The iTunes Store and others like it are convenient ways to purchase music, and are incredibly popular. Chances are if you buy music on the Internet, it is through iTunes, Amazon, or something else similar to it. However, I feel that no matter how popular these systems are, they are hurting the music industry in the long run.
Now Hear Me Out
iTunes is like Walmart, a massive selection of items that are marked down in price. If you hear a jam on the radio on the way home, you can boot up your computer and pay a whopping .99cents for the song, ($1.29 if the song is really popular). Before iTunes, if we heard a song we liked, we either had to wait for it to be played on the radio again and then record it from the radio, or just buy take the leap of faith and buy the full album, which is around $15 bucks for an average album. While iTunes gains many customers that just come to find the newest, hottest, most banging beats, they are not sustainable customers. If you take that leap of faith and buy a full album, you might find your next favorite band, which translates to merchandise, concert tickets, and at the very least, more album sales, which are important to the BAND as a whole.
iTunes is creating One-Hit Wonders, even if the bands/artists are better than the simple hook/line/sinker forumla. If you look up an album on iTunes, you can see a scale next to each song that measures its popularity. There is almost always one song that is much more popular than the rest of the album, which says to me we are not living on the edge.
So How Do We Fix It?
Well, I just recently heard about a thing called Spotify, which is yet another platform to buy and listen to music. I am not here to sell you on this product, or even talk about it (well its name is gonna get mentioned), I am here to talk about its idea. If iTunes is Walmart, than Spotify is more like a Sams Club or a Cosco. You can buy one Walmart steak for 10 dollars, or 10 Sams Club steaks for 85 dollars, or as where iTunes promotes buying as little as possible; Spotify promotes taking that leap of faith and getting the full collection. The more music you end up buying, the better deal you get on it. If you are like me, than you like to gamble, and downloading new and unheard music is a gamble. However if you are gambling with iTunes, the house always wins. With an idea like Spotify, you can gamble at buying a few full priced albums and even if they all suck, at least you got them at a discount, you earned rewards doing it, and the band is happy that it can actually make its next album, as opposed to its next single. In times like these when money is hard to come about, if we spend it willy-nilly, we want some respect back. iTunes doesn’t really give us that respect or reward system, and if we buy a shitty album on iTunes, then we are stuck with a 15 dollar shitty album.
So What Do You Think?
Obviously paying .99cents for a song is better than not paying anything, but I feel like we could actually revive a dying medium if there was just a little something-something in it for us. Would you buy more music if you were rewarded for it?
Are you kidding me? iTunes saved the music industry. If it weren't for iTunes' easily accessible cheap downloads everyone and their grandmother would still be infringing copyright by downloading music from P2P, BitTorrent and Usenet and the industry wouldn't see a cent for those downloads.
I thought this was a very good read. I'm not sure if iTunes is really killing the music industry or not, but being a CD collector, I'm sad to see CDs are slowly becoming a thing of the past.
And how many more people bought that song because they didn't have to but the rest of the album? Instead of just downloading it off limewire, people will pay 99 cents for a song they want instead of 12 dollars for a song they want and the rest of the album.
" Are you kidding me? iTunes saved the music industry. If it weren't for iTunes' easily accessible cheap downloads everyone and their grandmother would still be infringing copyright by downloading music from P2P, BitTorrent and Usenet and the industry wouldn't see a cent for those downloads. "
This is exactly right. iTunes isn't a problem, it's the alternative to a problem that already existed.
OP is correct. If you want Artists to get very little of the money you pay for their work then yeah sure, use iTunes. But if you want the money to go to the artists, the only people who deserve it, then buy physical CDs straight from them.
I think you're missing the part where between 1999 and like 2005 people would just use a P2P service or something to find the one song from an album instead of getting ripped off buying the whole damn CD, or recording it off the radio like an old man or something.
iTunes created a market where you can just buy that one song you wanted, and thus people actually were buying music again. itunes isn't responsible for the death of the album anyway, top-40 radio one-hit music already killed the idea of an album as a piece, iTunes just made it profitable.
You don't have to buy music to listen to it in Spotify. Don't even have to download the music - it's a streaming service. I haven't bought a single thing through Spotify, except for the subcription price. Spotify is hardly the savior of the music industry.
Some of you guys are largely missing his point. He's not saying that digital distribution of the music is bad. He wants to discourage people from buying individual tracks. Read it before you jump to conclusions.
And I'd mostly agree, but I generally don't listen to people who are out to make the next "Hit", so I don't really care.
Its like been that way already. A single is like 1 buck (or less if its an old one), but a full album downloaded is like $10 (or less). As long as the album has more then ten songs, the price per song will win out in the end. Oh, I don't use Itunes, but use Amazon as a way to download music legally. So my comment is mainly about amazon's pricing scheme which comparing to the OP's dislike at Itunes prices, Amazon seems to win out that much more.
