Confessions of a Fanboy

It’s time for another “the industry is going to Hell” report.

Guess what? Album sales are down… again… still. Why Billboard continues to write this story is beyond me. Isn’t the word “new” part of “news?” Music sales are in the toilet and the industry is stubbornly unwilling, unable, or uninterested in dealing with the elephants in the room.

If the story is that stale, why am I bothering with it? As always, the devil is in the details. The headline itself tells us nothing we didn’t already know. The underlying numbers reveal some trends that give voice to the elephants being ignored.

For starters, digital tracks are growing while CD sales are declining. I am one of a handful of people who would be disappointed if the music industry woke up and followed the consumer trend. I am a devoted fan of music on a physical medium. I like CDs. I like the tangible object. I seem to be increasingly in the minority in this department. The digital market may have gone a little soft in this latest report, but it is still growing. There is a huge market for digital distribution.

This trend says a lot about the demand for digital, but I think there is another message hidden in that trend. I wonder what the music sales landscape might have looked like had the industry embraced the commercial CD single. It continues to exist in the UK, but was practically banished here in the states.

People not only like digital, they like the idea of a la carte, or the idea of being able to buy the song they hear on the radio before committing to buying the full album. Just like with digital, the profit margin is smaller but you keep listeners and keep people in the habit of buying music.

Music fans started feeling like they were being systematically screwed by being asked to pay $15-18 for an album without having heard a single song from it, or at most one song on the radio by the time the album was released. People were unwilling to do that.

Killing the single also effectively killed the genre-crossing guilty pleasures. For example, I was not a fan of Korn in the ’90s, but I liked the song “Freak on a Leash” (don’t ask me why, I can’t explain it). I don’t like Korn enough to buy the CD. I don’t like Korn, I like “Freak on a Leash.” The industry gave me the choice of $14.99 or nothing. I took nothing. They could have gotten a couple bucks from me. They didn’t get anything, either. Digital stores like iTunes now give listeners that freedom. I haven’t bought “Freak on a Leash” because I’m over it. I would have at the time and been embarrassed about it today.

Digital is not only becoming more and more the medium of choice, it’s becoming the shopping experience of choice as well. One place CD sales are actually up is in nontraditional retail establishments, which includes online retailers. What could the industry infer from this?

How about selection? Even before I had my final fit and swore off Best Buy, I was finding it increasingly difficult to find anything interesting in the store. More and more, I was going to online retailers like Amazon, CDUniverse, and CDWow. Now with Best Buy off the list there aren’t many decent alternatives in Huntsville.

Turns out, there aren’t many decent alternatives in a lot of places. Tower Records is kaput, FYE has closed several stores and so have other mass merchant music chains. Independent stores have been getting clobbered by competition for years and many closed long ago. In most cities across the country, your options for buying a CD are to go to one of the “box” stores or go online. If you have tastes that deviate far from the Billboard Hot 100, it’s to the internet you go.

Now selection is one part of the equation, but Amazon is not getting rich because they’re the only place you can find a copy of Otis Rush’s Right Place, Wrong Time or The Byrds’ Fifth Dimension. You know what else the compartive health of online retail compared to traditional retail tells us? The experience of buying music in the Wal-Marts and Best Buys of the world sucks so righteously people would rather order a CD online and forgo the instant gratification of buying it now than suffer an array of indignities shopping in these places.

Then, of course, there’s price. As a good friend of mine says, “In God We Trust, Everyone Else Pays Cash.” If fans thought prices at discount stores and chains like Best Buy were too high (and many of us do), it’s amazing places like FYE and Sam Goody are still in business. Their prices are atrocious! At a time when sales are declining, some of these places have actually raised prices. I’m not an economist, but something doesn’t add up there. I’ve seen them charge more for a used copy of a CD than what I could get it elsewhere new.

Here’s something else this report has told us that ought to shock you: rock and roll isn’t dead, but rap and country are.

That almost makes me swell with pride as rap and country have long been the banes of my musical existence. I take get massive amounts of satisfaction from their suffering. I wish I felt bad about that, but I don’t.

The only problem is… well, the rock that’s selling right now is mostly shit. I guess shit rock is better than hip hop or country at its best. It would be nice to see good triumph over evil, but I will settle for seeing record labels have to once again be reminded that people like rock music- even bad rock music like Nickelback and My Chemical Jacket Cab Boy-182. Even when rock sales decline, as they occasionally do, the genre isn’t the problem. The bands are. The way they are promoted is. People have been declaring rock and roll dead since its early days. It never goes away and it never will.

What we’ve established is that people like rock music and they are willing to pay for it. There are reasons for declining sales and ways to combat them. The music buying public still exists. Is anyone interested in serving it?

Filed under: Fanboy Manifesto