The Economist on the music industry

Again courtesy of The Browser, here's an article in The Economist explaining why the music business isn't dying -- which is not to say that the major labels are doing well.

Audiences spend money on live shows, and prices have never been higher:

In 1996 a ticket to one of America’s top 100 concert tours cost $25.81, according to Pollstar, a research firm that tracks the market. If prices had increased in line with inflation, the average ticket would have cost $35.30 last year. In fact it cost $62.57. Well-known acts charge much more. The worldwide average ticket price to see Madonna last year was $114. For Simon & Garfunkel it was an eye-watering $169.

The article also mentioned a factor in the decline of music sales that I hadn't considered, "the end of the digital 'replacement cycle', in which people bought CDs to replace tapes and records." The music industry by the 1980s must have gotten altogether too used to the idea that consumers would have to replace their music collections every couple of decades or so as the industry rolled out new media formats. With the advent of user-friendly software, though, music was divorced from industry-controlled media formats and became just more data on people's computers. Thus endeth the replacement cycle for the foreseeable future.

Albums are and have been in decline, of course, as online services make it trivially easy to purchase individual songs. I can't say I'm altogether sorry about this. Of the couple of thousand albums I've heard or owned over the years, only a handful -- fewer than twenty -- are perfect in my opinion, meaning that they contain no weak tracks. Many, perhaps most, disposable pop albums consist mostly of weak tracks: their sales have been driven entirely by the one or two gigantic hits into which all the care has been poured. We won't miss the filler. (Albums that are worthy of the name -- say, the Who's Who's Next or Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea -- will still find their audiences.)

Between the focus on individual tracks, live performing and the increased importance of publishing departments, which the article claims "have become vital cash machines" to music companies, the industry sounds like it has come full circle. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, before sound reproduction was a mass-market phenomenon, music companies specialized in marketing the sheet music for individual songs. The only way to hear music was for someone to perform it live, whether in the parlor or the concert hall. A curious symmetry a century apart.