I am one of those rare people who still buy music on CD from a bricks and mortar shop. I have known the owner of this specialist shop that specialises in Classical and Jazz for more than thirty years. So its more an act of loyalty and friendship, than anything else. But a he often points me in the direction of some good music that I would have otherwise missed. I do buy some other obscure stuff on the web though.
We got talking and the guy mused that the move to streaming has caused a massive loss of jobs in the music buisness, as well as destroying a source of income for musicians. Just one number. Here in Italy, Warner employed 40 representatives ten yeas ago. They now have just one. I found this data point pretty stunning. What has been the human cost of streaming with so many good jobs lost in this sector?
Where is buffet of virtually free music leading us?
I would wager that the end result is a lack of choice.
I have mixed feelings because while I do buy cds it’s to immediately create a digital copy on my pc. I still love that cds exist and I’m glad that there is clearly some market for them as the second hand market also seems to be doing ok. I can’t really carry cds so I’m also appreciative of the convenience of digital. I like that it’s easier to make playlists than it was to copy a mixture of songs to blank tape. I do worry that streaming services mean a lot of people are just renting music and what that could mean for the future.
It is my opinion that the digital era has brought irreversible damage to the music industry. The number of record/CD stores has reduced dramatically. Those who still purchase music in a physical format are likely to do so from large online retailers like The River, where prices are more competitive than independent stores. While online music download stores might be thriving, opportunities to duplicate albums without paying for them and without loss of quality, are abundant, either with a CDR drive or from an unlicensed download or torrent site. Having said that, I have little sympathy for the major record labels. When CD first took off, CDs were prices at £15 per album, compared to vinyl albums which, if memory serves correctly, were priced at around £5 at that time. There is clearly still a market for the limited edition box set, for which record companies dredge the vaults for anything that might be of interest to the diehard collector and combine it with a presentation box and coffee table book. The digital era has also impacted on the live music scene. It is much easier to get music released through sites such as Bandcamp, bypassing the need for artists to get a recording contract. Back in the old days, artists secured recording contracts through live performance, which provided greater exposure and recognition by A&R representatives of record labels. There is little wonder that the music has died, although this has been a gradual transition. The music business is now driven by greed as those who try to make money from it battle for the scraps that remain.
I rip my CD’s too, to put on my Astell and Kern portable music player. The thumb nail sized SD card can hold an amazing number of records.
Renting music from a provider that might go out of buisness, or change format, is the thing that puts me off. Ok you pay €10 a month for all you can eat, but I fear I might get musical indigestion.
I don’t buy CDs, and see little point in buying just to rip, as I want as little clutter as possible. I get my music as downloads and try to use Bandcamp where I can, or direct from the artist when they do this.
I’ve spoken to musicians at concerts when they are totting up their streaming income and the amounts are really pitiful. Smaller bands once got good income from album sales, but with streaming it’s very different and they are much more reliant on touring.
You touch on another problem, It is so relatively easy to put out a record and sell via Bandcamp, that I wonder who buys all those disks that get reviewed every day on sites like All About Jazz. Without the gatekeepers at least guaranteeing some quality. It is getting very difficult to find new exceptional music.
Every time I have fallen for that lost live, or bonus track added to an old CD, I have found myself with a lemon. Impulse recently released a lost Coltrane live, that sounds truly awful on my humble HiFi. Stuff remained in the vaults for a reason.
A recent article in the Guardian, pointed out that the members of some second and most third division bands, need to have a day job to pay the bills. Most Jazz artists seem to have teaching jobs, if you dig a little into their biographes. Steaming and subscription downloads has been the root cause of this new normal.
I find that when I play a CD on my audio system, I sit and listen to the whole disc. When I use the Astell and Kern, I tend to skip around, never playing a whole album.
The second point is really just down to you. I have no CDs, over 4,000 albums on a NAS, and never flick around, playing whole albums virtually every time.
What did they all do. Executive Vice President, Senior President, assistant with an assistant who had a secretary who had an assistant and I bet all of them had whopping great big expensive accounts.
