More Music Choices Creates Fickle Fans

Just about every streaming or download music service these days has at least 20 million songs available to choose from, and some have even more. This is great for the consumer in that the choices are enormous, but there's also a negative component it brings as well.

Mark Mulligan's Music Industry Blog post shows that because of all these choices, people are actually listening to their favorite music less than ever before.

When people purchased music in the past, be it either vinyl, CD or download, they tended to listen to it over and over first because they paid for it, but also because it was the only new music they could get on demand. With new music now available at your fingertips, this is no longer the case thanks to the short attention span of just about everyone today.

What this seems to mean is that fans now have a shorter-term relationship with the artists they like than every before. If you listen to a song or an artist over and over, you tend to identify more. That's no longer the case, so it means that there are fewer deep fan-artist relationships now being built.

This has long term implications in that 5 or 10 years down the road there won't be as many artists capable of filling an arena or drawing a festival crowd - obviously not good for the business.

Mulligan also makes the point that because there is so much mediocre music now available, it's becoming more and more difficult for quality music to rise above the clutter.

The only saving grace is that music follows technology. While streaming may be the distribution method of choice right now, something new could completely rewrite the music business as we know it and make us throw the above out the window.  Tomorrow's music and music industry will likely be quite different than what we see today.

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How The Music Industry Created Its Own Worst Nightmares

Once a sector committed to the bleeding edge, the recorded music business has gone from an industry adept at incorporating the latest technology into its products to one that’s become its own worst enemy by its refusal to adopt and adapt until its too late. Over the last 30 years, not only has the industry made a series of grim mistakes that has emboldened its competition, in some cases it has even created it.

For the better part of a hundred years the recorded music business had an impressive track record of staying on top of the freshest technology. From adopting the vinyl record to replace the fragile shellac discs that were its original core business, to welcoming the cassette and its new-found portability, to the random access and digital sound of the CD, the industry managed to rise to greater and greater sales heights with each successive tech breakthrough that it incorporated. 

But a series of short-sighted mistakes starting in 1981 have turned the industry from the master of its own domain to one that’s now primarily reactionary, with each latest response putting it deeper and deeper in a hole as it loses control of its own destiny. Where once the industry controlled every aspect of its business, now it has ceded control of virtually all of it, but especially the distribution of its products.

This has occurred due to many factors, but historians will look back at three major turning points that altered the industry’s fate. 

The Rise Of MTV

Up until 1980, recorded music was an ecosystem totally run by the major record labels. They were responsible for creating the product by finding and recording the artists, to manufacturing the product in its own manufacturing plants, to distributing the product to a series of retail stores, to promoting the product via print media and especially radio. The record label was at the center of each of these activities, none of which could progress without its approval. The money flowed and life was good.

But by 1980 the industry was in a major doldrum thanks to a backlash against the disco era and a general spending malaise. Luckily it was soon bailed out by new musical trends (punk and new wave), and an upstart cable television network called MTV.

Suddenly there was a new way to promote music and every label jumped in feet first as viewers and record buyers couldn’t get enough of watching videos by the artists they loved. Soon, a new stable of MTV-ready stars was created, the CD was introduced, and music consumers were buying more product than ever before, with MTV at the center of it all. Read more on Forbes.

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A Look Into The Music Industry’s Crystal Ball

“Crystal Ball, Crystal Ball, tell me things as you think they will be.” The great thing about the music business now is that, unlike previous eras, it’s rapidly shifting and morphing at a faster pace than ever. That makes it difficult for some to keep up, more difficult for others to adapt, and pretty near impossible to predict what will happen ten years from now. That said, there are a number indicators that allow us to look into the near future and take an educated guess at what we may see just a few years down the line. Allow me to gaze into my crystal ball.

