Dorks And Losers

If you really think about, the whole sit­u­a­tion with the music indus­try is quite tragic. Not because record labels lose money (I could care less about records labels and the music exec­u­tives who don’t know how to run them) or because artists lose money (I’m some­times really indif­fer­ent to them), but really because music isn’t truly expe­ri­enced any more.

Lis­ten­ers have been indif­fer­ent to music that they no longer crave it, they no longer buy it, and they no longer feel for it. Here are five ways the music indus­try can truly save itself:

Top 5

1. Dis­band the R.I.A.A.

There has been so much bad pub­lic­ity asso­ci­ated with this orga­ni­za­tion that it does more harm than good. What is the point of suing ille­gal file shar­ers by the thou­sands when mil­lions of file shar­ers exist?

Despite a few suc­cesses in get­ting Nap­ster and Kazaa shut down, dozens quickly replaced them. Now they seem to have the upper hand against The Pirate Bay, but even that seems futile con­sid­er­ing how wide­spread Bit­Tor­rent is. With all the money that pours into the pock­ets of lawyers and the cof­fers of cour­t­houses, wouldn’t that money be bet­ter spent on devel­op­ing and pro­mot­ing actual artists?

While a trade group should exist to pro­mote the indus­try as well, maybe even a name change might do it good. Cor­po­ra­tions do it all the time. Remem­ber TWA? If they play their cards right, in a decade hope­fully, no one will remem­ber the R.I.A.A.

2. Estab­lish a cred­i­ble music authority.

As long as music existed, large groups of peo­ple tuned into a sin­gle place for all of their music needs. You can go way back when to The Ed Sul­li­van Show or even more way back with camp­fires in the truly olden days.

MTV rev­o­lu­tion­ized the music indus­try with using music videos as the new way to expe­ri­ence music through mov­ing pic­tures. The cable chan­nel has always had ups and downs, but seemed to always rein­vent itself and win back its cool­ness. Total Request Live was the most recent exam­ple. Depend­ing on how you look at it, TRL either pop­u­lar­ized the new wave of boy bands (Back­street Boys, N’Sync) and teen pop (Brit­ney Spears, Christina Aguil­era) or at the very least rode their mas­sive waves to the moon and even­tu­ally into the ground.

Either way, mil­lions of (mostly) teenagers raced home after school to watch the pop­u­lar request show and watch the nation’s most pop­u­lar music videos.

Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine is no longer the print behe­moth it once was, although it might finally start a ver­sion in India. I know the print world is no longer cool, but where will the baby boomers get their de facto tastes from?

No one has been able to trans­late the musi­cal expe­ri­ence on the inter­net. No one has cre­ated any­thing immer­sive or inter­ac­tive. Pitch­fork is seen as the high­est author­ity on the inter­net, but its niche is Indie music. MTV recently revamped its web­site, but I fear they’re too late to the party.

3. Change the busi­ness model.

It’s flawed, but since it has worked for so long the con­formist label exec­u­tives haven’t been able to change. If music labels were more like start-ups, times would have been rough but would have cor­rected itself by now.

There has been lots of talk with a music tax on P2P and ISPs to sub­si­dize the music indus­try. While many peo­ple have dis­missed it as the wrong way to go, I think that they are look­ing more at the long-term future of music qual­ity rather than music itself.

Aren’t we at worst-case sce­nario right now as musi­cians are headed toward per­sonal dis­tri­b­u­tion? Strug­gling artists and bands still need the label sys­tem. Music won’t die, but I think many peo­ple would gladly shell a cou­ple of bucks just to not see those damn copy­righted warn­ings and com­mer­cials ever again.

4. Pro­mote itself better.

The music indus­try needs to find bet­ter ways to cap­i­tal­ize on music fes­ti­vals. I think they have always been seen as too niche for gen­eral audi­ences to want to go to them. Film fes­ti­vals have always had an inde­pen­dent and high-brow feel to them, but the more qual­ity films would always trickle to more mass audi­ences. That’s not the case for music festivals.

The South By South­west Fes­ti­val is in full swing, but again, it ful­fills the musi­cal indie wing rather than the musi­cal chicken itself. I under­stand that fes­ti­vals have always catered to dif­fer­ent tastes (espe­cially jazz), but man wouldn’t it be cool to see a hip=hop festival?

And don’t get me started on how use­less and bor­ing music awards shows are to watch.

5. Research.

The music indus­try doesn’t research enough about either the artists or the lis­ten­ers. They still rely on old ways of eval­u­at­ing and invest­ing. Mar­ketabil­ity shouldn’t be the main con­cern. Even­tu­ally qual­ity will tri­umph over quan­tity. It just takes time and patience.

Last.fm is a great music social net­work with all of the data avail­able to exam­ine listener’s tastes. I haven’t heard about any stud­ies that truly exam­ined the data, except for a few cool visu­al­iza­tion tools like the long defunct Mainstream-o-meter and the ____.

I’ve been tempted to take some of the avail­able data and make my own observations.

Like the country’s Social Secu­rity prob­lems, the music industry’s prob­lems are big but work­able. I don’t think many peo­ple want to tackle them because the prob­lems seem to run too deep.

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