A discussion on the radio last week was covering the cost of concert tickets. A mum was on talking about her daughter wanting to see an artist who had only had a small number of chart singles. The tickets were £200 each.
The reason was blamed on artists not earning anything from Spotify, and no record sales, so touring is only main income.
I’d point out that isn’t helped by the way concert tickets are sold prices for big artists go to insane levels especially with ticket touts which leads to £200 being considered the lower end, it’s insane for one evenings entertainment. I’m honestly relieved that I’ve never desired to go to a big pop concert.
Changes to the law have killed lots of small to medium sized venues over the past 15 years and that initially drove artists to CD but also running their own download accounts. The advent of streaming has made a huge dent in the sales of both and driven lots of artists away from record companies and back to running their own sales sites because smaller acts struggle to find the venues of an appropriate size from which to gig or profit. Break big via a record company or streaming and venue size or numbers cease to be an issue but for new artists and people who could previously make a career out of music just through consistent gigging and periodic product to a dedicated fan base it’s a huge problem.
I’ve a friend in a band in Manchester. They’re called Illegal Fireworks and they currently operate via Bandcamp. They’ve been together for more than a year but only played 3/4 gigs because the venues just aren’t there. The gigs have generated a huge uptick in interest and very quickly they’ve gone from family plus 10 to 200 people just there for them, including members of the Fury family (!). That could ordinarily sustain a career and generate record company interest but neither are on the horizon because of the lack of venues where anyone could see them.
Going back to the OP I doubt many of us would mourn Warners losing 40 posts but streaming is just one of several things creating a problem rather than the thing.
I agree and also the great film camera manufacturers that have gone to the wall like Rollei, Mamiya, Olympus and Bronica to name a few. There is only Leica that manufactures decent film cameras now.
As you say the photo labs have all but gone and film is so expensive now and can be hard to get. A roll of Fuji Velvia is now approaching £30. I used to enjoy 5x4 photography but at £9 per shot on transparency film, it is now out of the question.
Also the emphasis in photography has shifted from making sure you take a good picture in the first place to processing it in Photoshop and Lightroom. In digital photography it doesn’t matter if you get the first one wrong, you’ve probably got hundreds more - one must be ok. I heard the other day that someone took over 2000 shots at the Grand Prix. Who’s got time to look through that lot?
In fact it’s not photography now but image manipulation. Sorry, rant over!
Over the past 4 years I have moved to just vinyl and streaming for listening to music. These days the somewhat insane prices for new vinyl have seen my scale back my purchases of LPs, $40 - $60 for an album just seems too high to me. Add the fact that new artists can’t even get physical copies pressed as pressing plants seem to just churn out more and more re-issues by legacy artists and its really difficult to even locate copies to buy.
I now use Qobuz as I wanted the option to buy downloads but I tend to buy most of my downloads from Bandcamp, which I hope supports the artists a bit more.
The problem with streaming is that the majority of folks don’t really want to pay for it. $10 - $20 a month for almost unlimited new and old music on a streaming platform is never going to sustain new artists. And listening for free is even worse. Sure, Metallica might stream a billion copies of Enter Sandman and make some (more) money but the new album by Intranced (a screamingly good metal album called Meurte Y Metal) probably doesn’t get enough streams to buy a cup of coffee.
I try and limit my purchases to support smaller artists who are more than likely struggling to make a living so as much as I would like a re-issue of Genesis Foxtrot to replace my worn out copy, it isn’t going to happen, Concord Music Group can go suck it.
The positive side of streaming for me, especially via Bandcamp, is the ability to find new artists from around the world that I would never come across in a physical store. My latest purchases were heavy metal bands from Chile (Lucifer’s Hammer), India (Against Evil) and Canada (Tower Hill) and from a Hungarian Space rock collective called Pyschedelic Source Records. None of these would ever have made it on physical media to an HMV near me!
I didn’t know that. Sad.
I used to have a Mamiya TLR. Lovely bit of kit purchased from Pelling & Cross in Manchester. I bought loads of Fujichrome 50 from P&C too
