FRED MANTEGHIAN BLOG

According to an AFP article at Breitbart.com, Nielson Tracking reports CD sales for (almost) the first three months of 2007 are down 20% over the same period last year. Only 89 million retail CDs were sold year to date, compared with 112 million sold during the same period in 2006. Downloads of albums were off too, dropping from 119 million to 99 million this year.

So do downloads of single tracks help offset this double whammy? If you figure 10 songs per album, then the 40 million increase in individual track sales (equivalent to 5 million albums) only ameliorates about 10% of the overall loss to the record companies. In total, we're looking at the equivalent of a 15% drop (38 million) in album sales in the first quarter alone.

Selling music by the song was a great idea from a consumer's perspective. That crappy Nickleback CD I bought years ago only had one good song on it and even that was barely worth the $.99 it would cost me to download it today. But selling music by the pound is the only way record companies can justify all those wheelbarrows they've purchased to haul around their piles of cash. In fact, just a few years ago, SACD and DVD-Audio were hailed as the catalyst for a new dawn in music sales. High quality music would revive a sagging industry and consumers would willingly pay more for higher quality sound which, incidentally, couldn't be burned. Somebody grab me a fresh P.O. We're going to need a lot more wheelbarrows!

So what went wrong?

Basically, it's a combination of things. First – look me straight in the face and tell me you've never borrowed a friend's CD and made an identical copy for $.10. True, you might have liked the artist enough to purchase another album by them on your own. And then promptly burned a copy for the friend who turned you on to them. So, in the simplest of worlds (with all the lawyers safely locked out of ear shot), we've got a bad case of two-for-one sale going on.

Second, with the tremendous popularity of portable music players, sites like iTunes, even eMusic and my new toy, buying music doesn't mean getting all the bad Nickleback songs with the good ones. You can just get the good one for 1/10th the price of the CD. The long hours and late nights the musical artists endured to get each song in just the right order, well, you never know, it might come out on vinyl. . .

Third, and I'm going to get some grief here, the cheap availability of roll-yer-own studios that rely on a PC, a few mouse clicks and digital plugins that can make you sound like you've got every vintage guitar amp ever made, all shoe-horned into that spare bedroom that you occasionally have to clear out with the arrival of your in-laws, have led to a flood of new "artists" no one is clamoring to hear. These are guys who couldn't or wouldn't tour if you gave them a purple Liberty bus and a roll of quarter for the pay phones along their way. What stories do they tell, and what life experiences do they bring to their craft? The homogenization of the, pun intended, playing field simultaneously elevates the unworthy while diminishing the true giant.

Music hasn't died. It's just taken an artistic, and financial, detour. Caution: bumpy road ahead.