Recorded music: if you don’t want to pay, it may go away

With the revenue for recorded music ever declining under the stress of file-sharing, the image of the recorded music industry as an industry in dire crisis becomes evermore apparent. More and more people are consuming their products for free, rationalising their behaviour with arguments like: “it’s the industry’s fault for not innovating” or “all the profits end up in the big corporations, not with the artists, anyway”, or “it’s not stealing because it don’t take anything away”.

While we sometimes think that a sizeable portion of the population refusing to pay is something new, it has happened many times before. Throughout the last centuries of European histories, a wave of left-winged revolution swept across Europe. Starting with the French Revolution and ending in Russia, tension arose between the consuming ‘masses’ and producing ‘bourgeoisie’, with the former clamouring for free access to goods. 

“It suddenly struck me,” Fred Goodman, author of the upcoming book ‘Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music and an Industry in Crisis’ and former senior editor for Rolling Stone says in an interview with Wired. “This is nothing new. Of course people want things for free. What they really have to ask is what is the consequence of not paying for it.”

Refusing to pay meant that you didn’t get the item you wouldn’t pay for. The internet and file-sharing changed this, at least for copyrighted materials. In the end, Goodman argues, this means that recorded music could disappear.

“This whole system of ‘give me your music for free, and I’ll buy a T-shirt, and maybe I’ll buy a ticket’ — that kind of thing, you are begging recordings to go away. All you’re saying to the artist is, ‘See if you can find a way to sell me a ticket and a T-shirt without losing a ton of money on a recording you won’t make a dime on.’

“Already, we’re seeing that there’s only a handful of bands left that can afford to make the kinds of records that investigate what you can do in a studio. How many bands are left that can afford to get Rick Rubin (an important producer, ed.) and record a record for eight months? I think sophisticated records are in danger of disappearing already, because they’re cost-prohibitive.”

However, the music industry is not ready to resign itself to that fate. Labels still feel that recorded music is something of value, that recorded music is still worth investing in. The big question is how to present this product to the people who you want as customers, “I miss buying something worth owning. I liked buying LPs. I don’t see myself continuing to buy vinyl as a major thing today, but going to a record store and bringing home a record was a much better experience than putting 10,000 files on a gigabyte drive. It was like, this is the record I bought, and I’m going to live with it, listen to it, figure out whether I really like it or not. But also they had artwork and information, all these things.”

In the end, buying music is more than buying the sound. It is about buying an experience.

According to Goodman, the main question the music industry faces, is “Finding out what people want to own that’s worth owning.”