaced with the $10/month streaming subscription. What happens once they've got everybody signed up for streaming and the market is saturated? Where is there going to be any growth from there? I don't know, but I know it's not done changing yet.

 

You nailed it with that sentence. It was that confluence as well as a series of mistakes made by all involved, as well as some court rulings that, had they gone the other way, would have led to a drastically different future than what we have now in 2015. In particular, I'm thinking of the ruling which said that while file sharing was illegal, mp3 players which could store and play back mp3s were not. This seemingly contradictory ruling (how can something be ruled illegal, but the means to store and play it back isn't?) opened the floodgates in a way I think no other single decision during that entire period did.

 

Just spent the last two days reading this book. Great read, highly entertaining. Thanks drbeatle for recommending it. Hadn't heard of it before

 

As the author said, the record companies won the wrong lawsuit

 

Nice that you value songwriting, arranging, rehearsal, studio time, producer, engineers, mastering at $0. I guess that is the view of music fans around the world these days. And the boomers on this board wonder why music isn't as good as it was 'in the old days'. and yes, you will say artists only get a pittance of the remaining $14 ... not true, they got advances to at least make real recordings.

 

Cassettes were still popular through the 90s, and they made sufficient profit on those to pay everybody else even thought they retailed for 1/2 to 2/3 what the CD cost. When CDs were the dominant format and cassettes were banished to the dustbin, none of the labels saw fit to drop their prices.

 

Knopper's is the better book, although How Music Got Free has a more compelling narrative and would make a great Investigation Discovery-type documentary.

Stephen Witt was thorough in his research. I was delighted that he mentioned onetime Cleveland talk show host Steve Church for his significant place in MP3 history. However, the author quotes Doug Morris—and seems completely in agreement with the statement—to the effect that every iPod was filled with stolen music. Mine wasn't, and I daresay most of the people who read this forum could provide evidence of the compact discs they purchased and ripped, in fair use, to fill their iPods.

 

I did just read last week that the UK passed a law now making it illegal for anyone to make a copy of albums/songs they've BOUGHT, even for personal use. IE, if you buy a CD or an iTunes download and make a CDR copy to play in your car = illegal. Ludicrous.

 

I never said I didn't value those...of course I do. But there's no denying the labels fleeced everyone, consumer, artist, and the behind-the-scenes folks alike.

 

You didn't say it directly but you do say it when you say a CD cost $1 to make. Plus royalty payments to writers, publishers etc.

 

It is not any different that when the home stereo replaced families who use to by pianos and kids who learned to play an instrument. My generation bought 45s and LPs because our transistor radios only gave us a portion of the music. We learned to play an instrument and rode our bikes everywhere. Even if we only had a flip-top record player or the family livingroom console, that was way better than my little Zenith mono AM radio. We wanted to hear more.

Later I used my "system" to make tapes for my car, but still bought many lps and some cassettes, some of which I still have along with 2 nice decks still here. It is the computer that forever changed how people got their music and started stealing it, which was brought about by the CD itself. Grandma got Napstered on her computer. Video games became a great competitor.

But, while many of us cared about quality, the masses decided that reduced file sizes was more important, not quality, and all was lost. Good enough became standard fare as music was pushed to a secondary activity, something in the background. Of course MP3s are better than my transistor radio, but that is hardly the improvement brought to us. The music industry will change drastically and I would not be surprised to see the CD disappear in the next 10-15 years, audiophiles have and will turn to high-rez downloads and LPs will still be around, at some point passing CD sales. Why more labels aren't selling more CD quality downloads of their artists is lost on me. Why let it be done by someone else?

Kids will buy cheap turntables and buy some LPs and 45s, but how long this will last is anyone's guess. The challenge will be to get the kids to upgrade from their stock soundcard to a much better USB dac and find a great set of cans to listen on. Now cans are more of a fashion statement with sound quality secondary.

It may be that it will be the cellphone industry that will have to make the audio improvements to their phones that will lead the way. That is not going to help the music industry much. Most of that will be an upload from your ITunes account. How Pono is ultimately received by the masses will be key. It is worth the $399, but kids would rather have a cheaper tablet I think.

 

This is based on the assumption that the masses ever cared about quality in the first place. I'm more inclined to believe the majors deliberately cheapened their product line. The oil crisis helped with this, as did paper shortages, but when there was a recovery, LPs were still flimsy with poor art direction and content that (at least IMO, but I think there was a general consensus) was a shadow of what it was in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s—but they sold anyway. It was marketed and understood by my peers at the time to be disposable, something you grew out of, not something that had lasting significance. To them and most of their parents, it was something in the background long before personal computing came to be.

The issue that helped this attitude along was the emphasis on national touring. The live show replaced the LP/bedroom/headphones paradigm instead of supplementing it. Something that was once directed to "us" was now for mass consumption. Records (many of which never even saw release here) became an afterthought in the American consciousness.

 

When you did a search on Napster you could sort by bitrate. I quickly learned that 128kbps MP3 was wholly unlistenable, and made sure everything I got was at least 192. I remember I found someone sharing A Farewell To Kings by Rush at 320 on Napster!

I was doing a search for Laurie Anderson and someone had miscredited the Nick Cave song "Where The Wild Roses Grow" as a duet between Nick Cave and Laurie Anderson (lord knows how the uploader made that particular mistake). Turns out it wasn't Laurie but was in fact Kylie Minogue. I liked her performance on the song so much that I looked her up and am still a big Kylie fan to this day.

 

I remember being very frustrated when the song I was looking for was only available in 64kpbs joint stereo. I gave up after a few months and went back to usenet.

 

Most mass produced objects cost pennies on the dollar to produce. That isn't a problem. That is the way capitalism works.
Prices are not set by production costs. They are set by consumer demand.
Any college business class in the land will teach you that what something sells for is based on how bad the consumer wants it as opposed to how bad the consumer would rather have the money.
I agree that CDs are priced far too high now, and that is indeed a deterrent. It seems to be a situation where the industry is ignoring demand ( or lack of it) or the concept of how much dough the consumer is willing to part with.
But if the labels are happy with sales, then the price is what it is, and that is the way it works.

 

Very true. It just seems that the industry is talking out of both sides of its mouth...on one hand, they bitch and moan about how physical sales are dying, yet on the other hands CDs are still overpriced and they wonder why the majority of people download from iTunes/Amazon/Google Play or illegally. You'd think they would have learned SOMETHING over the last 15 years, no?