Advice to the music industry

By now, almost everyone knows that the music industry is in trouble. In just a few years, the enterprise has shrunk considerably, from $15 billion in 1999 to $11 billion now. Record sales have declined 25 percent since 2000, and the ten top-selling albums in the U.S. sold a combined 60 million copies that year. In 2006, the top ten sold a paltry 25 million.\nMost point to a crucial event that became the catalyst for this decline: Napster. \nYet while Napster set the music world on fire, the industry’s reactions to it did nothing to put it out, and in fact, probably indirectly fueled it. Nine years later, the music industry doesn’t really have anyone to blame but itself. \nAfter Napster burst onto the scene, no one can blame the industry for not knowing how to handle it; at that point, no one had a clue that it was going to revolutionize the way Generation Y would use the Internet or that it would lead to Kazaa, Morpheus or LimeWire. But once Napster was axed and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich was whining in a court room, the industry probably thought it had the fad squashed. \nBut as the peer-to-peer and illegal sharing networks continued to grow at rapid rates, the industry did nothing. Instead of taking the initiative, it sat back until third parties like Apple had to figure it out for them. Meanwhile, the Recording Industry Association of America has decided to terrorize users — primarily college kids — on an individual basis, wasting time and resources that it could’ve been using to think up fresh ideas. \nThey’ve failed to see that illegal sharing probably can’t be stopped, as 1 billion songs are traded on peer-to-peers each month. But people are enjoying downloading legally, too — 4 billion tracks have been downloaded on iTunes in five years — and the industry braintrust has yet to cook up good ideas to get the people who love music enough to pay for it to do so. \nLuckily for all the industry insiders reading this, I have a few simple solutions:\nActively use online arenas to your advantage. Most importantly, labels must pay attention to “leaks” of records and how to combat them. Labels should offer online pre-order deals that include a stipulation where as soon as an album illegally leaks all over the Internet, those that have pre-ordered it legally would be given digital copies or have their hard copy shipped to them immediately. Then not only would consumers still get the album early, but they’d also have a high quality, legal version of it.\nBe patient with your acts. Sales suck, but it’s ignorant to cut an act after one struggling album. There must be some time to cultivate the act and let the fan base grow, etc. Use the Internet to promote them for next-to-nothing — something indie labels do, but majors don’t — and get them on any tour possible. Make them work.\nAll this sounds like something a smart person would’ve told music moguls in 2002, but they’ve still ignored it for the most part. \nEveryone has a unique theory on the industry’s woes. Blender magazine says it’s because of the death of the CD single, Chuck Klosterman blames a shoddy economy. At this point, we’re all right.