All posts tagged discman

• August 4, 2009

  The Music Network story: “For The Record: An Album Retrospective Part 3”, August 2009

  In the third piece of a five-part puzzle, Andrew McMillen examines the digitally-inspired shift in consumer habits away from the long-established album format. This week, Andrew ruminates on the death of a pop icon, worldwide grief counselling through iTunes’ figurative cash register, and recent digital sales trends.

  One of the joys of writing on a short schedule is the agility with which weekly publications such as The Music Network can relate to current occurrences. After tracing the history of recorded music in the last two weeks – from technological advances, to the reduced reliance on singular album entities in favour of a more liquid, portable state – a significant event in musical history occurred. Thursday, June 25 2009 found Michael Jackson dead, aged 50.

  The grieving process translated into an outpouring of public reminiscence, which resulted in astounding sales figures for Jackson’s back catalogue. According to Billboard.com, US sales figures put the singer’s album sales for the week ending June 28 at 422,000, of which 225,000 were digital sales. A staggering 2.3 million individual song downloads found Jackson far and away the first act to sell more than a million downloads in a week. Within Australian shores, the disparity between albums and singles was curiously less noticeable: Jackson’s album and single sales were placed at 62,015 and 107,821, respectively, according to Undercover.com.au, while in another strange, archaic turn, only one out of every five Michael Jackson albums sold in Australia last week were digitally downloaded.

  Regardless, Jackson’s enormous sales in the US simply couldn’t have eventuated ten years ago. Record stores inventories would’ve been exhausted across the country, and compact disc factories would’ve rushed to press more discs to meet the demand. Both of these outcomes still eventuated, but instead of experiencing weeks-long delays, music consumers have the option of instant online gratification: his 2.3 million download count resulted in six Jackson tracks appearing in the Billboard top ten.

  The Jackson phenomenon highlights several points central to the discussion raised in this column series. First, consumer choices are trending away from the album as the favoured mechanism of music release. Choice is key here: it’s easier to choose to part with around a dollar for a song that you’ll love, rather than parting with $15-20 for an unfamiliar collection. If money is no object to the consumer, then time surely is: as industry analyst Bob Lefsetz phrased it in his July 5th, 2009 Lefsetz.com column, “Who’s got the time to listen to an hour of music that you’re not truly interested in when there are all these other diversions that fascinate you?”

  Second, the popularity of digital music sales continues to snowball the trend away from the album as the industry’s singular organising principle. The modern music consumer can now purchase music from her home, without being subject to an array external factors while travelling to the record store. This operates in a similar manner to the ease with which she can cherry-pick her favourite songs from an online store, and ignore the rest, A simple point to make, but it’s worth reinforcing that digital distribution is the spark that set alight the consumer’s reliance on the album.

  Finally, a startling counter to the arguments that copyright theft is the primary factor crippling record labels’ established business models. In the period between Jackson’s June 25 death and July 1, streaming media analysts at VisibleMeasures.com report that combined views of the “Thriller” music video totalled in excess of 28 million. Considering that his aggregate single-song sales during the same period were 2.3 million – and just 167,000 for that particular track – it’s somewhat surprising that less than 10% of his fans chose to buy his music, and instead opted to stream it for free. But to step back within the boundaries of this discussion, let’s discount Jackson’s untimely demise and instead examine recent digital sales trends.

  The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) – comprising 1400 record companies in around 70 countries – released their annual Digital Music Report in January 2009. This report quickly became infamous within the recording industry, as media hurled themselves upon the IFPI’s estimation that, after collating studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, over 40 billion music files were illegally file-shared in 2008, which resulted in copyright theft rate of around 95%.

