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February 3rd, 2006

Poll Explores Reason for Sale’s Slump

The always reliable Hypebot comments on a Washington Post article about a new poll that points to high prices and lousy music for the music industry sale’s slump, not downloading or file sharing. Although most of the poll takers consider downloading music to be stealing, they also consider CD prices to be too expensive.

I always tell anyone that will listen that one of the biggest problems for the sale’s slump is the oversaturation of music. Take this example: if you were to browse Pure Volume, you would see that there are a ton of bands on there. In my home state of Colorado alone, there are over 2,000 bands. Let’s assume for this example that Colorado represents your average number of bands. Let’s now multiply that number by the 50 United States. You resulting number is 100,000 bands. Understand that Pure Volume tends to cater to punk, indie, metal, and emo/screamo bands so that 100,000 bands is a very low estimate at the number of bands out there. I can’t speak for you, but I know that in a lifetime, i could not keep up with the amount of music 100,000 bands would produce. There in lies the problem, music fans just can’t keep up with the vast amount of music out there. Let’s say that your typical music fan has only $20 per month to spend on music, how can they spend it?

1. You could almost buy 2 albums on Itunes. Tax would put the total over $20.

2. You could maybe buy 2 albums at Best Buy (if one of them were sale priced at $7.99).

3. You could only purchase one album at a mall store(mall stores tend to have retail prices set at around $15.98).

4. At Yourmusic.com you could purchase 3 albums (Yourmusic.com only charges $5.99 per album shipping included. It is kind of like BMG but there are no penny cds or high priced cds, all cds are $5.99 postage paid. They only have major label content though.

5. Inspired by Yourmusic.com, my company Suburban Home Records and Distribution, offers a number of the titles on my label and some of our distributed labels the price of $5.00 plus shipping per album. $20 could get you 3 full length CDs if you live in the United States.

6. At Emusic.com you can get 40 downloads per month for the low price of $10 per month. And the songs are DRM free so you can put them on any player you might have including an IPOD or even burn Cds of the songs you purcahse. For $20, you could get 80 downloads which means you would get around 7 albums for your $20. They have no major label content, but they have a vast catalog of independent music. They also have a great offer: Get 50 FREE Music Downloads for your iPod® or any MP3 player! Emusic is currently the #2 site for MP3 purchases and illustrates that if you offer competitive prices, you can get customers.

7. Rhapsody offers you a monthly fee of $9.99 per month and for that fee, you can get unlimited access to their over 1.3 million songs. And in most cases you can put those songs on your mp3 player (not an Ipod though, sorry). Click here for Rhapsody, you can try it out for free for 2 weeks.

I personally subscribe to Rhapsody, Emusic, and Yourmusic.com, plus we get a ton of music sent to us for free since we sell a number of titles on our online store. For the $20 per month example, you can’t really beat combining Rhapsody and Emusic services as you will have access to millions of songs.

So there are a number of options. I did not even begin to discuss the option to buy used CDs and then sell them back to the stores after you have uploaded the music. I agree with the Poll that full length CDs tend to be too expensive and before it is too late, I really think that the major powers in the music industry need to get with it. In my example, your $20 can’t really get you a lot when you go to your average chain store. It is really hard to compete with the digital music options and before CDs go the way of the dinosaur, there needs to be a reconfiguration of logic and retail prices need to come down.

Read the Hypebot article.

Written by Virgil Dickerson