Can someone school me on what happened to the music industry?

They were public corporations with an obligation to their shareholders.

 

Maybe someone else can explain it to you.

 

Because they were divisions of conglomerates earning tens of millions of dollars in profits currently, and the parents were public companies with shareholders expecting revenue growth and even earning growth every quarter.

 

What? Why? Again, you can just have them provide exclusive content catered to certain subscribers. What I'm talking about is music to listen to. You can have subscribers who pay $50 more per year or whatever.

 

It would be a simple empirical fact what degrees the employees in question actually had.

 

So the answer is to eventually let those quarters start declining because of the moves you didn't make.

Again, this is just the problem.

 

It utterly amazes me that some people are oblivious to people who listen to different music than they do, or do so on a different platform than they're used to.

Recorded music revenue is up on streaming growth, as physical sales plummet – TechCrunch

As mentioned earlier, record companies are taking in a million dollars per hour in streaming revenue. That doesn't sound like "indifference" to me, but what do I know? I'm stupid enough to think that Amazon has smart engineers, so you probably shouldn't put too much credence in anything I write.

 

LOL at thinking that "degrees" equates with computer programming expertise, especially in the mid-90s.

 

yes, Amazon making millions every second makes me feel so warm and fuzzy about the music industry

 

Is one premise here that "nothing happened to the record industry, it's bringing in more profit (adjusted for inflation) than ever"?

 

Computer programming has nothing to do with product engineering.

You can know every possible thing there is to know about programming computers. That doesn't do anything for designing something like a kindle or a Tap. That requires specific sorts of engineering expertise that you only acquire via going to school for it.

It's like the fact that I have skills up the wazoo re music theory and re playing instruments like keyboards, bass and drums. But I couldn't even begin to make a keyboard, bass or a drum, much less design something like that from scratch. Those are completely different skill sets.

 

It is a problem, or, it was a problem -- although of course losing money is a problem for shareholders who didn't buy shares on the basis of an on-the-come investment maybe but bought them on the basis of a P/E ratio based on actual E! And the duty of the corporate officers to retain and even growth that value. But, like I said, Bertlesmann was a company that tried -- they invested in B&N online, the did a joint venture with AOL. But there's a difference in kind between a media conglomerate dedicated to developing and exploiting copyrights. And a technology start up with no preexisting lines of business dedicated to building a technology platform. They're completely different sorts of situations and they are not designed to do the same they and they don't have the same shareholders with the same expectations.

It's not like the record companies didn't try to protect their businesses and just sat back and took the losses. And it's not like there was a viable financial alternatives. They partnered with Apple on downloads, but downloads never really were very successful in that revenue from downloads never was sufficient to replace lost revenue from CD sales. And paid streaming wasn't an industry that existed or could exist -- people didn't have broadband access, consumers weren't will to pay for content online (I can't tell you how hard it was in 1995 and 2000 to convince people to pay for an online subscription to a content service). It's not like in the late 1990s CD sales went into decline and paid streaming started skyrocketing. No, it would be another 15 or 20 years before paid streaming started to work. There were paid streaming schemes like Rhapsody, and subscription download services like E-Music. They flopped. Consumers didn't want them. The market wasn't ready for it. It's only like five years ago that paid streaming finally started to take off, after certain market conditions had changes as I previously noted -- the Netflix effect in terms of people's willingness to pay for content, the ubiquity of smartphones with all-you-can-eat data plans. The record companies were not going to do anything but take 15 years of losses between 1999 and 2015 no matter what they did. They also weren't organized to develop the winning platform for delivering music services by subscription (it's not surprising actually today that Spotify is the industry leader and that last generation's tech giants Apple, Amazon and Google are playing catch up to a start up, this is how it goes).

On top of all that, they couldn't get together and form their own exclusive online direct to consumer distribution platform if they wanted to without it being shut down by US and EU regulators over anti-trust concerns.

 

The quality sounds SO awful on a phone.. I don't see why anyone would want that low-quality experience.

 

On a related note, I've been wondering what happened to the door-to-door ice-block industry.

 

You prefer bringing your portable LP player.

 

I went to the doctor, I said 'Doc, it really hurts when I move my wrist like this'. He said 'Well, don't do it then'.

 

A lot of people don’t know any better, or aren’t discerning.

Also, when I plug my iPhone into my integrated amp, using the iPhone’s DAC, it sounds fine. Not great, but fine.

 

The record companies definitely did fight a rear guard action to defend their turf instead of an offensive action to seize new opportunities, much like the movie business did when home video tape players first hit the scene. I remember back in the '90s a friend at a record company called me to help him work through some web-based ideas for a catalog division of a major record label that he was responsible for. We had a meeting with business folks and legal and every netcentric idea we spitballed got shot down, especially by legal in attempts that they thought were protecting the value of their copyrights. It was very frustrating and nothing ever came of it. But they were so afraid at the time of stuff getting out in the ether and never being able to control it.

 

Big issues in the era of boy bands which cost the music business dearly. 1: Artificially high CD prices, even though the cost of manufacturing a CD was far cheaper than a cassette. (yes, I know the royalty rate was higher) 2: These groups often had one or maybe two desired hit singles, at most on an album. 3: No standard CD single format for youth pop. And when computer CD-R drives and blank media got cheap, and Napster and other pirate download sites began catching on, the beginnings of the music industry's downfall began. Like I've said for years, CD prices should have dropped to $10.98 list prices, labels should have insisted on the prevailing LP/cassette royalty rate, and priced where every teen could afford to buy legitimate Compact Discs. What the labels would have lost in profit per disc, would have been gained back in sales volume. Look at what the 1957 reduction in LP prices did for LP sales volume back in that era, it fueled the LP sales gains from 1958 through the 1978 era. Some thoughts.

 

No, my little mp3 player, and I only use that when I'd cut the grass.

 

It is the customers taking the cheapest route and not understanding how well the music could actually sound

Your chart shows 10% of year 2000 sales (943 million vs 99 million). Not 2%
Unless there has been a 5 fold dropoff in the last three years

Still 10% of it’s former self

 

Sure, you need hardware and mechanical engineers to design a Kindle, etc. But it's eventually the software on it – and in Amazon's case (and Google's, etc), the software behind it, in the cloud – that will make it useful. See what happened to the mobile phone manufacturers. Every one of the "classic" telco hardware-based manufacturers: Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, all of them, are out of that business. They were companies where the user facing software never had first prio. They laughed at Apple when a computer company launched a mobile phone. But a phone today *is* just another computer, which is nothing without the software.

 

the listeners.

 

Lol. People still have CD binders? I was told the whole point of a CD was to have liner notes and a case and all that "tangible object" stuff. If it's just the disc, it's the same 1's and 0's you get from streaming. (Not to mention anyone who actually cares about physical media in 2020 definitely wouldn't store their stuff that way). But if I just had the disc, what would I play it on? New car (nope), any of the 4 computers in my house (My profession requires me to be a Mac person, and they haven't done optical drives in at least a decade), my TV that gets all its content from a Roku? (nope)

Vinyl is old technology, but also still a niche product. Even those of us who enjoy vinyl listening probably do the vast majority of our music consumption elsewhere, because that's just how life is. But unfortunately it's the only way to get decent sounding versions of too many albums.

Nothing has changed but the delivery method. There's always been music made to generate profit, and music made to be art, and how it gets to your ears doesn't affect the art at all.

 

Some binders are Disc only and some are CD and artwork. Many on this forum us a drawer system in plastic sleeves(no cd cases) which actually makes filing and storage EASIER.


400 movies in one binder. There's a dozen different methods for drawers/boxes/binders and several different ways to handle to artwork.