Streaming will become the primary way that most people consume their music. We’re only at the beginning of the streaming era of music and there’s a lot of room for growth. World-wide there were only 28 million paid subscribers of streaming services last year according to the latest IFPI digital music report, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of music consumers on the planet. More and more people are discovering just how useful the access model is as compared to the ownership model. It doesn’t take long to realize that your digital storage filled with a library of songs can’t compete with having access to 10+ million songs anytime and anywhere.

But there will be fewer outlets that deliver it. Right now streaming is a part of the industry that’s completely upside down financially. None of the major platforms, Spotify, Pandora, Beats Music, Slacker, etc., turn a profit yet, instead playing for the big score down the road when the economy of scale flips their way when enough new users sign up. Unfortunately by that time it will be too late. Apple will have entered the game with their own streaming service that will play on all platforms, and will be able to convert its massive existing customer base into monthly paying customers. Amazon will be in the game too, and Google will intensify it’s already potent efforts (perhaps with a separate new YouTube component). Read more on Forbes.

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The Music Industry Moves Kicking and Screaming Into A Streaming World

One thing about the music industry is that it likes to be comfortable. Life was so easy for about 50 years as the way business was conducted hardly ever changed. The label found an act, made a record, sold it to retail and promoted it through radio. Publishers and songwriters went to the mailbox and collected their checks. Boy, are those days over.

Just about the time the industry was getting used to digital downloads as the center of its financial universe, the business model is changing once again as streaming becomes the consumption method of choice for music lovers everywhere. The genie’s out of the bottle, the cows are out the barn, and the music files are off the hard drive.

Nielsen SoundScan’s numbers for 2013 now show that streaming was up 32 percent, while digital download sales were down about 6 percent. Folks, from this point on this disparity will continue to grow, and by leaps and bounds I might add, and you can take that to the bank.

Once again, let’s state the obvious - people prefer convenience when it comes to technology, and streaming is so much more convenient than any other type of music consumption method that there’s no contest. You’re going to see streaming explode for real in 2014, and those SoundScan numbers are going to look tiny when we look back this time next year. Read more on Forbes.

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Chuck D's 5 Tips For Music Industry Survival

Chuck D has been one of the most influential rappers ever, acting as a spokesperson for the state of the urban black man through his powerful lyrics in Public Enemy. In a series of tweets, Chuck lays out his tips for music industry survival. These apply to everyone trying to make it in the business.

Rule #1: Don't let other people's money distort your goals. Their shit has nothing to do with you. Be thankful and work with what you got. 

Rule #2: Don't spend more than you make.What you don't know you'll have to partner up or pay for. What you save is what you make. 

Rule #3: Celebrity and artists are two different things. You can be a celeb, but that's like winning the lottery. Make yourself valuable to something. 

Rule #4: It's easy to make recordings now but learn how to perform your art very well. So well that when people see you they undeniably have no words. 

Rule #5: Always top yourself. Put the AWE in audience. If the crowd feels they can do better than you, why would they take the time and money to be bothered?

Sadly, Public Enemy seems to have fallen out of fashion these days, as boasting about how great you are seems to top social commentary. Still, Chuck's words about the music business are wise and worth taking heed.

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The Music Business Is Not Dying

As all the various research and trade organizations begin releasing their 2011 sales figures, a number of them have jumped out for perfectly defining the state of the music industry today. Check this out:

• US album sales were up 1.3% last year, the first year since 2005 that's happened. 66% of these sales were CDs.

• There were 249 million albums sold in the US last year. People will tell you that the music industry is dying, but 249 million of anything is still a huge number.

• 75% of all CD sales were made offline. That means that people physically purchased the CD at a brick and mortar store or an event.

• 40% of all CD buyers are over the age of 45, which means that the demo that mostly grew up with CDs are the ones still buying them.

• Vinyl sales increased 37 percent in 2011, but only accounted for 1.2 percent of all physical sales. That doesn't mean that people who buy vinyl actually listen to it. Just like the old days, many still buy it for the cover and the artwork, and the trendiness (which is new).

