To Patrick:

I just read an article in the New Yorker this week about the current state of the music industry. They said the major labels control something like 85% of the music market. So I was wondering where you’d heard that indies had surpassed the majors.

It’s an interesting read because they talk about the decline of the mega-hits.. albums that used to sell 5-10 million copies (ie. Alanis Morisette) are now selling 3-4 million (ie. Avril Levigne). Thanks to KaZaa, of course.

But the upshot was: People will always need information filters. They talked about having a government-levied monthly fee you’d pay the music industry, whether you get any music or not, and in return you can download whatever you want and they would provide a nice filtering system for you— something like amazon’s recommendations. Artists might still get paid based on number of downloads. The fee would have to be government regulated, though, for every IP address. Apparently TVs work this way in Britian…

Were this to happen, it’d raise three points in my mind…
- how might the actual music change as a result? and the listening experience? my brother and I were talking today about vinyl records.. and what a visceral “art experience” they can be. getting to look at this big piece of accompanying art (the album cover, liner notes) while listening. people used to sit down and just listen to whole records together.. but you’d never dream of doing that with a CD. The smaller format is only partly to blame, I’m sure, but it leaves me wondering if listening will ever make a comeback.
- what kind of filtering would the labels impose, and might they be able to figure out what I really want? (amazon still hasn’t…)
- A change like this could cause the outside of the art to become the future money maker. Forget about the music, it’s really just a jingle for the artist’s “brand” .. clothes, posters, tea…physical goods.