Rolling Stone is running a two-part series on “The Record Industry’s Decline.” They seem to pin the tipping point on the moment the industry refused to work with Napster in 2000, instead launching their own music download services, none of which worked as well as Napster. Soon after Napster shut down, what had been the central-hub for music file sharing spread out among various networks, making the situation far worse than it was before. In 2003 the RIAA began suing people who downloaded music, and we all know how that’s gone down.
While the record industry blames the Internet, let’s remember the music trends that precipitated the industry’s fall. Boy bands? Bubblegum pop? Nu Metal?! I don’t think anyone thought these were artists with substance and staying power. I remember more than a few “modern rock” radio stations that couldn’t survive when the bottom fell out of that one – Now they’re either country, classic rock or “Jack” stations, which don’t adhere to any particular format. At the time, of course, there was nothing a good “Hit Me Baby One More Time” or “Nookie” couldn’t do for you:
Just a few years ago, many industry executives thought their problems could be solved by bigger hits. “There wasn’t anything a good hit couldn’t fix for these guys,” says a source who worked closely with top executives earlier this decade. “They felt like things were bad and getting worse, but I’m not sure they had the bandwidth to figure out how to fix it. Now, very few of those people are still heads of the companies.”
The industry went for the easy fix, but it’s risky to live and die by the blockbuster. This business model is quite different than the industry of several decades ago, where artists were allowed to grow and stay with the label even with modest-selling albums.
As the article points out, thirst for music has not waned. Touring bands are raking in record money, as are digital download services like iTunes. Nearly every band gives a few songs away for free on their Web pages or on sites like MySpace, which certainly isn’t hurting for users. So while plenty of artists are circumventing the traditional path to success of “getting discovered” and being signed to a major label, the labels continue to suffer. Unfortunately for them, their bone-headed business decisions, contempt for their consumers and the inability to change in the face of new technology has them teetering on the brink of irrelevance.
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