Music Delivery Systems

   In the past  eight years alone,  Music sales as a whole has dropped substantially.  Although according to  Apple’s annual SEC  

 

Apple’s annual SEC 10K filing showed that music-related sales increased by US$844 million (or 34%) to $3.34 billion in fiscal 2008, up from US$2.5 billion in 2007. Apple cited “heightened consumer interest in downloading third-party digital content” as the reason for the hefty increase.  However    according to the RIAA, 85 percent of cd’s released this year alone, did not see  big numberts in units moved.  Primarily it was  downloading from  third party users.

   With the introduction of the i-pod,  mp-3 players and  third party  download websites, most wich do not require  payment for downloads the music industry as a whole has been hurt.  In 2007 alone it saw a total of 500.5 million albums sold, including “hard copy” media: CDs, cassettes and LPs. This is a 15% drop from the unit total for 2006, according to Nielsen SoundScan.  However is this in itself is hurting the music industry.

One detrimental aspect to  music sales and promotions is when  labels, send promo copies to other promotion companies,  journalists and bands.   These copies of albums are usually  advances of what will be distributed out in market in the comings weeks.  Lately , companies, such as Nuclear Blast Europe,  Metal Blade among others have utilize I-pool which allows companies to directly download lbums, while  using a sign in/tagging system to keep track of people using the albums to play on air,  promotions or people with acess to it. This is to prevent piracy within the industry and thus monitoring bands music.  The great aspect of this it that it obviously saves money for  the costs of shipping out physical copies,  creating them and paying print companies to print artwork.   These are all aspects of spending that save thousands in the long run in order to promote across the United States alone.   At the rate of sales being down by nearly 40 percent since the 90′s, bands tht used to be shoe-in’s for gold records, are merely selling  80.000-200,000  units now days.   Music promotions,  isn’t as lucrative as the days of seeing  Motley Crue  going 4 time platinum. 

Radio and music is not necessarily dying, however it is not in the best of shape if you are indie.  Tours, merchandising and sponsorships are where your money will be made if lucky.   Cutting costs does in fact have it’s benefits. However,  many digital artists,  print companies are already  struggling to find work and  this basically eliminates alot of middle men work,  i.e. printing artwork or  even finding cheaper methods to create artwork through  freelancers as well, which is always cheaper than contracting big names to do so, like sons of nero, or even a personal H.R. Giger design which some bands/labels  do in hiring big names.   

Piracy would also be harder to do, granted, there are always ways around trick and trades of the establishment, but this is yet another mean to prevent piracy. Piracy is one ,if not the biggest reason why record sales have dropped. .Napster,  i-tunes are now legal means to download, but according to the RIAA, most downloading is still illegal.   I-pool is only a means to combat that and if that prevents from smaller labels from folding, music sales to maintain, it will only help promotions, and labels but cutting down costs, while technologically  promoting and being financially smart.

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