3G Broadband 2Go -No Annual ContractWill recorded music survive the 2010s?
I have no doubt musicians will continue to perform throughout the 2010s, but they'll make less and less money from recorded music. The passion to make and sell recorded music is already starting to wane.
Big record labels will be increasingly irrelevant so I wouldn't be surprised if Warner, Universal, Sony/BMG, and EMI eventually merge into one mega-label to sell and license back-catalog music. New music, that's another story. Already established bands, like Radiohead, have already proved the point: they don't need record companies anymore. They can sell their music directly to fans.
Will anybody be making 'albums' in 2020?
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)But that model won't work for smaller groups. Recorded music for them may survive purely as a promotional tool, as fewer and fewer bands have any expectation of seeing recording as a potential source of income. Buying music, in physical form or by legal download, doesn't seem to have much of a future. So why would a band make an effort to make music people would want to listen to decades from now? The art of making albums--a suite of songs if you will--may become a rare pursuit.
The craft of recording will wither away, something only the most successful bands ever bother with. Same for record producers--their future employment possibilities look dim, and bands will just produce themselves without any outside guidance. Even in New York City, most of the major studios have already closed their doors; the Hit Factory, where Springsteen recorded "Born in the U.S.A.," and Sony Music Studios, where Nirvana recorded "MTV Unplugged in New York," are gone. Even famed London studios are history, including Olympic, where The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton recorded some of their best work. A sizable number of studios in Los Angeles have closed as well.
Home recording is killing off professional studios, and that's clearly tied to plummeting record sales and profits. Home digital recordings can sound acceptable, but the technology can't duplicate the great acoustics of a first-rate studio. You can't record the sound of a band in a great sounding room, unless you have a great sounding room. No wonder most new recordings sound so contrived. Just because you can make a record at home doesn't mean you should. Truly talented, professional recording engineers are a dying breed.
So yes, I have no doubt working musicians will continue to make recordings, but I doubt any of them will make the next "Sgt. Pepper's," "Dark Side of the Moon," or "Thriller." Why would a band work on a project for months or years, without much chance to make real money? Besides, most people listen to songs; the long-form "album" is on its way out.
What do you think? Will you still be buying music in 2020?
Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
i expect the "recorded" music will be of more live performances, consider the ???? live from Madison Square Garden(insert favorite band/any established band), as an example & it will be done of course in 3-D available only on Blu-ray. for the SD DVD it'll only be regular 2-D. there will still be a need for professional audio engineers & techs, they'll just be working more w/ audio for video. in really big rooms w/ so-so or crappy acoustics. but it won't matter, because it'll be all about the razzle dazzle of the light & pyro show, the gimmicky 3-D effects & "i've got a 56" HDTV w/ 10 speakers on a 7.2 system in my home theatre room that's 12' x 10' w/ an 8' ceiling" than the music.
the struggle will be for newer talent & i think even they'll be doing more long-form video of their performances. making one's own concert videos is next, after the album project is recorded & mastered in the basement. all it'll take is 2-3 friends w/ Flip cameras or iPod Nanos & iMovie 8 on the Intel Mac Mini that's already connected to the previously mentioned, though maybe smaller HDTV & sound system. so then we'll have bad video to go w/ bad audio. "it'll be awesome dude!!"--i think not. i'm not saying all of these newer talents will have bad product, of course there will be some who break out because they actually hired creative & technical talent to help them achieve the goal of a solid, quality product. but as w/ everything else there will likely be more bad to mediocre than good to excellent. this is my guess & i would love to be wrong about this as time moves on.
Well recoded crap is still crap. Creativity is still creativity, even if happening in a basement studio.
Read your last column, can you really be so unaware that you don't know SonyBMG hasn't been SonyBMG for almost a year? Bertelsman sold their share of the joint venture to Sony and now the company is back to plain old Sony Music Entertainment. A trivial point for some but I don't think it's too much for commentators to actually know what they are talking about.
As far as recording studios, you really think it's "the room" that made all those studios great? Not likely. It was a combination of many things. "The room" can be treated to sound any way a good engineer wants it to sound. The fact that recording equipment is more accessible to more people means more people will be able to discover their talent for producing and engineering, not just the privileged few who happen to have access to the major studios. More easy access to recording equipment may mean more bad recordings, it may also mean more good recordings. Thinking that recordings can only be made in certain rooms with certain equipment by certain people is an elitist argument that does not serve the music.
