I would be sad if the record companies stop producing CDs and digital formats would be the only way to purchase music, there's no more record stores where I live

I don't think people would be willing to pay so much money only for just one song they like on an album.

And Limewire, Napster, were the answers to those solution.

So yes they did have their affect.

But also- its rare to see a cd these days where you'll love all the stuff on it.

greedy recording companies / execs

fans feeling ENTITLED

cd store prices

big egos (artists)

output quality

i don't think the internet (i.e. napster, etc) are neccessarily the ones to blame. i think it appears if that started the ball rolling on the downfall of the music industry, but not really the cause. internet music was inevitable, as almost all forms of media are now. i think it comes down to choice.

companies decided to charge and arm and a leg for music and people "fans" chose to steal it once someone (napster?) figured out the way. they've all shot themselves in the foot. they are all to blame in my opinion. greed, entitlement and opportunity..bad combination. lol now they're sticking it to fans with concert prices. and it seems as if you aren't one of the BIG names, ticket sales have been declining as well.

that's how i see it. they're all to blame and i think most people have stopped caring anyway.

HOWEVER...that being said. people should be able to charge whatever the feel for their art/work.

doesn't mean you have to steal or support it though.

[Edited 4/9/11 12:45pm]

Greed and mismanagement.

Internet (specially the p2p)

High quality CD-R

Crappy/Average new music, specially since 2004...

High prices during the 90s and early 00s (when they cheapened the price of old & new albums during the mid-00s, it was already too late)

I think technology slowly killed it. Before the 1980's, there wasn't much competition for music. No VCR's, DVD's, home computers, internet, cable/satellite, video games, etc. Then CD's came along and made it fast to copy music, when before with 8-tracks, reel to reel, and cassettes, you had to actually go to someone's house who had a recorder (plus the music you wanted) and play the music you recorded. It was a slow process, especially if you were making a mix tape. Also, many of the places people went was focused around music, like a diner with a jukebox.

[Edited 4/9/11 13:39pm]

This board.

And it may not have been such a bright idea to sell CD burners and dirt cheap CD-Rs to the general public.. Any regrets Sony?

therevolutionwillnotbe said:

And it may not have been such a bright idea to sell dirt cheap, always scratchable, never being able to play CD-Rs to the general public..

For better CD-R experience buy either Memorex or Maxell.

Timmy84 said:

therevolutionwillnotbe said:

And it may not have been such a bright idea to sell dirt cheap, always scratchable, never being able to play CD-Rs to the general public..

For better CD-R experience buy either Memorex or Maxell.

Sony!!!

JoeTyler said:

Timmy84 said:

For better CD-R experience buy either Memorex or Maxell.

Sony!!!

Phony.

.99 downloadable singles.

Timmy84 said:

JoeTyler said:

Sony!!!

Phony.

According to this board, the industry has been dead since 2007.

[Edited 4/9/11 13:59pm]

Timmy84 said:

According to this board, the industry has been dead since 2007.

[Edited 4/9/11 13:59pm]

I think 2006 was last time where I enjoyed a full album. I did enjoy Emancipation of Mimi even thoug it wasn't my favorite Mariah album:)

I have been fighting with people saying that freeloaders killed the music industry, but I have finally come around and will agree that the music industry killed the music industry.

Why?

Because there really should/would not be Amazon, Netflix, itunes, Youtube and a lot of Google's new services if the music and movie industry had filled that niche first. I mean c'mon, netflix and everyone else has to buy the content from the industry and they still make a ton of money and are healthy and solvent. The movie and music industry not so much.

lack of quality

the DIY movement (because of the access to software like Pro Tools and Reason on your computer, some say it's made recording studios obsolete)

teenagers

people who want to take instead of buy

high CD prices

Our fucking selves.

bboy87 said:

the DIY movement (because of the access to software like Pro Tools and Reason on your computer, some say it's made recording studios obsolete)

This could go under technology. People in the past also did it themselves. Paul McCartney recorded his solo debut at his house, not in a professional recording studio. Alan Lomax used to take a portable recorder to rural areas and prisons to record people singing. Many of the recordings didn't have a great sound quality, but that wasn't the point.

teenagers

Teens in the past bought music. Who do you think were the main audience for young Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, early Beatles, Frankie Avalon, Donny Osmond, doo wop, Motown, New Edition, etc.?

people who want to take instead of buy

Some people in the past stole music, but it was called shoplifting. Maybe that wasn't as widespread or as easy to do, but again technology made it easy to do now. Like you can check out a CD from the library and copy it quick. Like I said earlier, before CD's you had to manually record music and the average person didn't have the means to do so. They also didn't have the product to copy unless they recorded from the radio (or borrowed a record from someone) and with that, you'd get the DJ talking over part of the song or the next song came on before what you were recording faded out.

Greedy ass Bastards . . . the suits of the Music Industry.

The argument put forth that legitimate and/or illegitimate computer technology is the major cause for the Record Industry going belly-up in my opinion is simplistic. In fact this common misnomer has been repeated so often, I file under "Propaganda".

I won't bother to repeat myself or my opinion on why I disagree..... go through org archives I've said plenty about this subject.

The rise of Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, iTunes, BitTorrent were all just symptoms of the downfall of the recorded music industry, not the cause.

In reality, the decline in the recorded music industry can be traced all the way back to the dawn of music videos and MTV. While it was a great idea at first to be able to watch your favorite musical artists on TV 24 hours a day, savvy bands and artists who weren't the most musically gifted performers but had a great look and could prance around in front of the camera suddenly found themselves an outlet to display their otherwise limited musical abilities by having exciting looking videos. In addition, you had Michael Jackson and Prince suddenly become huge megastars thanks to the advent of MTV, and soon a huge number of artists were selling gazillions of records. The record companies, being smart at recognizing a money making opportunity, suddenly discovered that they could put out medicore product and still rake in huge sums of money if they could present a "good looking" artist. That's when the original hair band explosion and dance diva craze came into being.

