Traditionally, the majors blame the internet for devaluing music, but the most forward-thinking in the business are starting to reverse this equation. “In a way, the CD is what destroyed the music business,” says Joe Mardin, a musician, producer, arranger, and engineer. Mardin grew up in the music business; his father was Ardiff Mardin, the legendary producer of Hall & Oats, Norah Jones, Aretha Franklin, and others. “People were buying millions of CDs to replace their catalog,” says Mardin, explaining how industry greed ended up killing the Golden Goose. “There was this imperative that started to emerge: ‘You must fill up a CD with as much music as possible,’” Mardin says. “The rest was filler. You ended up with albums that were one or two hits and a bunch of wanna-be hits.” The record industry itself killed the album, trying to maximize profits.
via Record Labels Get Real – Dual Perspectives – Portfolio.com.
For those of you who are tracking tech, or are looking at the vision of the future, realize that this paragraph indicates a trend not an anomaly. What happened with music is happening with movies, with newspapers, with television, and anything where technology has allowed users to more specifically choose what they consume. It’s the change from People to a Person and your individual choices will, although still seemly small, can make or break industries.
Industries still have the upper hand, because humans don’t yet have full control over their decisions. Marketing works, in huge ways, and companies can still get people to consume without a person really believing they were manipulated, however as industries get smarter so do we. Indeed a Person is faster then industries are insofar as a armada of large ships is slower to change then many nimble ships are.
Look towards cell phones and communication networks to be next in this arena. I also be willing to bet other manufactured goods are likely to be hit within the next decade or so, as micro-manufacturing begins to take off and leverage just-in-time delivery.