Finally, it seems pretty fatuous to make predictions ten years out about an industry that throughout its history has confounded the prognosticators. I wonder what your predictions from 10 years ago looked like.
Actually, youtube is an incredibly powerful tool. My family is spread out over the U.S., and putting together a slideshow, a quick movie, etc., of the kids gives friends and relatives a chance to see our family and events they normally wouldn't see, until maybe, we sent a picture through the mail (snail of email).
You must be quite young, for I remember an era where media was expensive, difficult to duplicate, and the equipment was also expensive and quite technical. Hell, I learned photography on an old Pentax SLR, the kind where you have to learn about film, aperture, shutter speed, etc. Mistakes were expensive, and heartbreaking. Now, kids have cameras that take ****** pictures on their phones, the cameras they sell nowadays take most of the guesswork out of the equation, and hell, even shoot pretty decent video.
Yes, youtube is filled with a lot of nonsense, but hey, you probably could care less about my son blowing out his birthday cake candles for the first time, but now I have the opportunity and ability to share a moment like that to people who are interested. It's a wonderful thing.
Without recorded music bands have no way to get people interested in coming to see them live and thus make their real money. Recordings are baseline requirement to do business. And if your record sounds like crap people will assume your live show will be just as crappy.
Just because there has been a big shift in the pricing structure, distribution and production of recorded music does not mean recorded music is going away. Even though something is available for free people will still pay for convenience and quality. As the file sharing generation grows up they have less time and patience for hunting down stuff on P2P networks dealing with bad encodings and viruses and malware. They will pay for less hassle. But few will ever pay what was being previously commanded by record labels.
And this pricing adjustment means the bloat of the recording industry must be trimmed like any other business that has to compete in a digital economy (watch out book publishers, you're next). The closing of big expensive studios is not some omen. Its just one way to trim this fat. The inefficiencies are being replaced by the newer more nimble techniques. Quality will still be present as will creativity. These don't require huge budgets. They are a state of mind.
I was hoping Windows 7 had a better anti-piracy features. That would have helped all of us big time.
I also think the big computer company's should pay the record labels. They used the ability to stealing/sharing to boots the sales of pc's/mac's in the late 90's.
I can go on and on about how the internet broke a leg of the music industry.
Some people say cd's are to high. But can afford six buck a coffee & $200 jeans.
I never thought I would be selling vinyl going into year 2010. The indy stores will rule the next decade!
And catching them is an almost insurmountable problem because people, rightly, have the expectation that they will not be tracked, wiretapped or have their mail read without a warrant. We do not live in a police state. Its not the ISP's or Microsoft's responsibility to track our moves.
Its much easier to convince people to pay for something they can get for free by focussing on the positives of paid content: higher quality, convenience, safety (no malware). Water is virtually free but that hasn't stopped the bottled water industry from turning a huge profit.
We can all watch this take place on "American Idol" which is an accellerated version of what was once a long term process.
Back in my days as a record producer, i went where the bands were playing, listened for the talent and creativity, and watched the crowd to see if the band had fan-power.
I even went backstage it the Peppermint Lounge after seeing the Doors for the first time. Unfortunately i was a week too late, they had already signed with someone else.
Without the greedy record companies in their way, talented groups are finding their own fans and making their own recordings, frequently sold at playdates and downloadable free.
Otherwise we can only look forward to a string of manufactured "stars" like Hanna Montana.
This has been a recurring theme since the invention of the wax cylinder. It hasn't happened and I don't see why it will. Big labels may go but recorded music simply will not.
Move on, nothing here but click bait...
Oh, and merry christmas..!
We need the labels and the people who work for them. This business is bigger then the outsiders think. It's OK for the artist to create it's own buzz. But eventually they may create a demand. An one of the labels will step in. An help the artist with marketing, promoting and maybe even manufacturing. Now the artist can focus on produce & perform. that's where the big buck's come in. It's a investment! Instead of saying kill them. The upcoming artist should support them.
Recording the music is the easy part. 90% of this business is promoting! That's where the real money come in. If the artist is really good, and able to produce a grate sounding product. It will sell!
Everyone wants to be a artist. Because they recorded some songs on a computer. Now they only want to support themselves. An call the artist that worked hard an got a record deal. Wack!
This business has been around since the angle of music. It's not going anywhere. Just do get in the way!
Really, you think that music is promoted there? I don't think so man. Radio has and always will promote new bands. Plus, when new band's come out they usually open for a bigger act.
