So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed – but the music industry sucks. Not the musicians, mind you, but the business model backing them. Yeah, it’s always been a bunch of stuffed shirts with dollar signs in their eyes looking for the next trend – but the fact that they nearly missed out on the whole internet thing blows my mind.
From the second Napster hit the web and showed the world how to download, R & D for the major labels should have been trying to work on a new digital business model to make some money. They could have easily set up a tiered subscription service (Basic, Gold or Platinum, from low usage to unlimited) that could have given consumers a legal alternative and provided a huge source of revenue. But they didn’t – instead spending ridiculous amounts of money in legal fees trying to get that genie back in the bottle.
But by then, the scene had already been set – people didn’t see downloading as wrong, because they had been burned by the music biz for so long already. Everyone was fed up with paying for a full album when there were only a couple of songs actually worth the money, with a whole lot of filler. And the rest of the public were just pissed that they had followed industry trends and replaced their old vinyl with cassettes, cassettes with CDs, and who knew what new format may be looming ahead? Why should they have to pay again?
(On a side note, our Canadian neighbors were much smarter about this from the start. The Canadian government worked out a deal with the RIAA that would legalize all music downloads in their country. The price: an extra tax on blank media (cdr, mp3 players, etc.) that would go directly to the record companies. If only the U.S. were as smart as those crafty Canucks!)
So where does this leave us now? Well, there’s no central store where you can get everything you want, legally. I mean, there’s iTunes, which has a decent catalog. And Napster (the new version, the name bought out by Roxio) seems to be doing okay. But at prices nearing a dollar per song, or only slightly discounted full album packages, what’s the real appeal? The general public had way too much time to accept illegal downloading as the norm before these businesses set up. Even with the threat of lawsuits and fines, most consumers felt righteous enough in their piracy. I mean, after being tricked into buying albums from the Spice Girls or Hanson, they essentially bought a $15 coaster. Yeeecch.
And what could the major labels do to regain our trust? Well, they could take a cue from some of their artists. On September 16, 2007, while Nine Inch Nails were touring to support Year Zero (their final effort to fulfill their contract with Universal Media), Trent Reznor gave the popular “Steal It!” speech to concertgoers in Australia. The gist of it was that he was sick of the major labels price-gouging fans, and that NIN followers should just go out and steal, download or otherwise liberate their new album.
Less than a month later, Radiohead came up with a similar idea. They too were recently done with their label contract, and decided to let fans price their new album (In Rainbows) for themselves online. You could download the album, in its entirety, for whatever you chose. Obviously, there were a lot of “free” copies, but a good deal of money was made. This was an amazing promotional movement for when the physical album was released a few months later, to fantastic sales numbers.
Nine Inch Nails followed their own advice in early 2008, with Trent Reznor posting a link for the first section of their new Ghosts I-IV album for download on The Pirate Bay (a popular, if not entirely legal, Bit Torrent search site). At the same time, through the official NIN site, there were different Ghosts packages available – both for download and physical ordering. Fans could download the first section for free, the entire album for $5 (complete with a digital copy of the CD art), the physical double-disc for $10 and various deluxe packages for rabid fans – including a $300 version with a limited print run of 2500, which sold out in the first week (that's $750,000 on ONE VERSION, in one week). This was all done through their own private label, the Null Corporation – a nice dig as to how much record labels are actually worth. A store release of the CD happened about a month later.
So, what’s the point? Well, Mr. Reznor seems to have made that quite clear – there is a truckload of money to be made, but there are also fair prices that can be attached. For $5, almost anyone would buy a 36-track album – even if it is a crazy experimental, all-instrumental album like Ghosts. And from a purely promotional standpoint, artists allowing a decent sampling of their wares before you purchase keeps everybody honest. If you like what you hear, you’re more likely to buy. But if most of the album doesn’t sound a thing like the lead single and stinks like old cheese…You get the idea.
Now, if only the record execs would get that same flash of genius…
No comments:
Post a Comment