Despite the major record labels’ best efforts to kill it, the single, according to recent reports, is back. Sort of.You’ll still have a hard time finding vinyl 45s or their modern counterpart, CD singles, in record stores. For that matter, you’ll have a tough time finding record stores. Today’s single is an individual track downloaded online from legal sites like iTunes or eMusic, or the multiple illegal sites that cater to less scrupulous music lovers. The album, or collection of songs — the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years — is suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way of the shoehorn.
The New York Times has a couple people who owned a Record Store write an article about the death of the traditional record store. And they place the blaim for the stores demise directly on the RIAA. After seeing napster come they really didn’t feel the bite until…
The recording industry association saw the threat that illegal downloads would pose to CD sales. But rather than working with Napster, it tried to sue the company out of existence — which was like thinking you’ve killed all the roaches in your apartment because you squashed the one you saw in the kitchen. More illegal download sites cropped up faster than the association’s lawyers could say “cease and desist.”
And that wasn’t the real death toll. The RIAA strived hard to kill the industry it was supposed to be nuturing. It worked hard to kill the song in hopes of saving the album. And when that didn’t work, they killed the record stores in hopes of saving a bad idea, they sold to Big Boxes at cut rate prices. Like they said…
The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association
wanted
to kill
Napster. Instead it
killed the
compact disc.The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it’s not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.
The two writers make some good points that I just touched on. And I wonder if and when the RIAA will wake up and agree.
[Read the New York Times Article]
Tags: Interesting, Irony, Music
Leave a Reply