8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

  • 8sided About
  • memora8ilia

Hard Times for MP3 Sellers

June 15, 2016 · Leave a Comment

I missed this article from almost a year back, and it’s an extra-interesting read in light of industry events that have taken place since. Beyond that, there’s some valuable food-for-thought to process here.

5 Magazine:

Unless you’re Amazon and the market takes your lack of interest in making a profit with good-hearted cheer, this is a tough time to be selling goods in the music industry. It’s even harder if those “goods” happen to be music files.

I’d heard it said as recently as a year ago that a DJ-centered market would be protected from the massive shift in consumer expectations driven by streaming, to a world in which every sound ever committed to tape can be listened to for free. This is clearly not the case. After all, it was once claimed that DJs would always have a “need” for vinyl, too.

This is a bitter pill for people with some skin in the game, who look and see a larger market for music than has ever existed before. There are also more DJs now than at any time in history, but selling that market on a product with zero duplication costs and unlimited supply has been a tough racket.

Recorded music was once the foundation of billion dollar corporations – corporations which were largely gutted by sexy tech start-ups that could do everything better… except turn a profit. Now we’re entering the next stage, in which the business of selling “records” (however you want to define that) is simply too low-margin to attract the big, dumb money of a Robert Sillerman. The precise shape of that next stage of the recorded music industry is unclear but one would like to imagine it characterized by artist-centered services like Bandcamp existing in the shadow of the streaming services – a business big enough for you or me or a guy doing this out of his bedroom or a bigroom but too small for the lumbering giants to bother with.

------------------

Related posts:

  1. Why Streaming is the Future of DJ’ing
  2. A Series of P.O. Boxes
  3. Who’s To Blame For Music Startups’ Bleak Outlook

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Download Sales, The State Of The Music Industry

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

8sided.blog

img-0 
 
 
 
 
 
8sided.blog is a digital zine about sound, culture, and what Andrew Weatherall once referred to as 'the punk rock dream'.

It's also the online home of Michael Donaldson, a slightly jaded but surprisingly optimistic fellow who's haunted the music industry for longer than he cares to admit. A former Q-Burns Abstract Message.

"More than machinery, we need humanity."
 
  Learn More →

Mastodon

Mastodon logo

Exploring

Roll The Dice

For a random blog post

Click here

or for something cool to listen to
(refresh this page for another selection)

Linking

Blogroll

A Closer Listen
Austin Kleon
Atlas Minor
blissblog
Craig Mod
Disquiet
feuilleton
Headpone Commute
Hissy Tapes
Jay Springett
Kottke
Metafilter
One Foot Tsunami
1000 Cuts
Parenthetical Recluse
Poke In The Ear
Robin Sloan
Seth Godin
The Creative Independent
The Red Hand Files
Things Magazine
Warren Ellis LTD

 

TRANSLATE with img-2 x
English
Arabic Hebrew Polish
Bulgarian Hindi Portuguese
Catalan Hmong Daw Romanian
Chinese Simplified Hungarian Russian
Chinese Traditional Indonesian Slovak
Czech Italian Slovenian
Danish Japanese Spanish
Dutch Klingon Swedish
English Korean Thai
Estonian Latvian Turkish
Finnish Lithuanian Ukrainian
French Malay Urdu
German Maltese Vietnamese
Greek Norwegian Welsh
Haitian Creole Persian

img-3

img-4 img-5 img-6
TRANSLATE with img-7
COPY THE URL BELOW
img-8
img-9 Back

EMBED THE SNIPPET BELOW IN YOUR SITE img-10
Enable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal
Back

Newsroll

Dada Drummer
Dense Discovery
Dirt
Erratic Aesthetic
First Floor
Garbage Day
Kneeling Bus
Lorem Ipsum
Midrange
MusicREDEF
Orbital Operations
Sasha Frere-Jones
The Browser
The Honest Broker
The Maven Game
Today In Tabs
Tone Glow
Why Is This Interesting?

 

TRANSLATE with img-11 x
English
Arabic Hebrew Polish
Bulgarian Hindi Portuguese
Catalan Hmong Daw Romanian
Chinese Simplified Hungarian Russian
Chinese Traditional Indonesian Slovak
Czech Italian Slovenian
Danish Japanese Spanish
Dutch Klingon Swedish
English Korean Thai
Estonian Latvian Turkish
Finnish Lithuanian Ukrainian
French Malay Urdu
German Maltese Vietnamese
Greek Norwegian Welsh
Haitian Creole Persian

img-12

img-13 img-14 img-15
TRANSLATE with img-16
COPY THE URL BELOW
img-17
img-18 Back

EMBED THE SNIPPET BELOW IN YOUR SITE img-19
Enable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal
Back

ACT

Climate Action Resources
+
Carbon Dots
+
LGBTQ+ Education Resources
+
Roe v. Wade: What You Can Do
+
Union of Musicians and Allied Workers

Copyright © 2023 · 8D Industries, LLC · Log in