The only time I give itunes its respect is being the first company to evolve with the world and do the right steps in fixing music piracy, by giving people the choice in legally paying for the digital music instead of the rest of the record companies that expect people to pay for a disc when the world was going digital.
As much as I can't stand the program on a PC, iTunes saved a still dying industry so no idea what your talking about. The music industry instead of trying to evolve they just decided to try a fools errand and beat Piracy. I haven't bought a single piece of music, Ever, but I've never pirated music, Why do I need to buy music? I have Youtube, Pandora, Car Radio, wtf do I need to buy any of this for? Its all free through PLENTY of Legal means, If I just want Random good music I listen to Pandora, Want a certain song? Youtube. Thats it, never found Any need to go outside those two mediums.
I can't reply to everyone, so I will try to sum it all up. As long as you are paying for music, then I am fine with it. iTunes brought a lot of people back form just stealing the music, but we didn't start over, we basically started new, by buying things one at a time. Spotifiy was just an example, I was going for the idea of it. The idea that the more we spend, the more value we get.
Tomorrow the music industry isn't going to be dead, but in a few years it will be hurting. I hate to bring it up, but look at Rebbeca Black's, Friday. A song that was literally built for those one time downloads. I don't want to see musicians skipping heart and soul for a formula that produces the most radio-friendly hit.
And no one has yet to answer my question if you would buy more music if you got a reward with it.
Hey great, let me pay .99-1.29 for a 128-256 kbps audio file. That sure sounds like a better deal than buying it through Bandcamp in FLAC straight from the artist for a dollar. Or at worst, CDs are not hard to find on sale for under 10 bucks. Rip them in lossless yourself.
iTunes provided the change the industry needed. It shook things up, but only because most of the industry were too stuck in their ways and didn't adapt and it bit them in the ass.
Having said that, I rarely use iTunes, and if I do, it's to buy whole albums. If I find new bands, it's not through iTunes.
Before iTunes, if we heard a song we liked, we either had to wait for it to be played on the radio again and then record it from the radio, or just buy take the leap of faith and buy the full album, which is around $15 bucks for an average album. While iTunes gains many customers that just come to find the newest, hottest, most banging beats, they are not sustainable customers. If you take that leap of faith and buy a full album, you might find your next favorite band, which translates to merchandise, concert tickets, and at the very least, more album sales, which are important to the BAND as a whole.
Your whole argument ignores the fact that people were buying singles long before iTunes.
When I buy a new album, but there's an iTunes exclusive bonus track. Then I have to deal with their shitty software to get the song, but oh wait, it turns out I have to buy the entire album to get the song. Then I uninstall iTunes forever and just download the song somewhere.
The music industry's current problems started when it killed Napster. Maybe if some of those execs had some foresight they would have seen that i tunes was coming no matter how hard they fought against it. Anyway I don't use i tunes or any services of the like cause I prefer buying the whole album. Thanks to review sights and some friends who are in the music industry I know whose albums are worth my $10.
The only thing iTunes may have killed is album sales. It's easier to just buy the one song you like and skip the rest of them which might vary in quality.
Actually, since most people only legally buy music through Itunes, I'd say they're the only thing preventing the music industry from going kaputt (no pun intended).
OP is correct. If you want Artists to get very little of the money you pay for their work then yeah sure, use iTunes. But if you want the money to go to the artists, the only people who deserve it, then buy physical CDs straight from them.
@kurtdyoung: I've never used Spotifly and i mostly use Amazon so i have no idea what yer talking about. Amazon has discounts on full albums all the time.
The industries business practices have destroyed itself a long time ago. in this day and age the idea of albums are kind of outdated. Today, there shouldn't be anything holding an artist back from releasing every single song they create upon it's creation, rather then releasing them all collectively on a single album.
There's pressure on artists to release full length albums and with that pressure comes plenty of filler.
As far as downloading new and unheard music, there are plenty of resources for that, some of which are podcasts filed under "music" on itunes, plenty of internet radio stations out there, or free survices like Last.fm.
anyway, i genuinely have no idea where you're coming from with this perspective. Seems to me too many people getting burned by the "leap of faith" in buying a $15 album that is 90% filler is what killed the industry and digital downloads give you the option to work around that.
The spotify concept that you mentioned sounds interesting, if only it wasn't limited to users in the UK.
As someone who grew up used to paying $20 for a tape (pre-CD era) only to find out that I didn't like eighty percent of the album I am glad that iTunes and piracy stepped in. I have been burned by buying an album out of faith that the one song I enjoy is enough to support me spending my hard-earned cash on it too many times before. I became sick of buying CD's because of it and now I refuse to spend money on an album that I haven't heard in its entirety.
