Interesting post on the Matador Records blog about "the death of the music industry" vs. the increase in vinyl sales over the last few years. Basically, Patrick from Matador posits that the media's coverage of the decline in music sales creates a self-fulfilling prophecy on multiple levels and that their assumptions might not actually be correct.
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interesting post. i think
interesting post. i think its important to make a distinction between the "death of the record industry" and the "death of the music industry". Just because CDs are going away, doesn't mean there won't be other ways for musicians to perform/record and for people to pay for that. But what seems to be true is that the major label record industry *is* radically changing. It was banking on this old model of releasing their catalog over and over on different formats and achieving higher quality. And then the MP3 came out, which was actually a reduction in audio quality and people embraced it because of the instant accessibility. This major shift in consumer thought from quality to accessibility was ignored - and only now are the labels starting to brainstorm.
So yea - while the major players aren't necessarily disappearing, they are going to have to adapt to the changes in technology and play a different role. I.e. it's NOT about making and distributing records, it's about finding music and cultivating a brand and lifestyle around quality and niche tastes. Which is sort of how record labels started in the early days anyway before they became industry giants...
I am interested in seeing what happens to music when the generation born entirely in the digital music era (born after 1999) starts to grow up...
f-stop