"Sales of physical and digital albums tumbled to 500.5 million units, as the music industry was pillaged by piracy and competition from other forms of entertainment like videogames, industry experts said."
"Pillaged by piracy"? Christ, if they think piracy is their biggest problem the industry will completely dissolve before this decade is out. You can chart the rise of the corporation and monopolization of the labels inversely to music sales. That same chart works if you substitute the consolidation of the media for the label monopoly.
Does anybody listen to FM radio anymore? What little time Clear Channel allows for anything other than commercials, they fill with shitty music. The iPod may be another example of Apple's dead-on designs; but it's explosive growth had to be helped by people like me; people who have eschewed commercial radio, because there's a limit to the amount of crap I can hear in a lifetime.
Album sales plunge in '07 as digital growth slows - Yahoo! News
3 comments:
I personally buy more CD's than any 25 or 50 people I know combined.
It's a great medium for classical music and longer jazz forms. And it's not really inconvenient because I do most of my serious liesening on big-old two-channel equipment.
In the car I listen to CD's, Air America, or NPR/classical, which is still common enough.
What I mostly miss is a good unformatted college FM station. I guess computers/YouTube serve that purpose now.
"listening"
I have about 450 CDs in my collection. I probably bought 80% of them in the mid-1990s; and I was broke then. (And by the way, RIAA, the only MP3s on my digital devices come from my purchased CDs. I _love_ CDs. I just hate what passes for pop/rock today.)
I know there's good music out there, but the industry doesn't support it and living in Mesa means I'm no longer exposed to it organically (not a college town; sure there's MCC et. al., but the town is too big for it.)
The labels eschew publicity for their up and coming bands; choosing instead to pour money into ads for the "sure things;" the same sure things playing every 5 minutes on Clear Channel. Oh my goodness; of course there's no legal payola going on there.
Hilarity ensues when they are pissed their stealth bands have poor sales.
Post a Comment