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New York Times
What’s the Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum
By Stephen J. Dubner
September 20, 2007
Before I was in the writing industry, I was in the music industry.
While the economics of journalism have changed a lot over the past 20 years — witness the demise of Times Select and the potential demise of the Wall Street Journal’s pay site — many other aspects of the writing industry haven’t changed much at all. If you are a non-fiction writer who writes books, for instance, the economic setup is pretty much the same as it was, in large part because book publishers still primarily offer hard copies of books to people who pay money for them.
But the music industry of today looks almost nothing like the music industry of 20 years ago. There are a ton of reasons, most of them having to do with digital technology. If you are a young journalist starting out today, you may still aspire to get a big publisher to give you an advance and widely publish your book; but if you are a young musician starting out today, do you want to get a big record advance or do you want to sell the music yourself, like these folks do, and like Jane Siberry does? If you are a record label, what do you do about illegal downloads, and do you keep putting out “albums” that nobody buys or do you instead try to release only individual songs, as many people seem to prefer?
It strikes me as ironic that a new technology (digital music) may have accidentally forced record labels to abandon the status quo (releasing albums) and return to the past (selling singles). I sometimes think that the biggest mistake the record industry ever made was abandoning the pop single in the first place. Customers were forced to buy albums to get the one or two songs they loved; how many albums can you say that you truly love, or love even 50% of the songs — 10? 20? But now the people have spoken: they want one song at a time, digitally please, maybe even free (yikes: big can of worms, which is addressed ably below).
So what really happened to the music industry, and what will it look like in five or ten years?
That’s the question we put to five smart people in our latest Freakonomics Quorum. I found their answers to be incredibly interesting, full of real information and clear-eyed thinking. (If you haven’t already done so, you should also read Lynn Hirschberg’s really good recent profile of Rick Rubin in the Times Magazine.) Huge thanks to all our participants.
(CLICK ON LINK BELOW TO READ THEIR ANSWERS)
(1) Koleman Strumpf, professor of business economics at the University of Kansas Business School whose papers include “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales”
(2) Fredric Dannen, author of Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business
(3) George Drakoulias, music producer, artists & repertoire executive at American Recordings, and veteran of Def Jam Recordings
(4) Peter Rojas, founder of Engadget and co-founder of RCRD LBL, a free, online-only music label launched by Downtown Records
(5) Steve Gottlieb, president of TVT Records
(CLICK ON LINK BELOW TO READ THEIR ANSWERS)
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.c....html?ref=music |
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