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Looper's Delight
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Yes, CD sales are declining since mid nineties. Back then I was playing full time the traditional way, with record label agreements to put out CD's and give back a tiny cut of the earnings. Our CD's were distributed to most territories and the trend seemed globally synchronized: CD sales diving all over the globe from 1996. My guess, and I've been reading other commentators take on the same perspective, is that this is a both case of "cultural paradigm change" and a huge infra structure blow up, due to the internet. Some factors play an important part: (1) Segmentation of culture makes it impossible for The Guys That KNow How To Sell CD's (a.k.a. commercial record labels) to keep up inside knowledge about all new scenes that pop up. Symptomatically the AR folks got sacked first. Not only that there are hundreds of sub genres for the AR folks to keep up with, there are also hundreds of sub markets for the sales folks to work. So the marketing situation looks very bad for traditional music distribution according to cost effective large scale methods. (This may be good for indies though). (2) As an effect of the above, each consumer today has to split up the same pocket money over more products. Not only to buy CD's but also to buy computer/psp games and DVD movies. Gone are the optional Jack-Pot Sales (the Hit phenomenon). Statistically eight releases flopped before the ninth brought a hit that kind of took back the money lost on the other eight artist launches. That's history and now the margins are much smaller. Again, bad for business. And taking away the headroom for active quality control and effective marketing. (3) Too much crap got released. The record labels started this trend in the mid/late nineties and many amateur/indie artists do their best to keep it up. With the record labels a lot of good marketing knowledge went down the drain - like how to work hype, how to wait until the right moment for plugging stuff and not at least the importance of not releasing too much of ones work. But still, working with a commercial label, is the best "Quality Tag" (here I do count in labels as Warp or ECM as "commercial"). Many indie artist forget about that. The internet and the musical outlet explosion is totally lacking the kind of "Quality Assurance Filtering" that commercial record labels were so good at. So what indie artist should look for, as promotional tools, is in fact new ways to fill up that hole. Derek at CD Baby has a great tip on this when saying "Go where the barriers are". He has written a lot of good tip essays, to be found at the CD B site. Also - why should music be produced just for listening to? I mean, never before in history this phenomenon have ever existed! Music has always been used for a specific purpose. As for dancing, marching, social rituals etc. So an interesting tip to anyone that want to make music today is to look into new areas where music actually does make a difference. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.looproom.com (international) www.boysen.se (Swedish) ---> iTunes Music Store (digital) www.cdbaby.com/perboysen