Good Riddance To The Music Industry

In 2000 the bigesst sellng album was NSync's No Strings Attached. It sold 10 million copies. In 2005 the biggest selling album was Mariah Carey's The Emancipation of Mimi. It sold 5 million copies. Last year's biggest seller was Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III selling 2.8 million copies. See a trend? For decades, since the rock era started, major record companies have been taking advantage of artists and fans alike. And everyone knew it. The average take on a record for an artist during the 90's, at the height of its greed, was 4-7 % of the album's profits. Then the record company had the audacity to subtract recording costs from that 4-7 % before the artist could see a penny. How greedy, right? Well, how satisfying was it to see Tommy Mottola fired from SONY earlier this decade? How wonderful to see LA Reid outed from ARISTA two years after he replaced Clive Davis (who has since replaced him) and now Reid is at ISLAND DEF/JAM shaking in his boots. To see ARISTA chained to Whitney Houston's 100 million dollar contract and trust me her comeback won't earn them back nearly that amount of money. The decline of the CD has been an amazing feat to watch. Seeing Sam Goody and Tower go down when at their height, they were selling CD's at 18.98 a pop. To watch the labels accept lower profits when Best Buy and WalMart were selling them as low as $9.99. Now Best Buy and WalMart have both shrunk music retail space in all of their stores. It's a great terminal illness to watch.

If you feel sorry for SONY/BMG, WARNER, EMI etc . . . dont! They brought this on themselves. The death of the music industry has been caused by illegal downloading but let me tell you where that comes from. In 1998 the intelligent CEOs sat down and said "sales from singles are cutting into CD profits, if we stop issuing commercial singles in stores, then the consumer will be forced to buy an entire CD." Consumers were duped into buying Chumbawumba, Natalie Imbruglia and a whole host of other CDs for one song. So when the internet became fast enough for file sharing, people ran with it. Now the record companies are losing profits and are being forced to merge. The one sad spot in all this are the artists who have been cut from rosters and it would break my heart if Billboard Magazine ceased to exist. One last problem with all of this is how is the mainstream gonna be exposed to new music and artists? The only artist to break into the mainstreamfrom Myspace is Cassie. That doesn't look promising. But whatever the case, whatever replaces the current music industry will hopefully be fair in compensating the artist and delivering to fans.