Extinction Level Event?
Now I admit that this posting isn't brilliantly current, but as i am the author, you'll just have to live with it. And besides the discussion at hand is one that will just run and run. I have been thinking recently about the fuss made over the recent release of Radiohead's new album "In Rainbows", made available online by the band for as much as people want to pay for it. A brilliant marketing move? Disastrous business case? A sign of the times? A natural progression?
Time will tell but media has abounded with the news that it has finally happened, the music industry is dead. To paraphrase Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot sketch, it has passed on! This industry is no more! It has ceased to be! It has expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! In every sense it is an ex-industry!!!
2007 saw, in addition to Radiohead's move in October, Prince releasing his new album and announcing a UK residency through a national newspaper, Madonna ditching giants Warner to shack up with LiveNation the concert promotion firm, numerous heritage acts releasing material through coffee shops, and large and smaller acts releasing music to fans direct from their own webspaces. Not to mention, of course, the onward march of file-sharing and free downloads, both increasing in popularity and becoming second nature behaviour to larger and more diverse populations and demographics. But is the industry dead or just changing beyond recognition, which is not the same thing.
What has actually happened, it seems to me, is that the business model has changed and the big dominating corporates, slow to embrace the digital world and its possibilities, are now being forced to face up to the possibility that their dominance may be irreversibly on the wain. Corporate fat cats with smaller and smaller profit margins - my heart bleeds. But the existing model has long been creaking, with large acts less and less able to keep the others afloat with their big releases.And this is why the Radiohead move is significant and that EMI's new owners, Terra Firma, are so up in arms about their previous big hitters' audacious bid for digital freedom. How dare the band take the music that they create and give it to the people who appreciate it and have supported them throughout for whatever they want to pay? Well they do dare, and rightly so. Copyright has changed, ownership has changed, business had changed, consumerism has changed. It is just that the "industry" forgot to change, o thought it was too big to need to.
Where it will end I don't know, but I for one am excited by the changes that are happening on a daily basis. Sure MySpace may be full of hopefuls and there may be a lot of dirge out there, but for the music fan choice is all, and competition, as with all walks of life, is a good thing. And what is often missed in all the coverage of the death of the industry is that Radiohead's new album is great, a massive return to form for these rock monsters who tread their own path of innovation and creativity. A record that teams up the stadia-riffing brilliance of "The Bends", otherworldly and conceptual greatness of "OK Computer" and the technical experimentaion and symphonic glimpses of electronic brilliance of recent works. I don't care what it costs me, frankly, I'm just glad to have it to listen to. As the band themselves might say, Hail to the Thief!
Time will tell but media has abounded with the news that it has finally happened, the music industry is dead. To paraphrase Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot sketch, it has passed on! This industry is no more! It has ceased to be! It has expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! In every sense it is an ex-industry!!!
2007 saw, in addition to Radiohead's move in October, Prince releasing his new album and announcing a UK residency through a national newspaper, Madonna ditching giants Warner to shack up with LiveNation the concert promotion firm, numerous heritage acts releasing material through coffee shops, and large and smaller acts releasing music to fans direct from their own webspaces. Not to mention, of course, the onward march of file-sharing and free downloads, both increasing in popularity and becoming second nature behaviour to larger and more diverse populations and demographics. But is the industry dead or just changing beyond recognition, which is not the same thing.
What has actually happened, it seems to me, is that the business model has changed and the big dominating corporates, slow to embrace the digital world and its possibilities, are now being forced to face up to the possibility that their dominance may be irreversibly on the wain. Corporate fat cats with smaller and smaller profit margins - my heart bleeds. But the existing model has long been creaking, with large acts less and less able to keep the others afloat with their big releases.And this is why the Radiohead move is significant and that EMI's new owners, Terra Firma, are so up in arms about their previous big hitters' audacious bid for digital freedom. How dare the band take the music that they create and give it to the people who appreciate it and have supported them throughout for whatever they want to pay? Well they do dare, and rightly so. Copyright has changed, ownership has changed, business had changed, consumerism has changed. It is just that the "industry" forgot to change, o thought it was too big to need to.
Where it will end I don't know, but I for one am excited by the changes that are happening on a daily basis. Sure MySpace may be full of hopefuls and there may be a lot of dirge out there, but for the music fan choice is all, and competition, as with all walks of life, is a good thing. And what is often missed in all the coverage of the death of the industry is that Radiohead's new album is great, a massive return to form for these rock monsters who tread their own path of innovation and creativity. A record that teams up the stadia-riffing brilliance of "The Bends", otherworldly and conceptual greatness of "OK Computer" and the technical experimentaion and symphonic glimpses of electronic brilliance of recent works. I don't care what it costs me, frankly, I'm just glad to have it to listen to. As the band themselves might say, Hail to the Thief!
posted by Twelve Bar at 7:10 PM
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