Sharing some interesting thoughts on music blogs and the industry.......-----------------------------------------
...Great places for sharing information, meeting like-minded people who you wouldn’t get a chance to interact with otherwise, and for finding out about stuff thats going on the other side of the country or even the other side of the world. Blogs are best when they inspire you to go and hear a D.J. at a party. If the blog is the party, that’s quite sad.
The music industry has always claimed to be under threat from people sharing their music; remember the ‘home taping is killing music’ logo that record sleeves used to have on them?. I used to tape loads of records before I could afford them, and if anything home taping fertilized my love for music. I think these days real music lovers might hear something for the first time by downloading an MP3 but the sound quality of vinyl (and C.D. to a lesser degree) is so much better than MP3, that people do still go out and and buy other formats.
I think the real thing that is effecting the music industry is that people aren’t making as good music as they used to; or to put it another way, there is so much good music already made, that buying older classics second hand can often be easier and better than trawling through loads of average new stuff. Proof of this can be seen in the current glut of edits/bootlegs, the majority of which I’m sure outsell new music.
I’d like to see the record industry re-invigorated by a new music format that sounded better than records (or at least as good). When C.D.’s where introduced I think there was a bit of a boom as lots of people re-bought there collections in the new format. It’s been proved that C.D.’s aren’t as good as they were hyped to be in both sound quality and durability, and the ease with which they can be copied has obviously had it’s own effect on sales. For ages there’s been talk of new format’s that sound better than C.D.’s but the industry can’t seem to decide which one to back. If they created something better than C.D. that could actually compete with records, people might re-buy their collections in the new format (or at least buy it new, rather than track down second hand records). This new revenue could then be filtered down to new acts who might never sell as many records as the classics, but there will always be an interest in new acts because people still like going to see live shows.
Not sure whether this would work though as so many people now listen to music on i-pods and other MP3 players, that they can’t really appreciate the sound of a better format. Again this is a very cynical solution, I don’t really want or think records will ever be bettered. The glut of edits and bootlegs should be telling the big record companies something though. Maybe they could just start utilizing their back catalogues more, doing official re-issues that could compete with the bootleggers, and maybe getting some remixes done. I think the revenues from re-issues isn’t going to be huge, but let’s face it a lot of record shops and distributers would probably go bust if they didn’t sell edits and bootlegs, so maybe some of the bigger companies need to look at that and get involved. I would rather buy a good quality re-issue where the artist might make a bit, so if the major record companies had a grasp on what music is actually sought after, they could make a bit of money from the music catalogues they already own.
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