Death Of The Labels

One of the only reasons why CDs are still a mainstream way of obtaining music is because the major labels haven’t figured out what to do next. How are they going to sell music? They hate iTunes and blame it for some of their problems, but iTunes is irrelevant. No one wants the iTunes model to take over the way they obtain music.

So Doug Morris wants to create his own version of iTunes? This dude is out to lunch. It isn’t like Universal and the other major labels are going to want to sell tracks for 99 cents. They will want to raise the price per track. There is no doubt about it. And who in their right mind is going to pay more than a buck for a song?

This is the fundamental problem with the labels. They got too greedy during the 1980’s and 1990’s when music sales were explosive and the money was rolling in. They continued to gradually raise prices of recorded music, but at the same time, they stopped developing talent. They were able to push shit on people, and it sold. They want things the way they were, but it will never be the same.

The price of recorded music has to go down. That is the bottom line. Today there are so many outlets for the consumer’s entertainment dollar. Consumers are not going to continue dropping $20 per CD. It costs less to purchase DVDs of movies or to buy books and the cost of living continues to go up in most places. People just aren’t going to spend the money they once did – especially on new releases filled with crap.

The labels were short-sighted. They were screwing the public with high pricing and for a time didn’t really have to offer any music of substance because it continued to sell. Now the whole operation is dead.

The labels have a very big decision ahead. Their next could be their last if they are not really careful. If they try to move everything online and develop an iTunes download service or create some insane subscription service, the public will not embrace it. Their revenues will plummet and that will be the end. The record companies known today may very well be extinct in less than a decade.

What will happen to those amazing catalogues of music? Some major company will own them and have less of a clue as to what to do with it than the morons in charge now. The artists will survive – in fact, they will have more power and control than they ever dreamed of. The devoted music fan will lose out. New music will be easy to obtain, but amazing catalogue music will be tougher to legally find and obtain.

I know a lot of music fans that are concerned about the future of product. It is disappearing. Things are going out of print. New archival releases are being cancelled. They know the CD is hanging on by a limb simply because the major labels don’t know what the hell to do but complain that their once lucrative business is gone. Once the majors finally decide to move their operations online and kill physical product, they are going to alienate a very important part of their audience and they will feel it where it hurts – their bank accounts.

Screw the labels. All I am concerned about is the future of obtaining product. Maybe a billionaire surrounded by some visionaries that really care about music and love music will step in. As Pete Townshend wrote in “Sound Round” from The Who’s latest album Endless Wire, “I fear the future man, as I take in the view.”