So, where does the news that Adele’s “21″ has now outsold Pink Floyd’s legendary “Dark Side of the Moon” leave the idea that downloading is killing music?
It’s increasingly looking like a big lie.
While I have no figures in front of me (and distrust any numbers quoted by Big Music), there is a lot of evidence that overall music sales aren’t declining at all. What has really been happening is that the major labels have been losing market share. During the boom years they made huge profits selling overpriced CDs, and eventually grew lazy and complacent. Too much of the music they released was formulaic cookie-cutter “product” that took few risks, aimed at people who buy all their music in supermarkets, and by controlling access to the mass media they prevented anything else from being heard. The coming of broadband internet radically changed the way people discovered and consumed music, and the majors were very slow in adapting their business models to take advantage of new methods of distribution. The lost out to those that did, and the likes of iTunes ate their lunch.
Rather than develop newer business models, they screamed “piracy!” and lobbied corrupt politicians to pass draconian protectionist legislation.
I’m now starting to believe that laws like America’s Stop Internet Piracy Act and Britain’s Digital Economy Act were never really about “piracy” at all. The way such laws have the potential to cripple parts of the net used by independent musicians to promote and distributed their work wasn’t just an unfortunate side effect, it was the whole point. “Piracy” was never more than a smokescreen, a lie spun to people like Peter Mandelson.
Just think about it. Which of these two activities hurts the major labels more?
- “Illegally” downloading an album you probably would never have bought, listening to it once and thinking “meh”.
- Paying 10 quid for an independently released record, leaving you with less to spend on the majors’ music?
I rest my case