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Re: CD SALES DECLINING?
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