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Topic History of: Digital ants wreck the music industry
Max. showing the last 5 posts - (Last post first)
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DJones |
The British music industry is undergoing a resurgence, and a spring of talent bloomed at the Brit awards this year. In the face of competition from mobile ringtones, games and DVDs, let alone mass piracy and flat compact disc sales, the music industry is breathing a sigh of relief. It is an exhalation that has all the joy of discovering that your pet duck has died through old age and not bird flu.
There is a fear in the music industry that while digital distribution in the guise of broadband, digital radio, third-generation phones and more than 1bn iTunes downloads will not diminish the demand for music, it might erode those big institutions that supply it.
The top recording companies see how digital has changed the television landscape: where there were five significant TV channels there are now 560 channels on Sky. Likewise, the four big recording companies wonder if they are facing the same restructuring and erosion that has happened to their TV colleagues.
Digital technology lowers the barriers to entry; where once you needed a whole country paying its licence fee to get radio and initiate television, now almost anyone can afford to start a TV station on the web. For the cost of a cheap house in London you can broadcast to the whole country on satellite for a year. In music it is the same; modern personal computers are latent recording studios and the web is your way to market, as the Arctic Monkeys proved by breaking on the internet and not signing to a big label.
Where ITV once had a 50 per cent share of the audience, it is now down to 20 per cent and the problem is that a 1 per cent loss of audience share on ITV1 is not balanced by a 1 per cent gain in audience share on ITV2. The advertising cost per 1,000 remains higher on the terrestrial channel. In other words, your eyeballs are more valuable to ITV when watching ITV1 than when they are watching the digital ITV2.
The same is happening in music. A pair of ears listening to a concert was always worth more to the creators of music than a pair of ears listening to a recording. But that gap widens in the digital era, as the scarcity of performance trumps the availability of mass digital distribution. In a nutshell |
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