The Music Industry and 2009

Image: Tessa Watson

In the past week I’ve read a few gloomy reports on the state of the music recording industry. CD sales continue spiralling downwards and, while digital sales are raising, it’s not enough to curb the general decline of musicians receiving money for their music thanks to piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing.

So it really is do-or-die time for Big Music’s business model and, according to an article in today’s New York Times, it sounds like 2009 is the year of the shake up. Since way back when the original Napster site shot to infamy the music industry, with Metallica leading the charge (mainly because it had found their unreleased material on the sharing service), fought to stamp it out before it grew too large. Unfortunately for them they failed to recognise the new digital world and rather than a boot on the head of pirates it was more like a finger in the hole of a dam full of cracks. That was back in 2001.

Eight years later the music industry seems to have been encouraged by services such as iTunes to allow people to own music digitally. Subscription services, like Napster 2.0 have arisen circa 2004, by early 2007 subscriber numbers were a little over 800k people. Unfortunately as Gizmodo reported over the weekend 95% of all music downloads are illegal. So the music industry is looking to the pirates for some inspiration. This is a huge revolution for the recording industry and truly light years removed from their initial approach to music and the web.

To get avoid making music downloaders sign up with yet another site/service the recording industry is looking to work with mobile phone operators, such as Nokia Comes with Music, and directly with ISPs to create inclusive fees that users don’t notice so much… the perception of free is often just as good as free

The services are not really free, but payment is included in the cost of, say, a new cellphone or a broadband Internet access contract, so the cost to the consumer is disguised…. Other services offering unlimited downloads are being introduced by Internet service providers, which many people in the music industry say hold the key to curbing piracy because of their direct relationship with Web users. TDC, an Internet provider in Denmark, offers unrestricted downloads as part of its broadband subscriptions, and broadband providers elsewhere in Europe are rolling out similar services

Eric Pfanner, NYT

So look on with intrigue as significant introductions are made to increase the ease of obtaining music legally in 2009. Positive for everyone from artist to listener I hope!

NB. In this post I’ve focused on downloading music to own, rather than streaming music sites like Last.fm and Pandora.