We're Not Who You Think We Are
by Jim Connelly
Indie 103.1, broadcasting somewhere on the Southern California coastline, is a radio station that is an absolute blast of fresh airwaves. It is one of the few radio stations out there that seems to take it as a mission to surprise its listeners.
Which is exactly what happened this morning, when I heard something which has bugged me for the rest of the day.
The RIAA tells us that piracy hurts artists, so we all try to be good little consumers who acquire music legally whenever possible. Who wants to hurt an artist? It’s like hurting a kitten.
Fortunately, in the 21st century there are quite a few ways to acquire music legally. Thanks to iTunes it’s possible to build your music collection while draining your bank account in 99 cent increments.
If you’re “of a certain age”, you probably still buy quite a few CD’s to round out your music collection. And, if you are a serious music collector, you probably buy a fair number of used CD’s. Serious music collectors have to buy used CD’s because new CD’s are priced for people who like to acquire music in small doses.
Now I’m going to tell you something you probably don’t want to hear: Buying used CD’s hurts artists.
It’s almost hard for me to fathom now, but there was a time in my life when I owned over 5,000 albums. My record collection took up most of my living space for many years. My eventual transition to CD narrowed that number considerably, to just under 1,000 albums. Now that I’ve made the transition to digital music I have access to 17,000+ songs on a network attached storage unit, and there’s almost no evidence of my music collection anywhere in the house.
The paradox of digital music is that while listeners are now exposed to a larger quantity of music than ever before, there are very few physical artifacts associated music anymore. The iPod has become the primary tactile interface that music lovers use to select and listen to music. Visual design is less important than ever, and liner notes have practically vanished.
As Gray McCord of M3 design noted during the Smaller, Faster, Lighter session at day 2 of SXSW:
The experience of music has been reduced to a data management activity.
McCord is working on a concept for a new type of music packaging that could be used to represent digital music in a physical world. The concept looks like a cross between a traditional LP cover and a book. With plenty of room for art, liner notes, lyrics, and more, the packaging could restore a vital part of the popular music experience that has gone missing in the iTunes era.
McCord noted that several ways that the packaging might benefit the music industry:
Or the RIAA could just go about business as usual and pretend that nothing has changed since 1956.
Unfortunately, if I were a betting man I’d have to put my money on the later.
by Jim Connelly
Have you ever wondered why it costs roughly the same for you to purchase a CD of, say, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde — an universally acknolwedged classic of 75 minutes of sublime music, and Bob Dylan’s Down in the Groove — a universally acknowedged piece of crap that barely breaks a half-hour? As a music fan, of course, you’ve probably come to expect that all albums, then CDs, then downloads all cost pretty much the same. It’s just that some enrich your life forever and others get you maybe a buck and for sure a snide look from the guy at the used CD counter.
In a lot of ways, this pricing is kind of like paying the same amount of money for a McDonald’s hamburger and a Prime porterhouse at Morton’s. Only in entertainment do we risk essentially the same money for such wildly varying degrees of pleasure. Part of that is wrapped up in our understanding of art: not even the greatest are great every time out — and of course, to be fair, even Down in the Groove no doubt has its defenders — but part of that is wrapped up in the methods of those who control the distribution.
In this case, that would be the major labels — these days they are configured as such: SonyBMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner — in the past, configured differently, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is, no matter how they are configured, from the consumer standpoint they’ve artificially set the prices to be the same, regardless of quality, regardless of manufacture cost, regardless of length (except that a 80-minute double-CD could be sold for twice as much as a 78-minute single CD), regardless of just about anything. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end amen.
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