In his May 12 Billboard column "Changes In Attitudes," veteran music journalist Geoff Mayfield mentioned dismal Nielsen SoundScan sales reports, which for the first time in years featured overall sales volume of less than 8 million albums.
Mayfield said the music industry's "head in the sand" mentality is speeding up the demise of the CD as a viable sales commodity. The industry says stop reporting the problem and it will go away. Meanwhile the situation only grows worse.
Even as legal digital sales reach all-time highs, the Recording Industry Association of America continues to extort money from the few consumers who still actually buy CDs regularly: college students.
The RIAA's strategy is to find a college student who has downloaded anywhere from 100 to a few thousand songs illegally over a given period of time. The RIAA then hits the student's school with demand letters, threatening lawsuits if they don't notify the students. Students then receive letters suggesting a $3,000 settlement. If the students choose to fight, they could be faced with fines of $750 per song, with potential totals reaching into the millions of dollars.
The RIAA knows the students will likely settle, but the lawsuits haven't served as a legitimate deterrent. So the industry sends out more letters. That's some seriously messed-up logic.
Record labels and digital retailers, meanwhile, hang to the outmoded notion that copy protection protects music, when really it merely alienates the few people who actually want to pay for music legally when they can't hear their music wherever they'd like. Companies that do choose to offer "unprotected" music, such as iTunes, choose to charge twice as much for the "privilege," and new listeners who might otherwise purchase the songs legally turn to file sharing software instead.
The record labels struggle to understand why people aren't buying CDs. They can't understand that they're not releasing CDs in a viable manner. Like the television industry, music labels think the only times that matter for album sales are summer, fall and right before Christmas.
Fans get barraged with choices in June, September and November, but see a vast wasteland on the shelves from January through May. Those who would buy music find nothing new worth purchasing, and when they're hit with a big slate in one of the "key seasons," they're forced to choose a few favorites or none at all.
I have four words for the record industry: Get with the program.
This is a consumer-driven industry. Musicians eventually are going to figure this out and stop wasting their time promoting CDs in the first place. MySpace broke Hinder, and their CD managed to sell two million in the U.S. alone. Adam Duritz just signed several MySpace bands to a label contract based on their online marketing strategies.
Once bands realize they don't need a bunch of over-priced suits suing their fans into oblivion, they'll adjust and find new ways to reach the fans while profiting from their art.
Meanwhile, members of the recording industry will still have their heads in the sand.
Write to Jonathan at jonathansanders@justice.com
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