Well it’s been a while since a post huh? I’ve received some good advice that if I want to make a go at this blogging thing, I’m going to have to put aside my tendency for editorializing, and just get to the point…regularly. Looking down at this monstrosity it seems I may have failed at the “not editorializing” part, so lets hope I can succeed with the “regularly” part in the future…
Why did the record industry crash? Simple. Flat-out refusal to modernize to the digital era until way too late. Instead, the industry chose to fight tooth and nail against any service designed to distribute Mp3s, a fight they were absolutely destined to lose.
Why? Because Mp3 technology is absolutely amazing! (all you audiophiles out there I hear you gagging, but hear me out…) What many people don’t remember is that audio, previous to the advent of the Mp3, was very data rich. If you wanted to copy a CD to your computer you had to have around 500mb of free space available. Consider that my Mac LC2 that I owned in the 90’s, only had a hard drive that could hold 275mb, so in that era I could not have even fit a single CD’s worth of music on my hard drive!
Mp3 technology came along and all of a sudden music took up 10% of the space. Consider what an amazing technological feat this is that Mp3s retain only 10% of the data of CD quality and yet 99 out of 100 people absolutely cannot tell the difference when listening! When video is compressed we can immediately tell by the fuzziness, pixelization, and frame-rate, but due to the psychological nature of Mp3 encoding that leaves the mid-range (the part of the music that has the voices and the guitars) relatively unscathed, most people simply don’t hear the loss of quality.
The Mp3s tiny size made it easy to send and receive on the internet, guaranteeing the demise of the CD. It was sort of a Harry Potter-esque situation: “…neither can live while the other survives.” Major labels fought extremely hard to suppress all Mp3 distribution platforms, which made it a bit harder to find music online at times, but didn’t help declining CD sales 
The miscalculation of the industry was their belief that they could and should try to fight the Mp3. Inside the industry, Mp3s were initially synonymous with piracy, and there was blanket refusal to even consider online digital marketplaces for fear that Mp3s purchased would immediately be illegally dispersed. The reality is Mp3s were, are, and always will be illegally dispersed, there’s just nothing anyone can do about it and it certainly didn’t mean that the industry shouldn’t condone, promote, and sell them.
The recording industry had the chance in the settlement with Napster in 2000 to convert the illegal service into a legitimate vendor of music, and instead chose to shut it down. The stupidity of this decision is overwhelming. How long did they think they could push a vastly inferior product (CDs), to a consumer base that had already tasted the forbidden fruit? Piracy was beside the point!
Instead of fighting so hard against Mp3s, what the industry should have done was realize that “free” was really only half the allure of the digital music marketplace from the consumer perspective. The other half is the huge searchable catalog of instantly downloadable music. As iTunes (now the biggest music retailer in the world) has proven, many consumers prefer to spend $1.27 at good ol’ reliable iTunes than wade through the murky waters of bit-torrent to get the same song for free. By the time the industry came around to iTunes it was too late, CD sales had plummeted leaving the industry in shambles.
There are lasting effects as well: Due to the industry’s initial failure to modernize they now have a gaping hole in their sales. My generation was used to buying CDs before Mp3s came along, and many of us, after downloading pirated music wildly in the early part of this decade, are back to buying music. iTunes customers are about 75% 25yrs old and up, so iTunes has not created a new market, it has mainly just salvaged the old CD buying market. The younger generation that is now 18-24 yrs old , basically grew up thinking music was free, and not surprisingly, they are buying music at a historically low rate- a huge problem in the very demographic that the industry depends on for massive consumption.
