Stop claiming <insert mature technology here> is dead

There. Does this graph seem to represent a dying format? Yup, I don't think so. Stop saying cassette tapes are dead. You did the same for vinyl, and now you're calling names to yourself...

Update: By popular demand, I started updated this graphic once in a while...

Updated graph, still according to the data available on Discogs, at the 2nd of February 2012:

Updated in 19/07/2013:

New-Rap: a new generation

From my whole collection of music, I don't have one Rap or Hip-Hop song at all - not that I recall of, at least. Sure, I have some music, mainly experimental, that uses lots of rap-style elements, but that's all. I don't think I like Rap or Hip-Hop. I can see the difference from good rap to bad rap, I understand its art and value, but... It's just not for me, I guess.

Now, today I'll talk you about something else - let's call it... er... new-rap. Probably this phenomenon is already known, studied and this new style has a name - another name. Just, it's something not known, and I don't know how to call it. As a matter of fact, the thing that makes this interesting is that - without purpose - this style is mainly unknown, specially from the music industry. But if they don't get this, they're dead.

Talking about new-rap is not talking about a music style - only. Talking about new-rap is talking about a new generation of people and how do they work, feel and deal with music.

Welcome to the world you usually avoid to see. They are young. They walk funny. They talk loud and in a strange dialect. They are everywhere on the streets and everyone knows, but usually don't think about them as a group - as a phenomenon. People are usually warry of them: from the "who's this funny guy" to the almost unconscious feeling that "this weird guy might steal me in a minute". As a matter of fact they probably walk with more money in their wallet than the one you would feel safe walking with, but you don't know that. They know they make you feel exactly how you do, but they don't give a shit. They're surprisingly friendly - to anyone. They talk really strange, but they usually don't curse, unless there's a specific curse-word that entered their dialect. They don't smoke. They don't take coffee. They don't do drugs. They only drink alcohol at parties. They drive a lot - and race - but they never do it in public places, they never drive after drinking alcohol, they all do safe sex. They're different.

They all have high-technology in their pockets: expensive cellphones. None of those cellphones have any software you ever seen. Really. They don't really have a concept for music, they live music. Sometimes while they're talking a cellphone just pops from their strange pockets and some loud music starts playing. They act as there's no music there - they just feel it and use it as to mark the rythm of their actions.

They all make music. All of them. Their lifes are basicly about three things: cars, parties and music. Not that they have a concept for music. They don't know what a composer is. It's really weird, but most of them don't know what a "band" means, they think that "a band" or "a CD" or "some sound" is the same thing. They don't have a clue about what intellectual property is. They make music, using voices, hardware and samples. They don't know that they make music. They don't know the difference between the music they composed and the music their friend did. For them, there are two types of music: the one they have and the one they still don't. They don't consider what you consider music as music. Not even well-known rappers. For them, those guys just make sounds. As they put it, "sounds are everywhere, but quality sound isn't in what you can record, is on what others recorded". What they mean with this is that, for them, a Bach 1 hour CD is the same as turning on TV in a random channel and recording (losslessly) one hour of the sound stream from that TV channel. As a matter of fact, they prefer the later, since they have more variety of sounds. Sounds are important for them: they all use them to make samples. I head a music that used a brilliant sample that I had to think about for several minutes until relating the result with the original: a 3 minutes or so kids song was reduced - in a brilliant way - to a 3 secs sample. They use everything. They mix and remix. "What? You're crazy, no one owns sounds!" It's their reaction to one comment. They were surprised, I was weird to them. They do AWSOME music. Really. They share it with everyone. It's the whole purpose of music - sharing thoughts, ideas. I listen an astonishing lenghly discussion about a 30 secs intro to a music someone they knew did. And I bet that if you buy 100 rap CD's from a CD store and mix those tracks with the new-rap thing they're doing, they'll naturaly call their tracks as music, the others as sound sources. It's a new style - a new generation.

Now, I know some other movements happening, for other music styles, for other kinds of kids. Not every have something in common with this. Many are different. The real question here is that, if you talk with this guys, you'll understand the way they live. You see beauty in some stuff. You don't see anything wrong. Then you go home, yet startled. And start thinking about what they do. They don't "record", they share. They don't buy music or sounds. They don't know what intellectual property is. According to our laws, I bet everyone of them "should" be in jail. They're happy. They aren't violent. They don't harm anyone. They share. They have true friends. They are humans. They live.

Who's wrong?

Music: what was 2007, what to have in 2008

Acording to http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2008/01/top-music-20-st.html, music sales in 2007 are expected to have dropped 15% or more in 2007 (relating to 2006). On the other hand, eMarketer's predictiongs for 2008 also talk about music, as we can see at http://www.mediafuturist.com/2008/01/emarketers-pred.html. The predictions include a further fade off of the CD but a rise of experimentations with new and emerging business models like ad-supported music, mobile music and music social networks. Also, DRM is going to drop further (in music, remember)...

I can hardly wait, let's make 2008!

The State of Music Business

Manuel Marino, who has a blog about music in its various aspects, invited me to wrote an article about the state of music business. For those who read this blog for a long time, you probably already know my position about it. But if you're not a reader for that long, or, in other hand, you want to have my thoughts about the state of the music business compiled in a somewhat small article that sums it up, then you might be interested in reading this article:
http://manuelmarino.com/the-state-of-music-business/

The music market is falling: who's to blame?