  But to focus on the near-past so as to not bore you with figures, here’s five key points garnered from the IFPI’s report on the international digital music business in 2008:

  • The digital music industry saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25% to US$3.7 billion in trade value
  • Digital platforms now account for around 20% of recorded music sales, up from 15% in 2007
  • Single track downloads, up 24% in 2008 to 1.4 billion units globally, continue to drive the online market, while digital album sales grew 36%
  • Consumer demand for music is higher than ever – NPD research found that total music consumption in the US rose by one third between 2003 and 2007

  At a national level, ARIA’s 2008 figures revealed that:

  • Physical sales declined from 51,866,917 to 44,438,874 (down 14%)
  • Digital sales overall rose from 47,267,034 to 128,532,126 (up 171%)
  • Digital album sales rose from 788,316 to 2,853,040 (up 261%)
  • Digital track sales rose from 17,647,057 to 23,464,576 (up 32%)

  It’s important to distinguish the disparity between album and track sales. While digital album sales experienced growth in Australia, they were still outsold nearly ten-to-one by single digital tracks. Why? In an era of musical abundance and complete portability, the consumer is spoiled for choice. We live in an age where you can experience “Thriller” for around a dollar, with a minimum of fuss – or you can stream it from YouTube, if you’d prefer. Freed from the constraints of physical products, we’re able to sample sounds before purchasing so as to reduce the rampant buyer’s remorse that we both feel while casting our eyes across our music collections.

  The record industry marketplace has fundamentally changed for content creators and consumers. To pound a cliché into your head: the internet has theoretically afforded any artist the chance reach your iPod earbuds. The barriers to entering the recording industry have been lowered, and the costs of bedroom production and online distribution are trending toward zero. As a result, it’s unreasonable for artists and labels to continue propagating an album-release business model that’s so firmly rooted in the past.

  But what about the present? I’m glad you asked, as part four of this five-piece puzzle will find me removing my hats marked “boring history” and “boring sales figures”. In their place, I’ll hatlessly hammer the thoughts that current musicians feel toward my incessant prodding of the album; that alleged, proverbial dead horse. Expect well-articulated rock-posturing, before part five finds us exploding in an orgy of alternative release models, innovative case studies and an unerring optimism for a recording industry who’ll eventually realise that as music fans, all we really want is our favourite artists to release great music as often as possible.

  Brisbane-based Andrew McMillen writes for several Australian music publications. He can be found on Twitter (@NiteShok) and online at http://andrewmcmillen.com/

  (Note: This is part three of an article series that first appeared in weekly Australian music industry magazine The Music Network issue #746, July 13th 2009. Read the rest of the series: part one, part two, part four, and part five)

  3 Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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• July 26, 2009

  The Music Network story: ‘For The Record: An Album Retrospective Part 2’, July 2009

  In the second piece of a five-part puzzle, Andrew McMillen examines the digitally-inspired shift in consumer habits away from the long-established album format. This week, Andrew highlights portable playlist control as a key component in the reduced reliance placed upon the album by music consumers.

  In last week’s column, I discussed the history of the album format, from the revolutionary, 45 minute-long LP through to the rising costs of compact discs. Now, take your imagination on a mental walk to your music collection. Stand before the shelves and admire your beloved classics, your blinding debuts, your middling sophomores, your utter disappointments, and the hidden atrocities that you’re embarrassed to have purchased.

  There’s an enormous nostalgia value attached to your record collection, whether in actual LP format or CDs. Few cultural topics are as divisive and subjective as one’s music taste. I’m certainly not writing off the value of the album in its entirety; that’d be madness. But why is it that you fondly fondle some albums, and not others? To use a cricketing metaphor: why do some releases hit you for six, while others barely make the length of the pitch?

  To elaborate on the latter example: picture the average album you’d buy from a store – perhaps not in this era, since both CD shelf space and CD merchants continue to dwindle – but ten years ago. Hypothetically, the disc is likely to be front-loaded with some great songs. They’re the ones that you’re likely to have heard before you bought the album. These strategically-placed songs are the ones that either – or both – the band and record label wanted you to hear first and enjoy first.

  Then you’d get to the second half of the album and, more than likely, you’d find a dramatic reduction in the quality of songwriting. As with any conversation regarding music, this is an entirely subjective topic of discussion, but there’s not a music fan reading who hasn’t experienced the phenomenon of an album’s proverbial tail failing to wag.

  As I wrote last week, the recorded music industry has revolved around the album for decades. Record deals, release schedules, pricing structure, the touring cycle, the catchy lead single, album reviews; these choreographed industry institutions are all funneled toward the end goal of selling albums. Music consumers were tied to the album format as a force of habit, since it was by far the most convenient method to listen to music. In the LP era, it was easier to let an album play from beginning to end, rather than painstakingly searching for the groove that contained the beginning of your favourite tracks.

