| 78s and 8-Track |
14 April 2003
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CD Sales Drop Confounds Music Industry
The compact disc was supposed to save the record industry. Consumers were going to have to buy CD versions of all the music they had ever purchased, but they would have the incentive of knowing that their collection would never scratch, skip or hiss while playing. Naturally, the precipitate drop in sales in the last year is making record moguls panic, and just as naturally, they don't understand the problem.
The terms "recording industry" and "music industry" have become interchangeable, and therein lies the problem. The powers that be in those firms that bring us Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, Garth Brooks, and
Marilyn Manson believe that the record is the music, and pace Mr. McLuhan, the medium isn't the message.
Capturing the rents one can charge for tunes is a difficult trick. Before Thomas Edison recorded sound, wandering minstrelry was the best most musicians could achieve. And even when wax tubes and Victrolas were cutting edge technology, money was made from the sale of the sheet music, not the sound recordings. Indeed, the records were considered advertisements for the sheet music up until the First World War.
Radio killed the publishing star, though, and the rents captured from the sale of the recording far surpassed the sale of the written note. For 80 years, buying a record was buying music. The MP3 and Napster brought "piracy," but ability to charge for a recording may simply be obsolete.
There are still live performances, and perhaps, those are the rents that should be cultivated. Record companies might give CDs away, allow free MP3 downloads and write it off their taxes as advertising expenses while charging for TV specials and live gigs. The World Wrestling Entertainment crowd put their product out on open broadcast, and still charge $40 for pay-per-view. And what's better for business, giving teenagers free music and charging their parents' cable bill $29.95 for a single show, or paying lawyers huge fees to threaten the kids with jail for downloading songs that will be forgotten in a month?