Music and Film

It’s always interesting to look at the rest of the content industry. I find the developments in gaming, music, and movies as interesting as technological changes in books, magazines and the web. The short hand we use “BLANK is dead” elicits some interesting reactions when I speak around the continent.
I once (years ago) said that cassettes and CD-ROM would soon be as dead as vinyl. Someone came up afterwards visibly upset. “Vinyl is not dead!!!,” he exclaimed. Gently I asked for what evidence he had of that. Apparently his library was still circulating vinyl, twice a month!
He was from an audiophile community that felt vinyl recordings were better. Personally I am positive that there are these niche markets but libraries can’t fade to serving only tiny niche markets driven by hobbyists. (I grew up with vinyl and I remember that scratchy sound!) When you see vinyl not selling in music retail stores anymore – and for that matter cassettes you get pretty strong evidence that things are changing.
When DVD players can be had for $19.00, it’s probably unwise to stick to Beta and VHS too much longer. I know it seems harsh but some library’s floorspace and budgetary resources might be better served by lending cheap DVD players than devoting floorspace to tapes. Since everyone must have a digital television within a year when analog goes black we must have started to prepare for this already.
Anyway, here a few soundbites from the AP lately:
“The music industry can’t stop the hemorrhaging. Despite a nearly 45 percent surge in digital music sales last year, overall album sales in the U.S. still declined 9.5 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (It counts ten digital tracks as an album). ”
“There were 500 million CDs and other physical albums sold last year, and another 844 million digital tracks (or 84.4 million digital “albums”).”
That compares to 588 million digital tracks sold in 2006. “Overall music purchases, including albums, singles, digital tracks and music videos, rose to 1.35 billion units, up 14 percent from 2006.”
“Digital music accounted for 23 percent of all music sales in the U.S. last year.”
“Last year, Apple Inc.’s iTunes Music Store became the third-largest music retailer in the U.S.”
“A report released in November by Jupiter Research LLC forecast digital music sales will continue to grow to $2.8 billion, comprising 34 percent of U.S. consumer spending on music in 2012.”
Mobile phone owners bought over 220 million ringtones”!! Hmmm. Does your libary have a ringtone?
“EMusic subscribers downloaded nearly 500,000 tracks and audio books on Christmas Day alone. The company’s paid subscriber base exceeded 400,000 at the close of the year.”
The last of the Big Four record publishers, Sony BMG, will shortly remove DRM form it’s products. The others are Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI. (here) ITunes and Amazon can follow. Watch for the Radiohead effect. We see more and more walls coming down around music. Will the same thing happen for eBooks? articles? patents? etc.?
Anyway, there will always be niche markets and they can be served effectively. We mts make sure that these markets are valid and we are not holding on to things for nostalgia reasons or other non-future oriented thinking.
Stephen