I was reading the paper and they referred to the CD as "near obsolete".<\/p>\n
Nobody books their airline travel on the phone anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, the airlines charge you EXTRA to book a reservation with a person.\u00c2\u00a0 And the odds of a fuck-up are higher than they are if you book on the Internet.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, the airlines are freaking a bit about the fact that you can comparison shop INSTANTLY and they’re lobbying in D.C. to allow advertising subterfuge, leaving the final price, including surcharges and taxes, until you COMMIT, but they saw the wisdom in eliminating employees.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only their salaries, but their benefits and the buildings within which they worked.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet record companies are still trying to prop up the CD.<\/p>\n
I am not Chicken Little.\u00c2\u00a0 The switch to files is going to happen seemingly overnight.\u00c2\u00a0 In the not so distant future.\u00c2\u00a0 People believe since CD business didn’t tank in 2000, with Napster, that they’re safe.\u00c2\u00a0 But, that was before the iPod.\u00c2\u00a0 The reason people no longer want CDs is not because they can steal the music but because they no longer want the DISCS!\u00c2\u00a0 They’re superfluous.\u00c2\u00a0 Made to be almost instantly thrown away, like the CD longbox of yore.\u00c2\u00a0 They serve no purpose other than as a device from which songs are transferred from the record company to your computer.\u00c2\u00a0 Stereos are now iPod based, just look at the iPod Hi-Fi, never mind the Bose SoundDock and the zillions of other mini stereos that contain iPod docks.\u00c2\u00a0 The vast majority of automobiles sold in the U.S. in the coming year will be iPod ready.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, you’ll have to pay extra for the cable, but the odds of someone throwing down are higher than they are for aftermarket satellite radio, after all, people have ALREADY been convinced, via ownership of the iPod.<\/p>\n
In other words, it’s an iPod world, and we just live in it.\u00c2\u00a0 But stunningly, the major labels are doing nothing to accommodate this.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, they’re selling shitty-sounding copy protected files at an equal aliquot price to the pristine versions on CD.\u00c2\u00a0 And, they want to RAISE the price even HIGHER!\u00c2\u00a0 If you call this acknowledging the new world, you must be living in the old.<\/p>\n
The iPod is not like a conventional stereo.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not purely a vehicle for playing music, the music resides RIGHT ON IT!\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t have to carry your CDs in a booklet, and, you can carry as many tracks as you can afford!\u00c2\u00a0 And, at the present price of FREE, that’s quite a lot.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, you’re limited by your storage space, not your wallet.<\/p>\n
Threaten people.\u00c2\u00a0 Sue them.\u00c2\u00a0 But there are more holes in the distribution system than there are in the Windows operating system.\u00c2\u00a0 You just can’t close the gap.\u00c2\u00a0 There are not only P2P apps, but IM.\u00c2\u00a0 And ripping from CD.\u00c2\u00a0 And hard drive transferring.\u00c2\u00a0 The key is not to eviscerate that which cannot be eradicated, but to come up with a solution that’s cheaper and easier.<\/p>\n
People now carry a lot of music.\u00c2\u00a0 So, you’ve got to sell them a lot of music.<\/p>\n
But the funny thing is, there’s another problem.\u00c2\u00a0 People don’t want the music the labels are SELLING!<\/p>\n
The people no longer want albums.\u00c2\u00a0 If they did, they’d be buying them on the iTunes Music Store.\u00c2\u00a0 But, the public has been conditioned to believe that ONLY the single is any good, and therefore they only buy THAT!\u00c2\u00a0 To deal with this, labels are now not making the single available on iTunes, at least not before the album is available.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s like making people buy the DVD of the whole season without allowing them to watch the episodes one by one on TV.<\/p>\n
You see the record companies are selling SPECIALS and the money is in SERIES!\u00c2\u00a0 But rather invest in a "Sopranos", something meaty, a bit different, that garners loyalty, the labels are just creating dreck exactly like what came before.<\/p>\n
Bottom line.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t prevent the public from acquiring just the single.\u00c2\u00a0 The game has changed.\u00c2\u00a0 This is not the nineties, where the CD single can be cut out forcing the public to buy the whole album to get what it wants.\u00c2\u00a0 If you don’t make it available on iTunes, people will just steal it.\u00c2\u00a0 Via whatever means.\u00c2\u00a0 How come the record companies can’t understand the game has changed?<\/p>\n
We now need act loyalty.\u00c2\u00a0 Act belief.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the only way to make your numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 By convincing the public that they want MORE than the track.<\/p>\n
Wow, THAT’S scary.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s not how the labels have done it for DECADES!\u00c2\u00a0 Propped up by MTV and paid for radio.\u00c2\u00a0 It hasn’t been like this since the SEVENTIES!\u00c2\u00a0 When FM radio broke acts completely unlike those on AM.<\/p>\n
Think about that.\u00c2\u00a0 A lot of the FM acts DID make singles.\u00c2\u00a0 But the public wanted the ALBUM!\u00c2\u00a0 Because people were convinced the album was GOOD!\u00c2\u00a0 They wanted to know more about the act, get INTO IT!<\/p>\n
And, unlike today, it wasn’t the single that sold the act ANYWAY!<\/p>\n
The tour sold the act.\u00c2\u00a0 And the accompanying word of mouth.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t TOP DOWN marketing like today, getting the story all over TV and Top Forty radio, but infiltrating the UNDERGROUND!\u00c2\u00a0 Convincing the connectors.\u00c2\u00a0 It was the "Tipping Point" in action.<\/p>\n
The "Tipping Point" has no relevance in today’s major label game.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s not time for the public to do the work.\u00c2\u00a0 Via scorched earth marketing EVERYBODY is instantly reached.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only the insiders, but the casual customers.\u00c2\u00a0 And therefore, there’s no core.\u00c2\u00a0 I ask you, are there really any Yellowcard fans out there?<\/p>\n
The key is to get A LOT of music in the hands of the consumer.\u00c2\u00a0 But, they’ve got to PULL IT!\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve got to WANT IT!\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve got to BELIEVE IN IT!<\/p>\n
It’s not viral marketing.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s no company game at all.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s purely about good music.\u00c2\u00a0 Creating something that people believe is valid.\u00c2\u00a0 And, chances are, it won’t sound ANYTHING like what’s already on Top Forty radio.\u00c2\u00a0 Because when it does, people don’t believe it has any worth, that it’s just another attempt at cashing in.<\/p>\n
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I was reading the paper and they referred to the CD as "near obsolete". Nobody books their airline travel on the phone anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, the airlines charge you EXTRA to book a reservation with a person.\u00c2\u00a0 And the odds of a fuck-up are higher than they are if you book on the Internet.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-singles","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}