http://www.marketingcharts.com/topics/entertainment/music-downloads-dont-offset-cd-sales-slump-281/
fair enough music sales have dropped 16%, that gap has been filled by computer games et al, the market place has changed
but that fall still leaves them with £23 billion, this is hardly chicken feed, and certainly not an industry up against the ropes, or is it? Certainly seems healthy to me
If anything the continuation of the Cowell regime should provide them with a steadier platform than say Motley Crue, there will always be a market for the latest teen pop sensation, and for every 100 who go back to singing on the club curcuit almost certainly having recouped any outlay you'll get a big star who will bring in the money
What may have to stop is 8 million advances for the likes of REM, or someone might have to tell Robbie Williams 'actually that's rubbish , do it again' the next time he makes a cd, somewhere people will suffer, much the same way I assume that with the death of vinyl a fair few people in the record pressing industry went bust, and the net means that a lot of highstreet retailers are losing out
Maybe you're right and Celine Dion will be left standing as all taste & decency goes to the wall, but I suspect that there is too much vested interest in other parts of the biz for it to go completely tits up. After all promotors have arenas to fill etc
Think about the millions of "name artist" cds that will be bought this year by HMV from majors for £2.00 or less in order to retail at £4. These records are not really profitable but they are all about the churn of commerce. That is all they have left to them. Good quarterly headline numbers measured in $$$$.
The chickens are coming (oh boy are they coming) but the blame game is getting us nowhere. Major labels are bad! Downloading is evil! Blah blah.
As with the drugs trade once you've lost the battle with the middle classes then you have to find a way to tax the supply chain. So for all forms of recorded music to survive the ISPs have to pay an intellectual property levy for the trafficking of music from which they profit and we will have to pay the ISPs a higher flat rate whether we downloaded 0 albums, 100 albums or 10,000. The industry and government then have to find a fair way to distribute that ISP money to those who have earned a right to it. Though it means the records have to get made first with private money. There will be no prior investment for anything that is not a guaranteed earner / traffic generator. That's the future ten years hence.
Sure it's too late for the old model but free isn't a model. Not a sustainable one. It's a dystopia built by people who think that music costs nothing to write, nothing to make and nothing to distribute.
This is why we have government intervention. This is why we will have bad law in the short term but we have gone from a system that just about served the real needs of a vibrant musical culture to one there there is no support for the new and the radical. That's the forecast for the next decade folks.