• Rock is the most popular genre of music, with 32 percent album share, while pop music represents 40 percent of all current digital tracks sold. Ninety-three of the 100 best selling vinyl albums in 2011 fall within the Rock or Alternative genres. I guess that means that the hip-hop and rap trend has run it's course.

• People who live in New York or LA buy more country records than those who live in Nashville by almost 2 to 1. Having just come from a speaking tour in Nashville, I can tell you first-hand that it's a very cosmopolitan music town, with country no longer the major part of the industry as it once was. That said, country music represents 13% of the total album sales.

• Digital country music sales are up 31% over last year. While it might have been true that country music lovers were slow to get into digital music, that's obviously no longer the case.

• Acts that perform at halftime during the Superbowl get an average sales bump of 555%. Critics may pan them and you might hate them, but you still buy them.

All these numbers (which mostly come from Nielsen Soundscan and the IFPI) show that the music business is still huge, is still extremely diverse, and is still as quirky as ever. It is changing, morphing, shifting, and evolving, but it is not dying.

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How To Reach Out to Industry Execs

As you might imagine, I get a lot of email from people asking me to critique or help them with their work. This is something that I love to do, but most days there isn't enough time for my own work, let alone something coming from someone else. It really does hurt when I realize 3 or 4 weeks later that I still didn't get around to listening to something. Rest assured that eventually I will get around to it, although not always in a timely manner.

That being said, you don't get something unless you ask for it, but there's a definite right way way to do it, and there are some reasonable expectations that you should have when doing so. Music Think Tank had a great article about this recently that you can read, but here's my version.

When you reach out to someone in the industry, remember that:

• They're busy people first and foremost. Most people in the industry are doing too many jobs at the same time. They're overworked and most likely underpaid and already have a lot on their plate. They're not sitting around waiting to hear from you because there's probably 10 things on their to-do list that they won't even be able to get to today. Consider yourself lucky if you happen to get a sliver of their time, but don't take it personally if you're rejected or ignored. Unless you have something to offer that fills one of their needs at that specific moment, they probably just won't be able to fit you into their already crowded mind. 

• They don't like people who aren't straight forward. Back when I was writing for magazines, I had a friend call me up and waste my time by beating around the bush hoping I'd suggest that he was awesome enough to write an article about him. I would have much preferred he just got right to the point and said, "I'm trying to get some press? What do I have to do to get you to write about me?" That why I could've either told him how or told him I couldn't, but he would've known a lot sooner and saved us both a lot of time. To this day I still don't want to talk to him because he turned me off that badly. People that are working in the industry are busy. Get to the point. 

• It can never be about the money. If you're calling someone up and looking for help, a job, or even a record deal, the last thing you need to discuss is  money. It's an instant turn-off and will immediately get you dismissed as someone who doesn't care enough about the right thing. This is an industry that requires you give a lot more than you take, and do so gladly. Do that, and the rewards will come by themselves. The only time you're in a position to talk money is if someone calls you!

• They may not be able to give you what you're looking for. You may be looking for a critique or advice, but they just may not be able to supply it. Why? Everything and everybody in the business is somewhat unique, and the knowledge or experience that was required at one time in the past may no longer apply (especially in this Music 3.0 world). It could be that person doesn't have any better idea that you have, or that what they know is outdated (hopefully they're aware that that's the case).

• You need to have your elevator pitch ready.  Know what an elevator pitch is? It's a very focused and to-the-point presentation that should last the length of an elevator ride. Entrepreneurs looking for money develop their elevator pitches early in the process in the event they find themselves on an elevator with someone who might have the ability to fund their company. The fact is, everyone should have an elevator pitch that describes who they are, what they do, and what they're looking for in 2 minutes or less. This takes some time to get right, but pays dividends even if you find yourself pitching outside of an elevator. If you've enticed the person you're pitching to enough, they'll ask for more details.