The ONLY DVDs I buy are of concerts. The Los Lonely Boys at Austin is my latest, and it's great. So great, that I wil purchase more of their music in the future. The annual "Austin City Limits Fest" dvd's have introduced me to new artists. The cable channel "Palladia" is excellent, live concert recordings, "Soundstage", "Crossroads", and other shows featuring musicians doing what they do, everyday and night, in HD.
I think radio (sat and terrestrial, maybe even internet [if they can figure out a proper business model]) will continue to, and perhaps, be even a greater force, of music promotion. Since I bought my first XM receiver and service, I have been introduced to countless new musicians, many of whom I have purchased their music.
I'd like to see a web hub of new musician promotion. Currently, bands for the most part have their own sites, online stores, etc. If there was a site I could go to, choose a genre, look up a band or musician, listen to something, and buy their music, I think it would be great, and successful for both the site and the artist.
You may be correct Steve, in the old guard of recordings fade to black, but that opens the door for new, fresh ideas from people who don't have the baggage of the antiquated studios of yore.
If you don't want to be bothered sorting through piles of music to find something you like, hire someone to do the sorting for you. But don't force me to hire them too (the record companies) because I don't want their help. Most consumers don't need the record companies any more. And smart bands don't need them either.
Giving away music as advertising does not imply that it can be reused for commercial purposes for free. License the commercial companies exploiting the music, not the end users. No one allows advertising to be reused for other purposes. There needs to be a central licensing agency for this.
Do you really think the first deal from a label is going to be any better? The labels are in it for themselves, not the band. http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091226/wl_time/08599195000500
"Releasing it for free is just good marketing," he says. "Whether it's through piracy or distribution your film is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this." And he has managed to make quite a bit of money out of it. Online sales of merchandise - including T-shirts and collector's editions of the DVD - have generated $430,000 on a film that only cost $21,500 to make, Vuorensola says.
http://www.pampelmoose.com/2009/04/the-end-of-the-music-album-as-the-organizing-principle
http://madebyfight.com/2009/12/dear-musicians-please-be-brilliant-or-get-out-of-the-way/
enjoy music and don't worry too much , changes are part of the world's success, bare with whatever comes at ya, the future hold something new for everyone.,
If people keep stealing the music, even facebook can't help. It's dosen't matter the formmat. If people keep stealing it. No one wins! If I knew people would be stealing music/movies/software. I wouldn't have gotten in the biz either.
Radioheads where already known before they made that move. It will be very hard for a indy to do the that.
Most good artist put out a group of song that tell a story. I think most artist want to sell the whole story not just a song. With so much stealing going on "copying or downloading" labels are happy to get what they can.
Some artist don't care if the music is stolen or not. They just want you to pay to come see them. An that not cool. The deal is the lable make money off sales and the artist get the show money. Now if the label didn't put up any money. Than I can see why the artist would be mad. Again 90% of the music business is promoting. Without the promotions. The only fans would be artist family!
Recorded music will survive because it's the only way people could hear it.
The acc/mp3 sound still don't match the sound of a cd yet!
CD sales will come back around this decade. The stealing has to stop, and mp3 or worthless.
The fact is recorded music is here to stay, and that's for the majority of people. Maybe the pricing and distribution structure will change but most people actually want to be told what to listen to, whether they realize it or not.
Where does one even start to address a statement like that? Perhaps our POTUS has reached further than we ever feared or imagined.
I'll stick with my gazillion channels on XM, terrestrial, and my remote control. Have fun tuning into BigBro.
Absurd.
Someone is telling you what to listen to when you listen to any radio station in the world. The programmer chooses what we get to hear (and more importantly what we don;t get to hear). Sometimes they do this for altruistic reasons but often their choices are based on corporate or monetary interests. But either way, someone is making choices for you.
I state again - "...whether they realize it or not"
Yes, I guess somebody (perhaps the Wizard of Oz?) is choosing the programming on the stations. But most program directors know what their core audience is tuning in for, and schedule appropriately. Do they get it right 100% of the time, well, if we all had the exact same preferences, yes. But we don't, we are all unique and different in what appeals to us.
Prime example of a failure, "Rolling Stone" magazine. What used to be a good rag, has turned into pages of dung on topics I could care less about. I stopped my subscription a few years back, haven't even picked this mag up on the news-stand just to peruse it.
- by magicmaster December 27, 2009 5:53 AM PST
- If people wants to protest legally, listen to free musics provided legally (like radio) and pay nothing. Tell them who is the boss.
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