  But portability heralded a substantial change in listening habits; the now-ubiquitous MP3 audio compression algorithm was a mere twinkle in German audio scientists’ eyes when Sony released the Walkman to the public in 1979. The device used cassette tapes, which allowed listeners to use headphones to play audio recordings while on the move. This led to label-released albums and singles finding a wide audience, and the proliferation of home taping from sources such as the radio, television, and your existing record collection. The ‘mixtape’ was born!

  The Walkman’s successor, Sony’s Discman, was released in 1984. The CD-based player allowed a greater freedom from the comparably imprecise Walkman method of fast-forwarding and rewinding through a cassette to find your favourite tracks. But the device was still tied to the concept of the album: while songs could be played in a ‘random’ order – an important precursor to Apple’s iPod Shuffle – it could only handle a disc at a time.

  That listening habit was exploded when CD burning technology allowed listeners to compile the circular equivalent of mixtapes, without the cassette-associated fuss. As the audio filetype known as MP3 became easier for the masses to acquire online, consumer attitudes to music further deviated from the past when the first digital audio players became available in the late 1990s.

  Commonly known as MP3 players, these devices allowed a user to transfer CDs encoded in the MP3 audio filetype onto a portable hard drive that could play the files. For the first time, a listener could store their favourite songs in a portable format that could be ordered on-the-fly, as desired. No rewinding or fast-forwarding, no moving parts; control had been placed into the fan’s hands.

  Several unremarkable forays into the digital audio player market from Rio and Compaq set the stage for Apple, whose first generation, exclusively Mac-compatible iPod debuted in October 2001. A Windows-friendly version of the device followed in 2002; frequently-released incremental iterations have boosted its worldwide sales in excess of 210 million, according to the Associated Press.

  Apple’s success in the digital audio player market can be attributed to their user-friendly design and savvy marketing. Their devices satisfied a demand for portable music that’d gathered momentum since the Walkman’s debut. The twin Apple successes of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store – which will be covered in greater depth next week – are evidence that listeners prize portable playlist control, after decades of passively absorbing albums from start to end.

  This newfound control is central to understanding the shift from albums as the key organising principle behind music dissemination. Industry analyst Bob Lefsetz wrote on his Lefsetz Letter website in August 2006: “The track has been disengaged from the album. The label wants an album budget, producers, a full-length that they can charge in the neighborhood of ten dollars wholesale for. No matter that no radio station goes deep and neither do the fans.”

  He’s hinting at the killer-versus-filler argument that’s as old as the industry itself. While there’ll always be pleasure gained by experiencing a classy, calculated collection of songs from beginning to end – see Perth post-hardcore act Eleventh He Reaches London‘s 2009 release, for example – writers like Lefsetz and myself argue that the record industry’s unending fascination with the album as the definitive musical product is misleading and erroneous.

  The record industry’s perceived market expectations are the driving force behind the unending push for more albums. This wouldn’t be problematic – for artists, labels, or listeners – if real supply met perceived demand. Instead, album sales have declined worldwide, while sales of individual songs – key singles often released to radio so as to promote an album – continue to climb.

  In 2009, artists shouldn’t automatically sprint toward the album endpoint as a result of historical programming. Their creative output shouldn’t be stretched to meet the 45 minute/12 track (whichever comes first) expectation, just so that the parties involved can proudly call it an album. In an era where more music is being written, recorded and performed each day than at any other point in history, an artist shouldn’t throw together words, chords and beats just to meet an expectation built upon a decades-old concept.

  The question that I put forth is simple: why continue to push acts toward the goal of the album release, instead of working with artists to determine the most appropriate method of releasing their recorded work? Next week, I’ll further investigate the divide between the recording industry’s historical expectations and current consumer habits.

  Brisbane-based Andrew McMillen writes for several Australian music publications. He can be found on Twitter (@NiteShok) and online at http://andrewmcmillen.com/

  (Note: This is part two of an article series that first appeared in weekly Australian music industry magazine The Music Network issue #745, July 6th 2009. Read the rest of the series: part one, part three, part four and part five)

  8 Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing / Andrew McMillen

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