I ran across an article in USA Today that rang true with my view of the music industry. The link is here, and i’ve included an excerpt of the bit that stuck out the most below:
“With so many different options in terms of how consumers obtain and experience music, albums aren’t the only game in town anymore,” says Keith Caulfield, Billboard chart analyst. “Because the album was the dominant format for decades, people became accustomed to quoting album sales as an indicator of how well the music industry was faring.
Now there are multiple ways of measuring music’s popularity and sales. It’s hard to keep tabs on how much money Lady Gaga is earning from having her songs in Glee. There are so many more ways to monetize music. Albums don’t tell the whole story.”
Bravo, Edna! We married the product (music) with the medium (vinyl, cassette, CD) for so long that we’re now having big troubles defining not only what we’re selling, but how much we’re selling it for.
Don’t get me wrong, there’re some stupendously smart people in the music business. The trouble is that most of these great businesspeople have either been so pissed off by the big guns that they’ve taken their show on the road and done their own independent thing, or they’re buried so far within an organization that we don’t ever see their brilliance.
Much like the ad industry needs to move away from CPMs as a measure of success, the music industry needs to move away from record sales as a measure of profit and industry health. Those sales only represent a portion of the pie, and in some cases it’s a mighty small one.
What say you, musicians? Do you care to share how much album sales (%-wise) contribute to your overall income?? What about the profit you make off of these sales vs other things like playing shows or licensing songs for other artistic uses?