You say that singles are killing the industry, creating a base of users that sees music more as a consumable item than a commodity that should be invested in. Yet I see differently. What is happening is the music industry is seeing a period of disintermediation, where artists are able to move away from the traditional confines of the five major labels. Digital delivery platforms like iTunes, bandcamp, and Amazon are combining with a lower financial barrier to produce an album nowadays. It is easier than ever to discover a band, listen to their music, then support them. It is so easy to be in a band that sells CD's nowadays that artists have to split the income (because there is only so much people are willing to spend on music) instead of the major labels taking the money for themselves. This industry has ballooned to the point where I believe that if anything is hurting the music industry it is this. Well, I don't actually believe it is hurting the industry. It is hurting the industry for the big and famous rock star, yet at the same time it is allowing the smaller independent acts to at least be able to record.
For example. I have a bunch of friends that moved to Calgary, Alberta because of the music scene there. They quickly formed a band, started playing live shows, producing albums, and now going on national tours. It cost them a couple of grand to create a studio that can produce a recording on par with what local studios charged $400 an hour for. Now they have recorded three albums, and sold almost 20,000 copies in their three years of existence. It isn't enough money to live off of, yet the band makes enough to continue doing what they love. Yet the $200,000 gross split between five people over three years is money that isn't going to bands like "Green Day," or "Rhianna," or any other major label band that is trying to do this for a living.
itunes and amazon already reward you for buying the full album; it's almost always cheaper to buy the whole thing than to buy each track individually. Not sure about itunes, but amazon also has those "album-only" tracks which you can't buy individually.
I have around 600 CD's in my collection. With stores no longer selling music CD's(I'm not counting POP music crap) I finally stopped buying. Itunes did not kill the music industry. Technology in general helps many artists get their music heard when just a few years ago there was no way they could get heard. Technology is also hurting bigger artists. It's too easy for someone to download someone's music for free. It's too easy to buy a CD listen to it once, sell it on ebay for a sales number the band can't claim. Sure we have the right to sell it off but now the whole world is connected and you don't have to go buy a new CD which gives the musician a sale. Another way technology hurts the overall industry is that its too easy for people to put out music. The point is there's TOO MUCH choice for stores to stock all the various artists and all their albums. Honestly there are 20 something Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Rolling Stones, AC/DC, etc etc albums each(yes I might be off on some of those). How can a retailer stock all those along with the 10 million other artists created from the myspace bubble? ITunes is a blessing for the messed up industry. When the Beatles and Elvis sold all those millions of albums they had NO WHERE the competition for sales that there is today. Yes the Beatles are amazing, but how would they do in a world with all these music genres where almost everyones personal tastes are satisfied? Don't like John Lennons voice how about this knock off band with a different singer from myspace? These are just some of the problems with the music industry, iTunes being the least. (although bands should get more of a cut of their digital sales...) I've only bought a hand full of music from iTunes/Amazon. Although my music ends up on my iPod I LIKE the physical CD with a cover and lyrics. I greatly miss the days of going to independent record shops (It's Only Rock N Roll from Lemyone PA) and going through the records and CD's trying to find something good. I miss the days of trading metal fanzines. Sending off for a photocopied fanzine that you waited weeks for. Tape trading through networks. Those were great times. Technology has made it easier to find music but the appreciation is gone. I love ALBUMS(full length albums of music); I'm not a singles guy or a radio guy. Having said that ITunes is the greatest way of getting music of all genres in this era. Best Buy has cut their CD (and movie) space to nothing, my local Target has let the CD stock empty out the last couple weeks. I can only imagine the next I go in there will be one small rack with the new pop music of the week and some 50's or 60's mix Cd's and that's it. Be glad you have iTunes or Amazon if you choose.
This is basically the story of the Blue Oyster Cult. Everyone knew (and still knows) the song Don't Fear the Reaper, because it's awsome, and they made a ton of money because people bought the album for that song. But I challenge you all to ask a friend if they can name one or two other BOC songs and they can't.
iTunes is creating One-Hit Wonders, even if the bands/artists are better than the simple hook/line/sinker forumla. If you look up an album on iTunes, you can see a scale next to each song that measures its popularity. There is almost always one song that is much more popular than the rest of the album, which says to me we are not living on the edge.
The idea that iTunes is creating the one-hit wonder is laughable. There have been one-hit wonders since the dawn of music. And, you've been able to buy singles for far longer than iTunes (they were available on VINYL) has been around. The change iTunes did was make the single price competitive with the album.
Rather than this being bad for music, this is a GOOD thing. Album only sales artificially drive up music sales. Buying songs individually lets people only buy music that is worth buying. In particular, it should raise up the quality of music across the board. In the past, a band only needed a single hit and it could sell a million albums. Now to sell a million albums requires bands to make ALL their songs worth owning.
I don't think you should blame iTunes, but rather blame the artists for putting out mediocre records. When I hear a song i like, I go check it out on iTunes an immediately check out the album. If I like 4 songs, I buy it. In other words, the other works of the artists are really great too. That's the way it should be if you ask me.
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