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Steve Jobs Honored with Special Trustees Grammy Award
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Wow. Those are three really unflattering pictures.
As for Steve's contribution, my 65 year old local bike/ski shop owners lifelong dream, to record an album after all those years of playing and practicing, has finally materialized. He has an album out on iTunes. Poppy things about relationships with odd characters and XC skiing allegory. His live band paid for hundreds of hours of studio time out of their own pocket. ...hours that never would have been booked by any label AR man with a brain. Because of iTunes, an album has an outlet, and was made at all. ...and after a year, the project is in the black. Pretty impressive.
Also, Joss Stone on Piracy
As for Steve's contribution, my 65 year old local bike/ski shop owners lifelong dream, to record an album after all those years of playing and practicing, has finally materialized. He has an album out on iTunes. Poppy things about relationships with odd characters and XC skiing allegory. His live band paid for hundreds of hours of studio time out of their own pocket. ...hours that never would have been booked by any label AR man with a brain. Because of iTunes, an album has an outlet, and was made at all. ...and after a year, the project is in the black. Pretty impressive.
Also, Joss Stone on Piracy
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This might be the best post I've ever read on this site. It's a great overview of what piracy actually did to music as a whole. Well done my friend. Evolve or die....nothing new going on here.
And this is probably the first time I have found myself agreeing with 97% of what you said. Very good.
Diana Ross was a true genius? I guess laying down with the right producer and ditching the Supremes was a masterstroke then? Singing others' songs doesn't make you a "genius."
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Even stars sweat on stage. People DO get older, and Steve DID have photos taken pre-cancer. Besides, who cares? Perhaps you wanted them airbrushed?
I'm not going to quote Winni's post on the previous page because it's so long, but I read the whole thing and it's so true. And the recording industry is already turning to YouTube to find new talent, and when those people realise that they'll make more of a living selling their music on iTunes themselves (not to forget the money they can make from ads on their YouTube videos), they'll stop cooperating with big labels too.
In fact, there is at least one small record label which solely recruits talent from YouTube, and those artists make enough money to buy houses.
The music industry as its existed for the past few decades is now obsolete. Enter the rise of the music talent!
In fact, there is at least one small record label which solely recruits talent from YouTube, and those artists make enough money to buy houses.
The music industry as its existed for the past few decades is now obsolete. Enter the rise of the music talent!
Wow, that was pretty harsh. Now, while I may not connect the word "Genius" with Diana Ross, she certainly is up there with some of the most talented performers in the industry, otherwise she wouldn't have received the Kennedy Center Honor award or this lifetime achievement award either. You're talking about something that happened how many years ago???? Sleeping with the right person doesn't guarantee you a successful career. Whatever she did in the past doesn't hold a candle to the horrible things other performers have done to get ahead so I think you're being quite harsh here. With the crap performers that are getting signed these days I would say Diana Ross is quite a genius against today's performers.
She has recorded almost 100 albums, she doesn't need to sing other people's songs, sounds like you just hater period.
This is the same argument people have said about Steve Jobs. They say all the bad things he's done in the past to get ahead but ignore the achievements he's made. Good thing the "non-fans" don't dictate who gets awarded.
The record labels are far from loaded. Even in the best of times, overall net margins were low because for every big success, there were 200 failures. And there's only three big labels left.
In the U.S., the record industry is at half of its 1999 peak (not taking inflation into account, which would make the stats worse). But the biggest factor negatively impacting sales is not illegal downloading as there was always illegal dubbing as well as legal copying off of FM, etc. The biggest factor is the change in the market from an album market back to a singles market.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the single market worked because artists would go into the studio and record 2-3 songs in a single session. Now they take months to do the same thing. You say you take six months to produce a song? Even if illegal downloading disappeared tomorrow, unless you have a really big hit, you can never make money. And IMO, music today is way overproduced. There's no life to any of it. We were better off when artists recorded records simply and they got released a few weeks later.
In the entire history of recorded music in the U.S., there are only 115 albums that have been certified by the RIAA as achieving 10 million or more units in sales (there may have been some others, especially older albums that sold before the creation of "Diamond" status, but the labels didn't bother to have them certified.)
