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Brandon Drury
Owner of Echo Echo Studios, Brandon Drury, has recorded and mixed over 600 songs in his very busy home recording studio.  

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Evidence That Piracy Is Not Responsible For RIAA Sales Drops
By Brandon Drury | Published  04/15/2007

Okay, so here we are in the spring of 2007. Napster had it's heyday 8 years ago. (Sorry to those of you who haven't accepted your impending death....you are getting old!). The RIAA has been suing soccer mom's and grandpas for over 4 years. P2P networks have fought and lost in court to the RIAA. There is no new cultural phenomenon sucking people into P2P and Torrent sites in a mad dash to fill up a 60GB Ipod. (That happened a few years ago.)


In other words, I think it's safe to say that illegal downloading has pretty much stabilized.


So if illegal music downloading is about where it has always been, that means that RIAA sales should stay about the same. If there were 5 kabillion songs downloaded last year and the RIAA still made 100 jillion dollars, it's safe to say that industry profits should stay about the same if piracy, is indeed, stabilized and all other factors are about same.


Well, it appears that something weird is going on. Even though there is no sign of any dramatic increase in illegal music downloading, it appears the RIAA is still losing sales....lots of sales. How can this be? First quarter albums sales are down 16.6% for the first quarter of 2007 when compared to the first quarter of 2006. Even if we account for downloading (assuming that a cd is worth $10 and downloading a song costs $1), the music industry still brought in 10.3% less than they did last year.


The way I see it, maybe illegal music downloading hasn't had as big of effect as the RIAA once thought. I don't appear to be alone in this one. According to Yahoo News, http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070409/media_nm/sales_dc,

Industry executives attribute the decline to a weak release schedule, the consumer's loss of confidence in the CD and a reduction in store space for the format.


Of course, “weak release schedule” is a nice way of saying “The music sucks!”. For the for the first time EVER (that I'm aware of), the music industry admits that may be they are releasing crappy music. So will this means that the industry will start taking more chances? I doubt it. It's crazy to me that an industry which has never been able to predict the albums that are going to define entire generations and yet, the modern trend is to sign less music.


No one predicted that Appetite For Destruction by Guns N Roses, Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette or probably any other album that sold a zillion units would be as successful as they were. Music success is something that no one can predict with any certainty.


So maybe if the labels see that the current model of cranking out very mediocre and very “safe” music isn't working, they'll do something about it. I'm not claiming to have all the answers, but it's clear that the labels don't have all the answers either.


Brandon

 
Comments

  • Comment #1 (Posted by .tom)

    good on ya brandon. i've lived thru this b4. it's different this time cuz most kidz think it's actually ok to sellout and make the big bux these daze and the corpo-ratz no it... desperate for identity yet striving to look, act and sound the same. if you want change you've gotta support wutz different... you gotta b different. you gotta sound different. you gotta have balls... well, i dont mean you as in you brandon. neccesarily;) fuk the format. go do it "wrong"... when its dun, you'll feel good about it for a change. we dont need the record industry. we dont need 20 shitty radio stations. we dont need mtv. now go out to someone's gig this week and get yer yaya's cuz thats where its really happening. and if they sound like weezer/live/311 then tell them:
     
  • Comment #2 (Posted by AfaraWayland)

    I disagree partly.

    Very few things in existence ever "stabilize," especially in economy. There is always a variable change, because quite frankly, there are so many variables.

    People are not buying music like they used to. There are many reasons for this. But never has it been so easy to steal intellectual property.

    Piracy is not the sole factor for slumping sales, but it still is a major part. When music was a manufactured product, running away with an iPods worth of songs would amount to a car load of discs or cassettes. Not as easy to get away with as you can suppose.

    I would suggest as others have said, LEGAL music downloads are causing just as much of an impact.

    Think about it, historically the RIAA based sales figures on album sales and such, when the control of distribution was soley in the hands of record labels.

    Now people can use the internet to intellectual property, but can also use it for the legal distribution of their own music.

    No longer is the market on distribution cornered. People don't need labels or even itunes, now they have myspace, soundclick, etc, etc,

    I am not certain about this, but I would wager that sale figures for the RIAA in the past counted heavily on album sales. Further, today's Internet market allows consumers to skip buying the whole manufactured product (which includes a number of songs, which each of which the RIAA can report), and go directly to the individual songs they want.

    Established and unestablished bands alike are keying into this. Now they promote and sell themselves on the Internet

    Add to that the point at which I agree with the article, the fact that the music output of mass quanities is crappy. Leading us to think that, "if only music was better..."

