PokeyNectar

It seems like fewer and fewer people are buying music now a days. With piracy and streaming, what do you guys think the future of the industry will look like?
obviously music is not going anywhere, but things are changing. I think there will just be a shift of where the money comes from. Instead of from recordings it will come from merch, Vinyl, and tv/film/online placements.

The Batlord

You're making a lot of assumptions about what I would and would not do with a TV.

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Tristan_Geoff

You can already see some of this with online services. More and more people are catching on, the underground is the way to go. Outspoken music fans will always buy CDs and Vinyl, and iTunes will be a superpower for while, but sites like bandcamp, soundcloud, and others have really gained traction for music distribution in recent times. The thing is, I like what iTunes is trying to do, they have a lot of music available for sale, but it's all highly compressed and costly (which actually seems to be getting higher every few years). Alternatives like bandcamp do much more in terms of music discovery and freedom for both the artist and the fans, fine tuning the product to what they want and letting them pay what they want. I expect other bigger name artists and eventually the industry to adopt this model at some point, or at least attempt to.

Music piracy, as it's been very well documented over the past decade, has actually driven sales up. People who pirate sometimes do it as a sampler, then buy physical later on. However, it's been a while since then. Streaming services like Spotify or the late Grooveshark allow instant access to vast amounts of material. Music piracy has certainly gone down due to this, but inadvertently physical sales are dropping too. Regardless, lots of people buy physical, and lots buy digital.

Also, not much money comes from the actual recordings in the first place. When you buy a CD it goes mostly (I'd say 99.9%) towards the actual label, unless of course, it's a big name act on a major label that has at least a gold certified record. Below that, artists don't see much from record sales. The artist gets their pay from merch and touring.

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The Batlord

I wish I'd remembered this piece by Steve Albini when William the Bloody and I were having that piracy debate, but it's still relevant. Really takes a dump on whatever preconceived notions that people still might have about being a band on a label.

The Problem With Music :Negativworldwidewebland

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Pet_Sounds

That was a fascinating read.

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Everybody's dying just to get the disease

Terrapin_Station

Yet we just heard that Adele's new album broke a sales record.

In my opinion the industry has tended to use file sharing as a scapegoat. It should be looking at the quality of its products, its marketing and its lack of innovatively creating niches in a way that responds to technological and societal changes rather than attempting to legislate against those changes.

Also, I definitely would "steal" a TV, and I'd "steal" everything and anything else, too, if it were somehow possible to make a copy of the TV or whatever so that the TV I copied from is unaffected and still in the possession of its owner.

The Batlord

Hey, man. You're taking money out of Walmart's pockets by doing that. How will they be able to exploit third world labor laws and pay people in the first world a sub-living wage?

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Terrapin_Station

Or am I just copying their money and leaving the money in their pockets unaffected?

The Batlord

Are you trying to make me horny or something?

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Frownland

I doubt that they're trying to you horny.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.