And there are certainly other factors that have helped to kill the industry: the deregulation of radio which resulted in "fast-food" comglomerate radio, the severe fragmentation of the marketplace (could there ever again be a Sinatra, Elvis, Beatles or Stones?) the competition for leisure time (many people spend more time texting/posting or watching videos than listening to music), the fact that the music industry has produced incredible amounts of crap for years now, the dissolution of most physical music retail and a declining youthful population (the market peaked when the baby boomers finished replacing their vinyl/tape collections with CDs).
As far as Apple is concerned, I think they saved the industry by creating a powerful and successful model for paid downloads. I think they hurt the industry by emphasizing singles, although can you imagine the backlash if they had only sold albums? I think a bigger problem for the industry is the amount of illegal content that's posted on sites like YouTube - all those videos of a song playing with a visual of a record spinning or a few photos of the artist. People go there instead of buying the music.
In addition, sites like Pandora make a lot of music purchasing unnecessary. There's very little music that I've heard in the last few years that I feel like I have to own. So if I don't need to own it, whatever Pandora happens to be playing fulfills my music needs (and I say that as someone who still owns 500 LPs and 1000 CDs).
And in spite of the complaints and hype, recorded music is the cheapest it's ever been. In the mid-1960s, singles (albeit 2-sided singles) listed for $1 and sold for about 66 cents. That's $4.88 in 2011 dollars. Albums generally sold for $3.64. That's almost $27 in 2011 dollars. One can buy back catalog CDs for $5 to $7. But having said that, most people have the perception that music is too expensive.
As far as your comment is concerned, no one is forcing you to stay in the music industry (and I say that as an ex-recording engineer). If you can make more money somewhere else, that's your choice.
I think you've hit on what Steve Jobs 'cracked' for TV delivery. How to shed the need for TV antennas and cable TV to enable delivery of the content we want and when we want it without all the junk that usually comes along with it.
But Jobs seemed to be behind the inferior quality downloads, and there's no evidence that he'd "cracked" the problem of bandwidth caps by ISPs that are the 600 lb gorilla in the room.
A lot of your points are valid but some are coming from your gluteus maximus my dear friend.
I'm sure you are in the huge minority in people who don't want to go to movie theatres.
Music record labels will always exist. It's pretty hard as an independent band to get the funding to rent Studio's, get professional quality engineers, mixers, band talent to make your song. (People really underestimate the need for quality talent in the engineering and mixing but. It's pretty hard to get your name out there, advertised, actually heard by people. Your points about traditional distribution channels being obsolete are nearly correct, but recording companies will still be needed for upcoming/mid-tier artists. (Although if tools and frameworks are put in place in the future for artists to emerge (kind of like Kickstarter projects of the tech world), the record companies will maybe start to become obsolete.
The only reason that the movie industry is dying is because of crap content. It has nothing to do with traditional distribution methods. About 5% of people actually know how to buy media online. The DVD industry is still well and through surviving and will for the forceable future. Bandwidth caps really need to open up if online is going to be the primary distribution channel for such high volume media
I think what really scares the traditional record companies to death (quite literally) is the fact that with Apple Lossless format now officially Open Source, that means smaller record companies can now start to record and put on sale music in a very high quality audio format that most iPods built since 2004, all iPhones and all iPads can play back natively without needing a third-party conversion program that converts music encoded in the the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) format to 320 kbps MP3 or AAC formats.
With Apple Lossless, the quality is excellent even if you're using a stereo system with top-flight quality amplifiers and speakers.
I do think what the iPod did was finally make everyone ditch their portable cassette and CD players for a player that could store thousands of songs per player. Indeed, it even changed the front dash of modern cars, as many new cars how have USB 2.0 connectors so you can attach an iPod/iPhone and let the car stereo control the playback functions.
With Apple Lossless, the quality is excellent even if you're using a stereo system with top-flight quality amplifiers and speakers.
I do think what the iPod did was finally make everyone ditch their portable cassette and CD players for a player that could store thousands of songs per player. Indeed, it even changed the front dash of modern cars, as many new cars how have USB 2.0 connectors so you can attach an iPod/iPhone and let the car stereo control the playback functions.
Excellent post, Winni. This is the key point for anyone who thinks Apple or some other "outsider", including piracy, is hurting the music industry. The studios spent far too much time treating the artists like serfs. The industry needed a jolt. I still can't believe it was Apple that accomplished it.
I can't always tell when you are just mouthing off. Apple has made very little from music sales, their money comes from hardware, which really doesn't fit into this discussion.