Digital music doldrums - Long-term change

Filed in archive Commentary on June 13, 2006

This article is one in a series examining the Pali Capital report that showed paid music download growth is slowing.

Long-term change

The long-term message is that the industry's problems can no longer be obscured by digital.

Does this spell doom for music? It depends on your definition of music. Independent artists are thriving through the Internet and P2P.

Big music though is another story. While the industry falsely blames others for its ills, the business continues to evolve due to a raft of causes, including a slow transition to a digital world, boring music, rapacious pricing, a media glut, an obsolete format (the album), poor marketing, restrictive licensing and business practices, and a shrinking percentage of consumer entertainment mindshare and dollars.

For ten years the industry has resisted this change.

Digital is not a simple format media transition, like going from albums to CDs. The digital and online worlds increasingly and fundamentally change how entertainment is consumed, stored, and distributed. Technology has swamped the entertainment industry's pretense of control despite its best efforts. Today there are ubiquitous MP3 players, storage on keychains, phones, and soon in cereal boxes, and decentralized and dark P2P networks. Computer hard drives can hold one hundred thousand songs, the equivalent of an entire label and a magnitude more than anyone owned on CDs, much less vinyl, a decade ago.

It took the major labels five years just to allow online stores to sell digital downloads and subscriptions. The industry will have to move much faster with real transformation if it is to salvage any semblance of its former great self.