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#Post#: 29177--------------------------------------------------
The Death of Casual Music Listeners as Supporters of Music
DIR By: Mac
Date: June 26, 2014, 10:21 am
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Interesting perspective....
Two Op pieces
[glow=red,2,300]The Death of Casual Music Listeners as
Supporters of Music[/glow]
By Steven Stone
--- Quote ---
> In an article in the NY Times on June 8th David Carr advances
the idea that "free music" available through the Internet is
killing the music industry. And instead of charts and graphs Mr.
Carr offers up himself as a prime example of shifting
demographics.
>
> First, read the article Below. It will, if you are in the
music industry, depress you. If you are not in a music industry,
or a music collector, the article will leave you wondering, how,
besides live shows, will musicians make money in the near
future? And how will young musicians ever make the transition
from starvation to subsistence to middle class wages? VanDyke
Parks lays out the current situation for songwriters in an
article in the Daily Beast.
>
> How valid is David Carr's argument that casual music listeners
like himself no longer "need" a personal music collection
because, "With scarcity now gone, songs are in the air, a mist
we move through like so much department store perfume. We are no
longer collecting music; it is collecting us on various
platforms." Using himself as an example, Carr has decided he no
longer needed to keep a library of CDs, or buy new ones because
all his music "needs" were being met by streaming services. Carr
sold all his CDs at a garage sale and isn't looking back.
> I think the first casualty of this new paradigm is the
listener's personal involvement with the music and the creators
of the music. What was that song? Who made that music? It
doesn't matter to a casual consumer because music, when served
up and consumed as background and soundtrack for living, no
longer has the same impact or meaning as when it's chosen as a
primary stimuli. The bond between creator and consumer won't be
as strong, and may never be powerful enough for listeners to
make the jump to fandom...
>
> Casual music "consumers" (those who aren't fans or collectors)
have become non-players in the world of music monetization.
Since the end-users pay nothing for their music, naturally the
purveyors of all this free music - Spotify, Pandora, Google,
uTube, etc., must pay nothing (or virtually nothing) to the
artists in order for their business plans to remain viable (or
so they say.).
>
> The short-term result of this shift in how consumers consume
music and what they seem willing to actually pay for means that
recorded music as a viable product may be over. In the new world
commercial paradigm recorded music may be relegated to a
loss-leader advertising expense - something that exists only to
bring peoples bodies to live performances.
>
> Never before have we had such fine tools for making
recordings. The irony is that never before have there been less
opportunity to make money from those recordings - at least if
your goal is to sell music to a casual listener...
>
> He's right, of course, in general, but wrong in the
particular. "partly because the physical artifact is more
attractive than the plastic CD case" - I beg to differ. I have
many CDs in both plastic and gate-fold that contain attractive
and interesting booklets and even attractively- painted CDs. If
Carr lacks any particular interest in either current but even
more in classic albums and artists, well that's sad. I have no
problem culling the 'crap' out of my collection, but would never
consider wholesaling it.
>
> I still buy CDs, and rip them as flac to my media drive. I can
play them on either of my network connected Denon receivers or
access them from the internet, or if purchased from Amazon
(likely), play them through their service.
>
> Sitting here with Glenn Campbell's Ghost on the Canvas, Hear
Music's Mele O Hawaii and Bruce Springsteen's The Promise in
hand though, is much more satisfying.
>
> Cheers
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> [glow=red,2,300][size=14pt]Free Music, at Least While It
Lasts[/glow]
>
> Late last Thursday, I stopped at the fruit stand and some big,
vivid red grapes caught my eye. The vendor said a two-pound
bunch would be $6, which seemed steep. I was about to tell him
as much, and then came to my senses and gave him the money.
>
> I wondered why I hesitated when it came time to pony up and
realized that, as just one more participant in the Something for
Nothing economy, I’d grown accustomed to getting all sorts of
lusciousness for the price of zero.
>
> Throughout that day, I used a suite of services from Google —
email, contacts, documents — for a price of nothing. I deployed
a free app called HopStop to plot my subway route to Brooklyn to
meet my daughter for dinner, then used free mapping built into
my iPhone to navigate to the restaurant. Along the way, I
listened to song after song on the free version of Spotify.
There were some nominal charges for the data services, but in
general, I was free-riding.
>
> The outbreak of free is being felt all over the economy, but
music is an industry that has produced the soundtrack of
contemporary American life. Artists are singing the blues about
the crippling effects of streaming, and no one wants to be part
of the day the music died.
>
> Music has been free for decades through the miracle of
ad-supported radio, but streaming services feel different
because I can listen to what I want, whenever I want. The
implicit promise of radio has been that consumers will hear a
song they love and buy it. But when I love something on Spotify,
my response is to listen to it some more on Spotify. I could pay
$10 a month for the premium version and have done so in the
past, but for now, I’m sticking with the free service and put up
with an occasional commercial.
