The Music Industry Is A-Changin'

Here's what someone from NY Times said:

"A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs."

These statistics seem to speak for themselves. Is this surprising? I don't really think so.

According to Yahoo, these are the top 10 downloaded songs of 2008:

	Song Title	Artist
1	Low	Flo Rida Featuring T-Pain
2	Bleeding Love	Leona Lewis
3	Lollipop	Lil Wayne Featuring Static Major
4	I Kissed a Girl	Katy Perry
5	Viva La Vida	Coldplay
6	Love Song	Sara Bareilles
7	Apologize	Timbaland Featuring OneRepublic
8	No Air	Jordin Sparks Duet With Chris Brown
9	Disturbia	Rihanna
10	4 Minutes	Madonna Featuring Justin Timberlake

Did you download any of these songs this past year? Did you pay for them (via iTunes) if you did? I own two of the above songs, and to be honest, I didn't pay for them.

The way I see it is this: The MP3 did for the CD what JPEGs did for photographic film.

Hear me out -- if you own a digital camera, you're probably not inclined to spend much of your hard-earned money on 35 mm Kodak film or cheap disposable cameras. If you're into photography and still use stock film, good for you. The noble art of photography is sadly becoming a hobby anyone with a Nikon Coolpix camera and a pirated copy of Photoshop Elements can enjoy -- but that's besides the point. If you're an average picture-taker, you're not buying film and getting it developed at the pharmacy anymore. You're instead uploading pictures straight off your camera or memory card. The bottom line is this: you price you pay to enjoy taking pictures begins and ends when you purchase your camera and memory card from Best Buy. And from the looks of it, music is heading in the same direction.

When the music CD magically one day copied itself into a completely digital format, the industry changed. Who knows? The MP3 may have been the coup de grace that would lead to the music industry's foreseen demise. I personally see little reason to pay money to enjoy MP3s. If I'm a loyal fan of a particular artist, I'm going to support them and buy their physical album (as in one of those square cases with the disk inside). Otherwise, I'd rather just get the MP3 from someone else...

I own a computer and pay for a wireless connection (most of the time), so I'm tempted to use that as my musical "digital camera" to capture the songs and albums I like without "paying for the film."

Is that bad?



Anyways, here's a good 'ol timeless song that tends to make most people think about change and whatnot. Should we try to re-envision the way we buy, share, and create music?