Music is dead
Aside from the game business, I do dabble in music. I’ve also been running a small indie record label for the last 8 years or so. Recently I’ve been thinking that the music business is truly and completely fucked, partly because of some dumb moves on the part of the big labels, and partly because of vast societal changes.
This quote from a recent NYT article pretty much sums it up.
A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.
76% of all songs up for sale never find a buyer! And it’s not just a quality issue, there’s just too much stuff out there. Got a new band? Good luck. “Long tail”? Doesn’t exist, unless you’ve already been selling music at a decent rate. “Promotion”? If you look at pretty much any band’s MySpace page, you’ll see that online promotion is akin to 100,000 people in a room all shouting at each other.
What you have here is:
- A low barrier of entry to content (lots of crappy bands can easily make records)
- “Infinite” distribution (gatekeepers are less relevant)
- The death of mass media and terrestrial radio (will U2 be the last ever Big Stadium band?)
- A highly explored artform (when’s the last time you said to yourself, “I’ve never heard a sound like this before?”)
Could this ever happen to games? Perhaps, but there are some key differences:
- Games are considerably harder to make than records, as they involve multiple disciplines of expertise
- Games can be interactive, providing a longer lasting experience
- Games can go online, helping to circumvent the piracy problem inherent in digital goods
Maybe someone will come along and reinvent the music industry’s business model, but I doubt it. Welcome to a future where you pay your $10/month to Spotify, get all the music you want, and creators are stuck getting a tenth of a penny per play. If you’re lucky enough to be Amanda Palmer, or Trent Reznor, perhaps you can live for a while convincing your rabid Twitter fanbase to buy $300 box sets or autographed beer mugs…