>
> With scarcity now gone, songs are in the air, a mist we move
through like so much department store perfume. We are no longer
collecting music; it is collecting us on various platforms.
> Spotify has doubled its number of subscribers, paid and
unpaid, in the last 18 months and reached a milestone of 10
million paid subscribers worldwide last month. In May, Pandora
served up 1.73 billion hours of music, up 28 percent over the
previous year. The two services have important differences, but
they both have premium pay options as well as ad-supported free
models. And Amazon, Apple and YouTube are all moving swiftly
into the streaming space.
>
> It is a very new world with behemoths crashing in, looking for
a place to profit in a regulatory environment that hasn’t
evolved much since before the Rolling Stones made a good record.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced that it would
review the 73-year-old agreements that govern Ascap and BMI,
which oversee licensing for radio stations, public spaces and
websites. The agencies collect close to $2 billion a year in
royalties, but operate under consent decrees that they say do
not give them the flexibility to negotiate workable deals in an
age of streaming.
>
> Many labels and the musicians and songwriters they work with
say streaming outfits risk wiping them out by paying tiny
royalties, but the people who make all that yummy music are
actually being loved to death by fans who expect it to be free.
>
> And it’s only going to become worse. Hand a music CD to a
10-year-old and ask her what it’s for. Most will never see a
song as something that was imprisoned on a disc or a download
that you had to pay for.
>
> And it’s not just tweens. A few weeks ago, we had a garage
sale at our house and I was willing to part with only about half
my books. But when I looked over my collection of CDs and
thought about what I wanted to keep, my answer was, um, nothing.
There were hundreds of them, carefully collected for more than a
decade, some of them gifts, some of them even recorded by
friends or bands I had written about, but they’ve been idle for
years. I priced them at a quarter each and then some guy offered
$35 for the whole bunch and we caved. We even threw in the rack.
>
> Books have retained some value in an evolving personal media
ecosystem, partly because the physical artifact is more
attractive than the plastic CD case (which can be opened only
with a crowbar). CD collections no longer signify cultural
identity. (LPs, which are making a niche comeback, are a
different matter.)
>
> Music’s jailbreak began almost as soon as songs could be
rendered in ones and zeros. When Steve Jobs of Apple decided
that the price for a song was 99 cents, he “saved” a record
industry besieged by piracy by burning about half of it down.
People ceased buying albums and bought only the songs they
wanted, a disaggregation that wiped out inefficiency — which is
profit by another name.
>
> Between what I bought and what I burned, I ended up with about
7,000 songs. But guess what? I don’t listen to those, either.
Why would I when I can mindlessly push a single button?
> I wrote a profile of Neil Young a while ago in which he railed
about the loss of sound quality, but as Clay Shirky, a professor
at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program,
has said, “good enough is good enough.” The convenience of
pushing a button on a handheld device that streams wirelessly to
a speaker is always going to trump hunting down a CD with
marginally better sound and plopping it into a player.
>
> Think I’m the only lazy one? Sales of digital downloads
dropped a whopping 13 percent in the first quarter of this year
after falling 5 percent in 2013, which was the first year since
the debut of iTunes that sales of digital music dropped. Apple
has certainly noticed; Less than two weeks ago, it announced it
would buy Beats Electronics in a $3 billion deal that includes a
fledgling streaming music service.
>
> The acquisition also included the expensive Beats headphones —
$300 and up in a variety of colors so they also serve as fashion
accessory. People will still pay large money for devices, and
this weekend, thousands of people will spend at least $250 for
three-day access to the Governor’s Ball Music Festival in New
York. It’s a curious disconnect: Fans will pay top dollar for a
music accessory or a music event. They just won’t pay for, oh
yeah, music.
>
> Writing in The Daily Beast last week, the musician Van Dyke
Parks said that in the good old days, a song he recently wrote
with Ringo Starr would have provided him “with a house and a
pool.” But at current royalty rates, he estimated that he and
the former Beatle would make less than $80, which means he will
have to choose between a dollhouse and a kiddie pool and then
share it with Mr. Starr.
>
> Superstars like Beyoncé can drop an unannounced bomb on iTunes
and sell a million copies in under two weeks, but most artists
are having trouble treading water in the stream. Streaming
services argue that as their subscriber base grows, musicians
will be able to survive on many small slices of a very big pie.
>
> On the bus ride home from dinner last week, I streamed most of
the wonderful new album from Parquet Courts, courtesy of the
Something for Nothing paradox. The $6 grapes were delicious, by
the way, but I consumed them slowly and consciously, each one
carrying not only lusciousness, but the knowledge that I had
paid for them.[/size]
--- End Quote ---
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