The Death of the Music Publishing Industry

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.