It's known for regular readers that I don't believe that illegal file-sharing has an noteworthy impact in the rise or fall of music market profits: it's more an excuse than anything else. This article tries to find out what's causing this fall.

Even if I read some stuff about market dynamics over the years, I'm surely no expert on the matter. Also, this all issue is way to chaotic to find simple and obvious causes for this fall. So, I decided instead to point four points that surely have some major impact on music market. This doesn't mean that these are the most important issues - they probably aren't, but at least they are some real measurable causes.

The digital era

The music market never made an effort to understand the digital era. The most flagrant example of this is the well-worn Napster case. Yes, people were doing downloads of copyright material, and yes, the copyright owners weren't getting nothing from it. That's beyond the point. The point is that the music industry instead of trying to understand what was happening, decided to just sue them and shut it down. With that act, they also gave a statement: they don't care about the digital era, if it hurts them they'll fight to take it down. The problem here is that you can't take down the digital era, because that's no company, no infrastructure nor even a technology: the digital era is a mind set. People share files because they feel there's no wrong with it. Some people download digital music for free arguing that the real cost of a digital file is zero. It's this kind of social mind set that makes the digital era define the music market's future, and if the music industry keeps against it, or at least doesn't bother trying to comprehend it, then they're fighting against the future of the market they are, thus fighting themselves. Of course that some people got it, and used the digital era to make profit: Apple, for instance, created the iPod and iTunes, making huge profits in an empty market. But the profits are not only for retailers: I've seen musicians, labels and every other piece of chain in the music business benefit from the digital era, they just decided to understand it first. The best Portuguese music I got in 2007 came from a Portuguese label created this year, some other music labels I know are in frank expansion, some music stores too. We've seen new business models rising, from fans-funded recordings like what you can find on SellABand, or even bands making money by giving their music for free in sites like ReverbNation.

The purchasing power

There are also less music related issues that have an huge impact in the music business, and ignoring them is like forcing ourselves not to see the elephant in the room. One of them is the actual purchasing power for these kinds of goods in the so-called developed countries. I've done several parallels in the past: for instance in the 2006 Portuguese BarCamp I compared the music business with the coffee machines business. The fact is that businesses - each one of them - have to adapt to the overall market. If people start to consider some stuff as "luxury items", then maybe those items should be sold as such. If
people start thinking that some item is more valuable than other item - in a case where typically they'll choose upon one of the two - then the second one has naturally to be less expensive than the first one. Market laws apply to any market, but the music industry fails to understand that the music market follows the same rules than any other market.

The physical price

So, the digital era appeared and with it digital music, that feels like free. On the other hand, the purchasing power for the class of goods music is inserted in is being reduced in the last few years. The natural thing to have would be the price of CD's, more than any other physical format for music sales, to follow these two indicators and have their price falling. Plus, even if that wasn't case, people were already expecting the CD price to fall anyway: one of the things that were being said in the first times of the Compact Disc is that the high price they cost would soon fall with new technology arriving, and the consumers kept that in mind. The manufacturing cost sure fell, as we managed to see, for instance, in the price of blank CD-R's. Yet, the price of a music CD kept rising. Doing the math, what's expect to happen to music sales other then a fall?

How to measure quality?

One of the causes, at least in Europe and in the United States for the rise of the physical price is the way big retailers entered in the music market. Big stores had everything in one place, wanting to be your one-stop-choice. They managed (by quantity and scale) to practice such lower prices that they practically killed an huge amount of small music stores, or forced them to practice even bigger prices to deal with the dropping unit sales. When they were already controlling some markets like the music market, they were then free to practice the prices of their choice. Speaking of choice...

It would be stupid trying to measure music quality. But we measure related factors, like choice and diversity. Let me explain: if music quality is hard to define because each person have different musical tastes, then it's pretty obvious that if you have few choice and diversity, then few people would be interested in the music being released and available to the public, and fewer articles for their tastes. To aggravate this, if market diversity isn't accomplished than if you satisfy someone's tastes, that person only has the choice to buy way-too-similar music (which will lead him to buy less music) or not to buy it at all.

With the fall of investment on music from the music industry, and with the fact that the market reaches its physical public mainly via big retailers, came the standardisation of music. Only a few pre-determined music styles, known to be well consumed, have place in the market. The long tail of music was being completely ignored (and majorly found their place on a less controlled environment like the Internet, embracing the digital era).

I risk to assume that if we consider the overall quality of the music available on music stores dependent of their diversity, by attracting each listener segment, then the overall quality of music has decreased in the last few years, which can then be related with the decrease of music sales.

Conclusion

If you still want to say that file-sharing is guilty of the decrease of music sales and overall profit on the music market, go ahead, I won't stop you, even if I don't buy it. But considering all the other factors that might affect its market, including those that surely are, please avoid making the same mistakes as Liebowitz is going to state in his upcoming paper, where he not only states that piracy is guilty of the decreasing of music sales, but that "file-sharing* appears to have caused the entire decline in the record sales and appears to have vitiated what otherwise would have been growth in the industry".

* - funilly, he measures "file-sharing" by measuring Internet penetration