    But it was just the same 30 years ago, and it will be even worse in the future.

    In the future, music will not be transfered in a manufactured state, but by downloads or streams.

    I agree that the model must change. But jsut the same, the accounting must change with it.
     
  • Comment #3 (Posted by Greg)

    do you think the extreme over compression used to master albums is part of the problem? i have great difficulty listening to more than a few tracks at a time lately ... and i'm wondering if this is big reason why i consider few albums to be worthy of buying.

    take tools 10,000 days ... first album in a long time that when i heard, i went out and bought. listening to it, i keep thinking it a masterpiece ... but is it? or is this simply one of the few metal albums with dynamics ... making it seem better than it is?
     
  • Comment #4 (Posted by Sid Narged)

    Actually a very similar argument as posed in my book, "Goin' Down." I have been a musician, an engineer, and a producer, and I'll tell you... I agree...
    The music sucks.
    The most interesting thing I've heard recently is Mika. I sat there when I first heard it and said. "They must've found an old Freddy Mercury track and finished the song off." Basically sounds like Queen. Don't know if it will go anywhere. But the youth today are playing with music that old school musicians basically find uninteresting, monotonous, and unspirited.
    I'm not going to argue for lyrical substance, that's actually not as important. Sure there's always a market for cerebral music with a message, but there's always a market for the superficial stuff too.
    I personally enjoy the mindless debauchery of the mid 80's Van Roth and the "Hot for Teacher" days.
    But I'm not very optimistic about the music scene, as it is the RIAA attempting to predict and force-feed their vision of what it good and pop to the world.
    You would think the Population would make something Pop...
    oh well.
    Shameless plug. sidnarged.com
    enjoy.
    Sid
     
  • Comment #5 (Posted by MWJC-CT2)

    Okay, so we all know about the "illegal music downloading problem". According to Brandon, it's stabilizing. I agree with Sid Narged in the fact that it's crappy music because they're sampling uninteresting music. If the people running the recording companies aren't going to do anything about it, then why are you all still bitching about it? If you want new, and better music to come out, or the stats to change in terms of sales on music, then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Another thing...if the RIAA is so worried about the money coming in from music, then why aren't they doing something about it? It doesn't make sense to me that anyone should be saying anything about how things should be done if you aren't going to take action on your words. Yes, the music coming out is indeed CRAPPY, but that's not the issue in sales. Wanna know what I think? I think that the current generation just isn't as interested in music as the previous generations were. They wanna bang their heads to inaudible screaming, or they wanna grab their crotches while listening to some guy talk about shooting someone. That's the problem, right there. Mindless, annoying "music" that shouldn't deserve to sell in the first place. Honestly, I don't have a problem with the fact that the new "music" isn't selling. To me, that just means that it may just GO AWAY FASTER.
     
  • Comment #6 (Posted by MPDSR422)

    Every generation's music SUCKS until the next great thing arrives and universally turns music on it's ear. Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, Zep, Aretha, Stevie Wonder, Billie Joel, Hendrix and on and on came on the scene at just the right time. Recording industry was given the chance to change the world and did, but kids grow up and the world changes. The music industry basically ate itself. What an industry of wasteful spending and tunnel vision! I a band has a release that sells a million or few copies they all go out and look for (or create) ones that sound the same. Maybe no one is angry enough anymore to make a musical statement that isn't self serving. The public can be fooled only for so long until they see the light and STOP BUYING. The My Generation of the Who is approaching or into their 60's!
    The younger generations have failed to produce a musical icon that holds sway over the world. Until it happens again the music industry will falter and return to the identity of the late 50' and pre-Beatle 60's. I'll keep recording little ditties in my bedroom studio (if you can call it that)and wait.
     
  • Comment #7 (Posted by MWJC-CT2)

    Okay, maybe it's just my generation that sucks. I see where you're coming from, and I agree with you too. My generation does need to wake up and make a musical statement that isn't selfish. It doesn't matter at this point, because IF it happens, it will be in some crotch-grabbing bullshit...maybe at some show or on a CD. Who knows? If my generations does do that, though, how much of the world will REALLY be captivated by that? Do YOU want the crotch-grabbing, slut-banging, hoe-killing music around you and YOURS? I know I don't, and that shit is from the kids of my generation! There are big names, and people actually making their own music, but it still sound just like everybody else's shit. There are, right now, three people who sound like "Pink", and I'm talking voice AND style. I just think that people need to wake up. If you want good music, you need older people to do it, because everything is going to become so muddy from all the sampling, that it's all really eventually going to be the same song.
     
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