Remember these points the next time you want to reach out to someone for some help. In this case, a little bit of knowledge really can go a long way.

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The Music Industry Is Bigger Than You Think

Whenever someone mentions the phrase "the music industry" we immediately think of record labels and music sales, be they via a digital file, CD, vinyl record, cassette or some other method where we listen to songs. The business is a lot bigger than that, especially if we look at all the different categories.

The IFPI (the world-wide music industry trade association), recently released some figures from 2010 which shows the real reach that the business has. Here are the following revenue streams of the world-wide music business, from highest to lowest:

$32.5 Billion: Radio advertising

$27.6 Billion: Recorded music retail sales

$25.0 Billion: Home Audio systems

$24.2 Billion: Portable digital players

$21.6 Billion: Live Music

$16.4 Billion: Music Instrument sales

$9.0 Billion: Music and television magazine advertising

$4.8 Billion: Publishing

$1.7 Billion: Performance rights

As you can see, it's a huge industry worth $168 billion. Sure, there are a lot of facets to it, but it just goes to show that there are also a lot of consumers out there who are still willing to part with their cash in exchange for something to listen to, play or enjoy music with. Don't believe what you read about the music business dying. The numbers don't lie.

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What The Music Industry Looked Like On 9/11/01

Here's a look at what the music business looked like on September 11, 2001, thanks to Digital Music News. We've come a long way since then.

• There were 5 major labels: Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), and Universal Music Group.  

•  CDs accounted for 94.5 percent of overall recorded music sales, according to the RIAA.  Cassettes still accounted for roughly 2.5 percent of the total, LPs were roughly 0.2 percent, and album downloads were essentially nonexistent. 

•  The labels were on their way to concluding their third-best year ever (the best being 1999), though they were also in the early stages of a decade-plus decline.  

•  Napster was just days away from concluding a partial, multi-million dollar damages settlement with major label groups. The application had been shutdown in July.  

•  Kazaa was about 6 months old.

•  The iPod was still two months from being announced. The iTunes Music Store was still about 20 months away.

•  Justin Bieber was 7 years old.  Justin Timberlake was 20.  Daniel Ek was 18.  

•  Mariah Carey's Glitter Soundtrack was released on September 11th.  The movie arrived at theaters a few weeks later.

•  The best-selling album on September 11th was the self-titled release from Aaliyah.  The singer had recently passed on August 25th, 2001.

•  The song with the most spins on radio on September 11th was "I'm Real," by Jennifer Lopez.

• Janet Jackson, Sade, Aerosmith, and Dave Matthews Band were dominating the live circuit.  U2 was preparing the North American leg of its Elevation tour, and actually planned the official announcement on September 11th.
  
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14 Rules For The New Music Industry

I came across this post on the Tuncore blog recently entitled "New Rules For The Music Industry." It doesn't encapsulate the entirety of Music 3.0, but does get most of the points.

1) STOP ASKING FOR BIG ADVANCES – Understand that the economics of the business have changed for both the artists and the labels.  The goal for artists and labels must be the same: create sustainable working relationships for both parties.  Disproportionate advances only add tension (economic and otherwise) to an already tense dynamic. Create financial working relationships based on realistic expectations of ROI.

2) EDUCATE YOURSELF – It’s no longer acceptable (or charming) to be the un-informed artist who doesn’t know the difference between a mechanical royalty and a mechanic.  You can’t claim that you’ve been taken advantage of by anyone at this point; the information you need is out there, and it’s not that hard to find.  Learn it, once you have this knowledge you can then make informed decisions and decide if the other entity is doing its job.  Not to mention, the labels etc already know this info and so should you.

3) TAKE RESPONSIBILITY – Stating that there is any person or thing standing in the way of you and success is a cop out.  No longer can you say, “If only my records were in stores, people would buy them,” or, “If only people could hear my music they would love it.”  The gatekeepers have vanished; the gates are open…go through them.

