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Posted: |
Mar 13, 2018 - 10:44 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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From www.showbiz411.com. Note the last paragraph. Record sales are being touted these days as on a comeback. All you hear is: streaming will save us. But things are pretty dire. For example, Justin Timberlake’s “Man of the Woods,” touted so highly on the Super Bowl and a hit in its first week, has been a total sales stiff. As of this week, “MoW” has sold just 285,000 copies. Contrast this with Timberlake’s “20/20 Experience,” which was the best selling album of 2013 with 2.5 million copies. (Luckily, Justin had a smash single last year with “Can’t Stop the Feeling.”) Even worse: U2’s “Songs of Experience” has taught us nothing. It had great songs, like Timberlake, but they didn’t save the situation. “Songs” has sold just 250,000 copies total. Remember U2? Their sales used to be huge. In both cases, the only way to make money is touring. Timberlake and U2 are committed to long tours. Even Taylor Swift has had trouble. Her “Reputation” album has sold 2 million copies, which sounds great. But it’s far less than her “1989” album, which did 5 million total since late 2014. “Reputation” is well past its peak and won’t do anything remotely like that in the end. Columbia Records in particular is suffering. While parent Sony Music has kept up on the charts with the Epic label, and RCA, Columbia’s name has not been on the charts in months. Their Harry Styles solo album has sold only 375,000 copies to date— no amount of PR or touring has moved it close to 500,000 copies and gold status. This past week’s chart should alarm everyone. The top selling CD/paid download was “The Greatest Showman” with just 38,453 according to BuzzAngle. Including streaming, the top seller was “Black Panther” soundtrack with 78,000 copies.
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I can live with the decline of auto-tune garbage. The SOlium Solace
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Yes, record sales are declining, very much so. I know not everybody here cares if Taylor Swift sells just two million copies instead of five million copies, but it has enormous repercussions for all music. Twenty years ago, many of the top selling artists enabled commercial releases of lesser know artists. Today, few new records get even made. Sure, Taylor Swift and Justin Timberlake will continue, but overall, producing and releasing records has become very expensive with little chance of making any money at all. That's why few new classical recordings get produced, and those that are, are usually sponsored and/or live recordings. Same for re-recordings of film scores. And you can see it when it comes to re-releases of classic film scores too. There used to be a time when a every new Varese Club release sold out in hours. No more. There used to be a time when a limited to 3000 copies edion of even a minor Goldsmith score such as BABY sold out in a day. No more. Streaming is definitely the future... people don't buy and collect music as much anymore as just pay a monthly fee and listen to whatever their streaming service offers. And the sound qualitiy of streamed music has certainly increased over the years. Streaming services such as Qobuz offer lossless and high-res streaming, so it's not as if sound quality is still the issue that it used to be. Of course, I've got lots of CDs accumulated over time and I've converted most of them to lossless by now, so I stream plenty of "my own" music into my living room, but for anyone just starting to listen to music: why spend the money on any particular record when for about the same price you get a full month access to all (or most of) the albums you want to listen to? Us music collectors are a dying breed. No question about it.
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I can live with the decline of auto-tune garbage. Me too. Processing has gotten so bad it seems most female Pop singers sound almost exactly alike. Then they go on live and (deflating whoopee cushion sound).
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Yes, there's a lot of free streaming options now. I agree the trend makes sense for "popular" mainstream music because we live in such a disposable society, and the music reflects that. But I also believe film score fans want to buy a physical product, but lack the personal finances. People don't have disposable income like they used to. Excellent post with insight. Not just film score fans, but many art music fans like CDs and buy their heros' box sets whenever reissued or dug up.
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And you can see it when it comes to re-releases of classic film scores too. There used to be a time when a every new Varese Club release sold out in hours. No more. There used to be a time when a limited to 3000 copies edion of even a minor Goldsmith score such as BABY sold out in a day. No more. Those were the glory days for the labels only. It was the Hunger Games for the rest of us. Terrible business model for the consumer I don't wish for the days where you had to hit F5 all night in front of your PC to await a possible grail release which otherwise would have been sold out in a flash. I just wanted to point out that considerably fewer units are sold these days over a longer period of time.
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Posted: |
Mar 14, 2018 - 9:39 AM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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I assume everybody is... stealing it instead? That's the problem when your commercial product (a download) is exacrly the same as your illegal product (a download). This wasn't the case with, oh, the CD format! #neverlearn This argument doesn't even make sense on its own terms. CDs are available. If people preferred that format, the CDs are there for them to buy. But they don't buy them. Nobody in the music industry wanted to stray from the once-successful CD format. But with Napster, and Limewire, and Gnutella, et al, vast swaths of the former album-buying public realized not just that they could get their music free, but that they could get just what they wanted (no more buying a whole album for one or two songs), the instant they wanted it. Sure, the labels could shut down some of these services, but others popped up, BitTorrent proved impossible to defeat, and the cost of constantly monitoring and trying to take action on all these fronts was growing. The only way to fight fire with fire was to offer the à la carte and instant benefits of illegal downloads, but for a buck apiece. For your dollar, you would get an approved and presumably perfect download (you never knew quite what you'd get on peer-to-peer file sharing). Most people consider the physical product of a CD pointless at best, and bothersome clutter at worst. So to them, no, a CD is not exactly the same as the illegal product – it is worse. Meanwhile, illegal downloads continue to cut into sales of music not available for legal download. Yes, including our beloved limited soundtrack releases. I'm sure people will respond here as they always do, that the true fan wants the physical release. Even if that is the case, I think the labels would also like the money from the less-true fans who are not buying because they are downloading illegally. And yes, they are doing that. So please spare me this "the labels brought this on themselves" nonsense. Illegal downloads sideswiped them, and they've been trying (and failing) to catch up ever since. #thetruthismorecomplicatedthanahashtag
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Slam-bang post Schiffy.
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SchiffyM is right: the illegal downloading killed the industry. The only remedy seems to be: labels cracking down on this. Get tough with illegal sites and the consumer who uses them. Also, don't offer the streaming services everything. Build in time spans in which people get access to music. New stuff should only be available via legal download platforms or on CD. The main problem is that people have grown accustomed to getting art for free. And as long as they can they will. Artists need to re-educate their audiences and say: no, if you are my fan then you need to pay me for my work. Only niche art like soundtracks will probably survive, simply because fans here still value CDs and legal ways to buy the product.
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I have been hearing about the death of the cd for decades now. It's still here. Vinyl too.
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Posted: |
Mar 14, 2018 - 1:19 PM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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But there is also a lot more stuff out there to listen to as it has become so much easier to access larger libraries of stuff. Yes. I have discussed just this with my cousin, who is in a band that's been around for decades. It is a miracle that tens of millions of pieces of music are available to us instantly – I can tell my HomePod to play James Brown, or George Gershwin, or John Williams, or Bruno Mars, and it plays. And yet… it makes none of it special. When you stared at the album in a record store, trying to decide whether to spend your money on it, you were invested. With streaming, the whole experience feels a lot more disposable. But it's hard to go back, because having it all right there is a miracle. The same is true in my field, television. Ratings that were inconceivably low even ten years ago can keep a show on the air for seasons, because there's so much fighting for your attention that appointment television is largely gone in the vast sea of choices. If you missed this week's episode, you can catch up with it tomorrow, or next month, or never (but it's there if you want it!). I bumped into an old friend a few weeks ago who told me he was writing for a series I'd never heard of. I asked when it was coming on, assuming it was a new show. He said they were on season four. And this is my business!
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