Boards

The charts in are in a state. I've given up in believing that a chart position means anything anymore, nothing seems sacred. A number 1 means fuck all, there will only be some other crap the week after filling the same space

So when did it actually 'mean anything'?! Perhaps you're just getting older and realising that all isn't (and has never been) so rosy.

MP3s aren't killing anything and nobody ever said they were. What the labels have been reported as blaming for sales being down is piracy and illegal Internet filesharing. MP3s - compressed music files - are already legally available from major/indie labels. See emusic.com - undoubtedly the best value you'll get for about £7 (actual price $9.99USD) a month for unlimited downloads from their huge archives.

"So if EMI went to gigs by lots of good little bands and said "Here you go, record yourself an album without any of the shiny production waffle them braindead CD:UK viewers generally expect." and just 10% of those albums sold 1m copies at £12 a throw, EMI would make £silly-amount."

Erm, except that only about 10 albums a year sell over a million copies in the UK anyway, and those albums are by either pop, easy listening or gentle indie-style acts (last year, for instance, they were Dido, Robbie Williams, David Gray, Gabrielle, Steps and Eva Cassidy, with Stereophonics, Travis, Destiny's Child, Kylie Minogue, Shaggy, Westlife and Hear'Say coming close). And the mainstream public who are the people who are able to buy a million copies don't want something that sounds like it was recorded in a toilet.

Your flawed maths also completely forget that for EMI to make £13,713,000,000, the public would have to collectively buy 1,430,000,000 albums in a year, when at the moment the total is morelike 100,000,000. So you're basically saying people would have to spend 14 times as much money on music as they currently do. Yeah. Right.

Oh, and you also forget that EMI don't get 100% of the money for a CD handed over at the counter. The retailer takes a 30%ish cut, and then there's the distributors, and then a lot of stuff has to be paid for such as the manufacturing, the publishing (fees and royalty), the marketing, general overheads, and of course, the recording royalties for the bands, before getting down to profit left for them.

What I think you need to appreciate is that most people aren't really into music and only buy a handful of CDs a year, and that's it's far more cost-effective to release something that they, the masses, will want, instead of pandering to the needs of the minority music fans like us. Why invest in hundreds of smaller acts, and probably only have a tiny fraction actually make the money back that will be spent on them, when you can invest in a couple of big ones where success is pretty much guaranteed?!

"Record companies dislike MP3s so much because they create wiser consumers."

Nah. Record companies dislike people stealing their music (it's nothing to do with MP3 as a format) because then they don't get the profit they are entitled to (for investing in the music in the first place). The decreased sales figures that have just been published do demonstrate that something is wrong.

"Before, magazines would hype up albums and you'd shell out your cash. If you were disappointed, well, tough titty."

Since when? You've always been able to go into HMV, buy a CD, take it home and give it a listen, then if you don't like it, take it back next week to swap for something else. Stores have also had llistening posts for years, and now official artist sites offer the online equivalent.

"Nowadays people avoid buying music they don't like by listening to it first."

So are you saying that people didn't used to have the common sense to try before they buy?!?

"On the flipside, how many people buy albums as a result of hearing tracks online first?"

I do! I do! I hear them online via the streams offered by the labels themselves (often via 3rd parties like NME.COM/DiS/e-cards etc.), then I go out and buy them (or order them online for cheap 'cos then I don't need to help pay for pretty shop displays and checkout tills).

"As well as MP3s, there's also fantastic sites like www.launch.com -- if record companies embraced the Internet pro-actively they could target the right people for less money."

Erm, how do you think the music gets onto launch.com? They can't just make magic it up out of thin air - it all comes from the labels. Hence they are already doing what you suggest.


P.S. The White Stripes are shite no matter how much or how little they spend on their recording process.