4) TAKE ACTION – Waiting for a booking agent before you tour? Waiting for a producer before you make a recording? Waiting for a label before you distribute or promote your music?  Guess what, someone else isn’t waiting for anyone, and he or she is leaving you in the dust.  The worst thing you can do is nothing.

5) SELL – Get over the fact that you’re the artist, and asking people for money in exchange for your art is awkward.  The reality is that if your work is good, people will want to compensate you for it. You must not only give them the opportunity to do so, but make it easy for them.  Be clear and transparent, and tell your customers that your music is valuable, and that if they want to ensure that you are able to keep creating the music that they enjoy, that they must pay for it. Then give them a wide variety of things to buy at different prices.

6) GIVE WITHOUT ASKING FOR ANYTHING IN RETURN – It’s not all selling, of course, and we are all in this together.  Look for ways to help other artists. Share information, share resources.  This is not a zero-sum game; the overall pie can expand, and we will all benefit proportionately when it does.

7) DEMAND ANSWERS – if you don’t understand something, ask.  If the person you ask can’t give you a clear, understandable answer then he or she is either clueless or trying to hide something.   Demand a clear, understandable answer or walk away from the deal.

8)  MARKETING DOES NOT ALWAYS EQUAL SUCCESS – The major labels spent hundreds of millions of dollars marketing and promoting bands.  Only 2% of them succeeded, the other 98% were deemed failures.  If marketing = success, they would have had a 100% hit ratio.  The reason an artist succeeds is because the music caused reaction.

9) LEAD TIME FOR STREET DATES MATTER LESS – It’s not like the old days where you only had a limited time for prime real estate in a retail store and if the CDs did not sell they would be returned.  In the new model you can release music today, and market later, with little detrimental impact.

10) IT’S ABOUT A CONSTANT STREAM OF MUSIC AND MEDIA, NOT A ONCE A YEAR ALBUM RELEASE ­  – The new world moves fast.   The best strategy is to roll out songs, videos, pictures, blog postings, tweets and anything else you can think of on a constant basis.  This keeps your fans engaged and stops you from losing momentum and going stale.

11) IT’S GLOBAL – The new music industry is a global one.  At the click of a button your music is available to buy, share, stream and download around the world.  Keep this in mind when you think about where your money is being held, generated and how to get it.

12) YOU ARE NOT POWERLESS – Music is not food, shelter or clothing, but everyone likes it and needs it.  The music industry currently generates around $30 billion dollars a year.  The entities and people getting this money is shifting from the legacy companies to you.  Within another five years the collective power of you will be bigger than any of them.  You have the power to change things, and you already are.

As just one example, in the past two years, TuneCore Artists have earned over $170 million in gross music sales and have sold over 400 million songs by paid download or stream.  TuneCore Songwriters have earned over another $120 million dollars.
As you sell more, they sell less.

13) DEFINE YOUR GOALS – Know what it is you are tying to accomplish.  Are you looking to be the next Vanilla Ice or just sell some music without touring?  Is your goal corporate sponsorships or having others cover your songs?  Whatever it may be, have a goal in mind and then work towards accomplishing that objective.  With that one conquered, you can move on to the next.

14) DON’T EXPECT SOMETHING FOR NOTHING - It’s going to take work to make things happen.  Either you need to do the work or you must hire someone else to do part, or all of it, for you.  If you understand your rights, how money is made, and how much you should make, you can make educated decisions.

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Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

Proof That The Music Industry Is Not Dead

You keep hearing that the doom and gloom about the music industry, and indeed it's in a terrible funk, but here are a couple of graphs from the RIAA (the record label trade association) itself that prove that music is in fact more popular than ever.

The charts provide an excellent overall picture of exactly what kind of music product has been sold since 1973. These charts take into account all kinds of music distribution formats, from vinyl albums to cassettes to 8 tracks to CDs to digital downloads.

The first chart just looks at albums.

