David Emery Online

Oi, Nostradamus!

27 September 2005

So much for having some free time to blog, then…

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Warner Music recently announced (it was a few weeks back and I’ve lost the link) that they are forming an exclusively digital label, with artists putting out music in batches of three (singles, then) spaced out over the year – as opposed to an album of circa 12 songs once every year or two.

Well done Warner Music!

It won’t work though.

Yet. This is the way that the music industry is going to go, but it’s just too soon – there just isn’t a big enough online market yet to support a band (or, more accurately, a record label).

I think that it’ll happen like this:

Step 1: The music industry (i.e. the big five) will continue on the greedy, i-need-more-money-to-keep-sueing-my-customers path they are walking at the moment and stop demanding that iTunes raise their track and album prices and actually make them do it.

Step 2: Apple do it (otherwise they’ve got no content, which makes it hard to sell iPods), but also starts to let individuals sell their own track on the iTMS.

Step 3: By this point, downloading will be a significant portion of the market (~50%) – iTunes won’t be as dominant, but will still be the biggest player.

Step 4: Someone becomes big without having a contract with a record company, utilising iTunes and the other music retailers.

Step 5: The house of cards crumbles – record companies becoming merely music promoters, with a sideline in limited release CDs and Vinyl (which are both niche markets at this point).

This is great for the bands – they get a much bigger cut (while they still have to pay a promo company, they don’t have to sign a shitty deal with a label so they get distribution); great for music lovers – much more choice (most of it will be rubbish, though); bad for record labels (unless they can find a new revenue stream – the bigger ones will go down fighting, the smaller ones will disappear or adapt).