During that time, the record companies also manufactured a lot of dance groups who could sing on record but either couldn't cut it live or didn't have that photogenic appeal to young music fans, so that's why they got people like Milli Vanilli and models to lip synch over recorded tracks for music videos. The Milli Vanilli lip synching scandal should have been a huge black eye to the music industry and brought down a number of producers and record executives for putting out a false image, but the fans shrugged it off and kept buying the records anyway, so the record companies just kept on doing the same thing. It was the triumph of image over talent.

The technology part didn't catch up until around the late 1980's and 1990's, when CD's and CD players became more affordable, and digital technology became cheap enough to use for making, recording and mastering music production. Suddenly, with pre-programmed drum beats and synthesizers which could be programmed to loop melodies and even sound like other instruments, it decimated the session music industry, leading to layoffs for a huge amount of studio musicians. Then with the advent of Pro Tools and Autotune, even crappy voices could be reprocessed to sound listenable. In addition, with CD's lasting up to 75 minutes in length for one album, the record companies pressured artists to fill that time with extra music, so you ended up with a lot of filler tracks plus a lot of interludes and skits which previously weren't found on older albums.

Also adding to what would be their eventual demise was the fact that record companies got greedy with their pricing of CD's. While they charged up to $10 for a brand new vinyl record or cassette tape in the past, they charged $15 to $20 for a new CD. They originally justified that pricing by saying that CD technology was new, but that when CD players became more affordable and ubiquitous, the prices of CD's would come down as well. Yet, while the prices of CD players did become very affordable, the prices of CD's did not come down; in many cases they went up. While this hurt a lot of established artists, the record companies made up for this by raking in huge profits by their cash cow artists, which by the late 1990's were mostly disposable pop acts who appealed mainly to teenagers.

So by the time personal computers with CD-R burners became affordable for the masses and the internet came into being, the record companies were already building their huge empire on a house of cards. Even before Napster came into being, more geeky music fans had already figured out how to rip tracks from CD's and put them on their computers, and there was already music sharing through FTP sites. Plus a number of internet service providers were increasing their transmission speeds for transferring files, which made it possible for people to download an entire album ripped into mp3 format in an hour, which for that time was extraordinarily fast.

And for those who believe the record companies were't fighting over music copying prior to Napster, remember that in the late 1970's they brought lawsuits against cassette recorder manufacturers because they allowed people to copy their viinyl records to tape so they could be played on their Sony Walkmans. And even just before Napster and Apple's iPod, the record companies brought a huge lawsuit against the manufacturers of the Diamond Rio, which was the first popular mp3 player. They accused the manufacturers of facilitating piracy, which the manufactirers vehemently denied. The record companies lost that case, and it would result in the creation of the iPod.

It was the iPod that became the straw that would break the back of the recorded music industry, because it allowed fans to put a huge collection of their favorite music in one place to carry around with them. And because of that, sites like Napster, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, WinMX, Limewire, and Bearshare became enormously popular, allowing fans to quickly download their favorite tracks onto their iPods. And while these sites were at best questionably legal, Apple created iTunes to create a legal download site for record companies to charge fans for new digital music. But the record companies were oblivious to its impact, for while they made some decent money to counteract all of the file sharing going on over the internet, Apple raked in huge sums of money by using iTunes to encourage more people to buy iPods.

The record comapnies, seeing Apple make enormous profits at their expense, eventually shot themselves in the foot by bringing lawsuits against their fans and attempting to set up their own music download sites with cumbersome DRM restrictions wihich were easily broken by tech-savvy pirates. This created a lot of ill will towards the record companies, which saw their sales drop precipitously. Then when the overall economy crashed in 2008, it dropped sales even further.

It was only in the past four years or so that a few record executives saw the writing on the wall and belatedly began embracing digital music and creating alternative streams of revenue. But the industry as we know it is dying and not coming back. Music will survive, but it will be much different that what we have seen in the past.

The greedy bitch fans who download and don't buy.

The Gen X

I don't know if this killed anything but I think it was very damaging when the vinyl 45 went away. Even though the LP had been the dominant format since the end of the '60s lots of people still bought 45s because they were cheap. Once cd's came into vogue suddenly the consumer was expected to pay ten bucks or more for a single. This made "free" music (illegal downloads) extremely attractive to consumers who felt ripped off by being "forced" to pay twenty bucks for a cd that only had one or two songs that they wanted.

Had there been a cheaper alternative through the end of the '80s to the end of the '90s I think that customers would have stayed loyal and not been so attracted to "free" music.

TD3 said:

Greedy ass Bastards . . . the suits of the Music Industry.

The music business has always been this way. Look at all of the old blues, soul, rock, country, etc. acts who died broke and/or have to do oldies shows at carnivals and such. The performers have been ripped off anyway by bad contracts, shady magagers, promoters, and so on. So downloading didn't really make much of a difference to them, except maybe the superstar acts who spent a lot of money recording. Only when it cut into company profits, is when the labels started crying. In the past, many acts made their money touring, not record sales. During the 1960's, Motown acts didn't even get this, since Motown was their "manager".

rialb said:

Even though the LP had been the dominant format since the end of the '60s lots of people still bought 45s because they were cheap.

This is not the reason for everybody. Some people may not have liked the act enough to buy an album. In genres like soul, the 45 was more dominant than the album was.

Norman Bates killed this industry. Who knew the industry was actually a woman in a shower?