Why The Record Industry Should Die

Bought a CD lately? Neither have I. But this story starts long before everyone was downloading music, before, as one record company executive put it, on seeing Napster for the first time, “The record industry was over.” This is about how the record industry, today known as “The Big Four”, drove the stake into their own heart.
The basic problem, as I see it, is that the record industry stopped respecting the record buying public at some point around the late 1980’s. Let’s talk about the “Single” also known by the names “7 inch”, the “Cassingle”, or my fav, “The Maxi- Single”. The record companies starting getting hot again for the single around the time of the original Boy Band regime. Singles like New Kids On The Block’s “The Right Stuff”,sold millions. Why market an entire album, when there’s only one good song, and the rest is filler? This business model worked brilliantly in the ‘60’s when you had bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys, putting out gem after gem. And then they had full length albums behind them with little to no chaff. But not so much anymore.The record buying public are consumers, but they’re not stupid. I believe this was the real beginning of the end for the album as concept. The Rock album being one of the record companies mainstay products throughout the 1970’s 80’s and ‘90s.
But oh yeah, what about that thing I was talking about how the record industry stopped respecting us at some point? Let’s look at two very successful artists of the last quarter century. Let’s start with Bruce Springsteen. If Bruce had released his first album in 2003, instead of 1973, you might be asking Bruce Who? His first album sold 25,000 copies its first year, not a hit by yesterday’s standards or today’s. It wasn’t until Bruce’s third album, “Born To Run”, that his career really took off, making the cover of Time and Newsweek. The point is that no artist is given the time to develop any more. It takes a while to rev up your engines, and get going. If you don’t shift a couple million albums or singles right out of the gate today, you get dropped, and the label goes searching for the next Johnny come lately. U2 on the other hand, didn’t start their million/billion selling selves until their fifth release, “The Joshua Tree”, which is arguably the first million seller in the CD format. I just can’t imagine an environment, in which sales is the only motivator. Who do we have today, that’s carrying the torch for artists like these? I guess we have The Killers. Lucky for them and thanks to an insane marketing blitz by Island Def Jam, sales for their debut album “Hot Fuss”, were well past the million mark.
What happens when you realize you no longer need the middle man? That’s what the record companies are in essence. The band or artist, creates and records the “product”. The label then manufactures and distributes that product to stores, whether they be brick and mortar or online. Home recording equipment became affordable and readily available sometime in the late 1980’s. A whole army of people who rolled out of bed and recorded in their pajamas bloomed and blossomed. A lot of these people had no chance of ever being signed to a major label recording contract. They sent their cassette tape or burned CD’s off to small independent labels. They embarked on small yet often profitable tours around the country. A lot of these people also started their own record labels, and here’s my point. Why let someone charge you for something and take your money, when you can do that thing for yourself? These independent, or Indie labels as they were called, often had a knack for connecting the music to their niche markets, and making their music readily available to their fans. A lot of these labels, survive to this day, in part because they were able to see the future before the old dinosaur major labels were. A lot of them made their catalogs available online as soon as they were able to. So while Warner Music Group is locked in battle with Youtube, about why they can and can’t show their artists’ videos, your neighbor down the streets record label, put all their bands videos up on Youtube, and just sold their first thousand copies.
So, it would seem when you have made it obvious that you are horribly out of step with the times, have made yourself obsolete, and no longer have a finger to the pulse of what is truly cool or cutting edge, you get to show yourself the door.