Mellencamp mourns the death of the record biz
Don't take my word for it that the major labels and the system that propped them up for so many years are dead. John Mellencamp, who sang a string of rock hits back in the 1980s and '90s, thinks the business is dead as well. In an articulate and passionate essay on the Huffington Post, he argues that the long slide started well before the rise of file sharing, back to when the business started relying on SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).
The old way of selling music is as outdated as '80s hairstyles.
(Credit: John Cougar Mellencamp via YouTube)With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how many units were being moved in any given week, and where those sales were happening. With BDS, instead of relying on phone calls to radio program directors, the labels knew exactly how many spins a song was receiving in each city. Shortly thereafter, the Billboard charts began relying on these automated systems as well. The result: labels ignored the vast majority of the country and focused on a few hits that were getting airplay in the largest cities, and allocated their A&R and marketing budgets accordingly. We ended up, according to Mellencamp, with No. 1 hits that most of the country had never heard, and the rest was a long downhill slide to today's hyperfragmented and piracy-ridden market.
It's a great essay, and I particularly like his side note that the CD was created out of pure greed, as a way to get users to replace their collections of perfectly good vinyl records. (Remember how CDs were supposed to offer clear sound forever? Funny, my CDs from the early 1990s are already wearing out and skipping, but I have records from the 1950s that still play adequately.)
But like the folks at Idolator, who called Mellencamp old and dumb, I completely disagree with his conclusion. Mellencamp says that the irrelevance of radio and fragmentation of the market means there's no organic way for music to find an audience and grow. That's completely wrong--there's more opportunity for smaller bands today than there's ever been. Yes, beginning artists might have to do more work themselves, but recording, manufacturing, and distributing an album has never been cheaper or easier. From ProTools to Disc Makers to CD Baby and Tunecore, and more recent competitors like Routenote and Audiolife, these are tools that anybody can use and master. Sure, online marketing through vehicles like MySpace can't compete with mass radio play in 100 cities, but it's available to anybody--not just the companies' chosen few. When you get a bit bigger, you can enlist services like Topspin to hype your product in the digital realm, for far cheaper than an old-fashioned media blitz. Even getting gigs no longer requires a booking agent, thanks to services like Sonicbids.
In one sense, Mellencamp's right: if you're in music to become a rock star, now's a bad time to be a musician. But if you want to have your music heard as broadly as possible, there's never been a better time.
And for those of you who couldn't sing the chorus to Mellencamp's "I Need A Lover" when you read his essay, click here.
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Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
On the other hand, I have worn out plenty of vinyl in my life. And I mean that quite literally. They weren't "damaged" by mishandling, but they did wear out from over playing. I have purchased 'Dark Side of the Moon' three times in my life, twice on vinyl, once on CD. Same thing with Devo's "Freedom of Choice".
Of course now, I just download my albums from Amazon. Yeah, I know they are compressed, but it saves me the step of ripping them to my music server, which is where I listen to 99% of my music. Love that Squeezebox!
And, I still have my turn table set up, to play the old stuff on occasion.
And yeah I have played my vinyl in my car. I put a cd into my cd burner or my computer and record my vinyl.
Cd's can wear out from over play. Go ask my radiohead o.k computer about it.
Vinyl can last a lifetime if you care for them, the turntable and the stylus. Replace your stylus often and you have no problems. Put the same care in to cd's and a cd player and you get the same results.
And vinyl is by far the superior sounding product.
Well, the record company's goin' out of business
They price the records too damn high
And the boys in the band could use some assistance
Get a daytime job to get by
Well, the P.D.'s, they won't play the record
They're too worried about that book
And the D.J.'s, they all hate the song
But they're in love with the hook
Mellencamp's been talking about this for almost 30 years.
- by MattRosoff March 27, 2009 11:28 AM PDT
- I am a bit rough on CDs--sometimes I leave them out of their cases, which is a no-no. But my point is that vinyl degrades gracefully, you can still hear a song with a couple crackles and pops. A scratched CD skips and becomes unlistenable.
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(8 Comments)I do wear out my vinyl as well, and have bought two replacement Dark Sides as well!