The Death of the Music Publishing Industry
And the Minor Deaths of CDs
“Heading West” was a
popular term within the U.S. long before it became economically possible, then
an option and ultimately a fad locally. The West was where any person with
empty pockets but a heart full of zest could make his fortune. Be it in the oil
fields or be it in a small town at the end of a desert. The town was full of
dust and promises, heart-breaks and dreams. It was called, of all unlikely
names, Hollywood. Starting off as a privately held estate, it took nearly half
a century to convert into a proper township. Aside from the picturesque
countryside the reason for major motion picture companies to establish
themselves there was quite accidental; they just wanted to move as far away
from Edison’s company and its lawyers. Thus, the industry that made dreams come
true was born. Each topic was fresh, each face was new. The cellophane they
produced was transported across oceans and nations. Careers and legends rose
and fell each day.
The biggest fall was with the advent of the “talkies”. At
first, the motion pictures that were recorded with sound were ignored by most
as naught but a passing fad. What history did with these scoffers is well
detailed in The Artist (2012).
The name of Eastman Kodak was synonymous with films; be they
those for recording Western actions or for X-Rays. Kodak owns the patents for
inventing most of the film industry and equipment. Cutting edge or bleeding
edge, if it had anything to do with filming, then Kodak invented it. With
camera equipment at its height, Kodak invented a gadget for the “non-serious
hobbyist”: a portable digital camera. It was taken as a fad yet again, expected
to pass once people got over its novelty value and returned to “serious”
cameras. The giant that ruled the business world of cinematography bet its
future the wrong way and ended up going into receivership in 2012.
Such is history. Each new invention raises a wake that
supports a million jobs and drowns a million others.
It is now the turn of Compact Disks to join the museum
shelves along with phonographs, 8-track tapes and cassettes. The curtain is
coming down not just on CD’s but publishing houses, distribution companies and
so on down the line.
The why of it is no mystery but is clear to everyone. CDs
were invented for data storage initially but quickly shifted to audio storage
for the simple reason that they offered a medium that was smaller, could store
more information and reproduce music at higher quality than others. Being a
change of recording mediums only, it was taken in stride by music recording
companies as well as equipment manufacturers who simply phased out, or dumped,
phonograph records and cassette tapes.
Their business, on the whole, remained the same: milking the
success of music artists and performers worldwide. The recording companies, not
the artists, profited from every sale. A complete book can be written (and many
have been) on the one-sided economics of the music industry. Singer after
singer worked unceasingly to produce enough material to fill one CD before any
money could be made. And then, all the money went into the coffers of the
companies while the singers got some fame and more bills to pay.
In this totally unfair world of music – which was/is exactly
as fair as rest of life – a singer could not sell the best of songs till he or
she could supply enough new songs to fill a CD and in the meantime the song was
blared out from radio stations and televisions.
Suddenly, people noticed the winds of change had blown yet
again when they hadn’t been paying attention and they had pockets full of
digital audio recording and playing equipment to which music could be
downloaded at the press of a button. “Where did this come from?”, they wondered.
Then went on to hook these matchbook-sized players to their computers to
download the latest songs, audio-books, cooking recipes, and so on. If you
stand near any bourse, you would be able to hear the stock of recording
companies crashing.
Each singer, each cook, each story-teller now has the option
of distributing single contents directly. They can completely cut out the
old middle man, though in favor of new ones, but with added benefits of
near-zero production costs along with worldwide distribution.
The audience slash target market is near incalculable as the
numbers keep increasing before any estimate may be collated. At a guesstimate,
there are going to be 800 million Android and 300 million iPhones in use by the
end of this year. In simple words, every 1 person alive out of 7 in the world
has a smart phone. Add to that iPods and its ilk of MP3 players and you are
looking at a lot of hardware.
Apple’s iTunes Store alone sold 25 billion songs. JLo’s On
The Floor had 1.4 million downloads from iTunes Stores alone within a
couple of months of being released, so she probably made enough money to buy a
fully custom-designed airliner.
There is a huge Winchester hard drive on display at the
Smithsonian. It could store an amazing 2K bytes of data. They’ll probably
display the CD next to it.
