A couple of years ago, a saleswoman came into my struggling CD store to get me and my partner to advertise in Yellow Book. It took her half an hour of cajoling, persuading, and convincing us that our business was still viable and that her product could help us attract new customers. Finally, we were sold. As we were signing on the dotted line, her assistant saw a CD she wanted and said "Ooh, I'm going to get this one." Our saleswoman turned and -- I kid you not -- said "Don't buy it, I'll burn it for you."
We closed up shop a few months later.
The last few years we were in business, I can't tell you how often I heard patrons telling their friends "Don't buy it, I'll burn it for you." I never, however, heard anyone say "Don't buy it, hunt for it on an illegal file-sharing site," or "Don't buy it, get it for 10 bucks on iTunes." So why is it that when you ask people what killed the music business, you'll invariably get something along the lines of "Blah blah blah Internet blah blah"?
In the early '80s, the record industry mantra was "home taping is killing music." (Or, more accurately, the music business.) It took 25 years longer and a different recording format for it to happen, but it finally happened. All you folks who predicted this outcome back in 1982, please stand up and take a bow.
It didn't happen then for the same reason it is happening now. In 1982, a new LP cost about $7-8 and a decent blank tape cost about $2-3. That's not an enormous bargain, especially when you have to sit there and tape the thing in real time (high speed cassette dubbing existed, but it sounded pretty atrocious). Not only was the fidelity inferior, but you lost the LP artwork as well. The only thing tapes had going for them was their portability.
Twenty-five years later, a new CD costs $10-15, which is the same price as a spindle of 30 to 50 CD-Rs. You can make a close-to-perfect sounding copy of any album in your hard drive in about five minutes or less, in the same CD format. And while you're waiting, you can print out the cover art in color.
If you're still not convinced, check out this stat from the market research company NPD Group: 37 percent of all music consumption last year came from friends ripping and burning each other's CDs. That's almost three times more than that of P2P file sharing.
Record companies have figured out what's going on, even if they don't know how to stop it, and it's changed the way they promote records. When I started college in the fall of 1987, Def Leppard's Hysteria had just been released. By the time I finished my sophomore year, their record label had just released single number seven from the album, and the damn thing was still in the Top 30 of Billboard's album chart.
Such a situation was hardly unique back in the '80s and '90s. The typical plan for a big selling artist was to work an album for a solid year if not more, with singles and videos getting pulled from it every three or four months like clockwork. Born In The USA, Purple Rain, Thriller, Sports, Can't Slow Down... these were The Records That Would Not Die, and there were plenty more like them.
Fast forward to 2007 and the model has totally changed. Now the expectations are for a big opening week, when all the fans buy a new CD, followed by a large decline, when all the fans' friends start burning copies instead of buying their own. It's hard to compare pre- and post-Soundscan sales charts, but it's clear that most current albums' sales peaks come much earlier in their lifespan. For every Nickelback or Carrie Underwood, there's a Nine Inch Nails or a Modest Mouse or a Hilary Duff or a Rich Boy, all of whom placed albums in the Top Five a couple of months ago and which are already all but dead in the water. One of the most hyped albums of the year, the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, isn't even in the Top 100 anymore.
So what's a struggling record industry to do? It's obvious that being stingy isn't the answer. Sony's attempt to install copy-protection software on CDs a couple of years ago was an unmitigated disaster. The labels are finally starting to realize that paid downloads aren't really going to take off unless copy protection is removed.
The real solution -- which goes against everything that major record labels stand for -- is to give consumers more bang for their buck when they buy music, in the form of value-added content that can't easily be ripped and burned. Whether it's video or ringtones or posters or discounts on concert tickets, the labels have to try something, they have to promote it well, and they have to give it a chance to work. Otherwise what's to stop a nation of music buyers from evolving into rippers and burners -- if we haven't already?