editorlisa
Hi! I'm Lisa. I work in TV and film as writer, producer & editor. This is my blog about the work I do and the news, trends and technologies that touch it. With the occasional totally unrelated bits thrown in.
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“Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks? …If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what happened to the record business.”
Doug Morris, CEO, Universal Music Group [via Chet]
There are a few problems with the stated logic here. First of all, the amount of time someone works on an album (or any other product/piece of art) does not correlate to the quality of the work, nor the value of that work in the eyes of the consumer.
Secondly, If I only like 1 song on a 12-song album, then $10 is waaaay too much to pay to listen to the 1 song I like. I’ve been buying music for, what, 25 years? It used to infuriate me that I had to buy an entire record/tape/CD just to hear the 3 good songs on it. My CD collection is mostly comprised of albums just like this, purchased at $16-$20 a pop. My iTunes includes about 1350 “albums,” yet fewer than 50 contain the complete song list. That’s less than 4%. Record sales soared in the 80s and 90s because the album was the unit of measure. Now that the song is the unit of measure, the market is correcting.
As for Coca-Cola through the kitchen faucet, we’ve had that for years. It’s called RADIO. Free to the consumer, subsidized by advertising. (And guess what? We used to record songs off the radio, make mixed tapes for people and give them to each other.) The record industry believes that downloading has replaced buying music, when really it replaced listening to music on the radio. A music distribution system we’re happy to use for free, but probably wouldn’t pay for.
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editorlisa reblogged this from chetgulland
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