You can see that the the best years were from 1995 until 2001 with the peak of almost 1.1 billion units in 2000. By 2010 sales were down to about a third of the peak sales, but digital album sales were increasing at a fairly rapid pace.

Now lets look at singles.

As you can see, the single was virtually a dead format by 2003, but once iTunes came online, the single took off into the stratosphere sales-wise to 1.1 billion in 2010.

What's the take away? In 2000 the music industry had it's best year ever with about 1.2 billion units (albums and singles) shipped. In 2010, the music industry shipped 1.4 billion units (combined albums and singles). The difference is that most of them were singles, which threw off a tenth as much revenue.

If you look at it from a revenue standpoint, the music industry is suffering, but we already knew that. But if you look at it from sheer popularity proven by overall units shipped, you can make a case that it's more popular than ever. The average fan just won't pay for filler anymore, nor does she have to - and that's the biggest difference of all.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The Music Industry Is Not Dying

There's a lot of doom and gloom about the music business out there, and I've certainly been responsible for my little piece of it. But if anyone thinks the music business is really dying, they're absolutely wrong. It’s evolving, morphing, transmuting, adjusting, adapting, reconfiguring, transitioning and progressing; but it’s not in any danger of dying.

While it’s absolutely true that album sales are down 65% from 2000, that still means that 326 million where sold in 2010 in the US alone. That’s a lot of music being sold. 2010 also saw nearly 1.2 BILLION digital downloads sold. Again, a huge amount. Internet radio service Pandora has over 80 million registered users and 30 million active users a month, which is almost one in ten Americans. As of the beginning of 2010, more than 278,000 artists sell their music at CD Baby and over 5 million of their CDs have been sold online to customers. So there are a lot of people out there willing to part with their hard earned money for music.

Now comes the best reason to believe in the industry. As of last week, British singer Adele has sold over 1 million albums in the UK alone since her album 21 was released at the end of January, plus another 325k in the US (check out my Big Picture production blog for an analysis of her hit "Rolling In The Deep." People are willing to pay for quality music; they just haven't seen or heard enough of it in a while to get really excited with their pocketbooks in big numbers like they used to.

Remember, the music industry only dies when people stop listening. See any evidence of that lately?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The State Of The Music Industry For 2010

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the association that represents the recording industry worldwide, recently released its Digital Music Report for 2010. In it was a lot of information that certainly put the state of the entire music industry in perspective, such as:

1) It's estimated that 95% of all music downloads are unlicensed, or 19 out of every 20. Spain has the highest piracy rate, and it's estimated that 45% of all Spanish Internet users get their music illegally.

2) Worldwide, digital music accounted for 29% of record label revenues last year, as opposed to 25% the year before. In the US, the percentage was much higher, with a full 50% of the record label revenues coming from digital sales. In Europe, digital sales grew by 20%

3) More than 400 legal music services now exist globally, 200 of them in Europe alone.

4) Global music sales were down 9% in 2010, while digital music sales were up only 6%. The total global revenue was $4.6 billion, which is about 10 times less than what Apple has in its bank account.

5) Box office sales of the top 50 tours dropped by 12% last year and the number of tickets sold declined. The revenue looks higher than it really is because the price of tickets have gone up.

6) Fewer new artists are breaking through globally. Total sales by debut artists in the global top 50 album chart in 2010 were just one quarter of the level they achieved in 2003

Now you can look at this report and see doom and gloom written all over it, but I'm going to give you a different perspective. The industry is changing and the big shakeout is in progress. You'll soon see many of the old guard drop away, and with them, their way of doing business. You'll see much of the big money that controls the business abandon it because it's no longer profitable. Good riddance to them.

In their place will be a new business and a new way of working. The new music business may never return to its former heights, but it will be better than ever and well worth the wait. New blood, new energy, new music, new excitement. Right around the bend.

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The Full "20/20" Show From 1980

A few weeks back I posted an article entitled "The Music Industry Crisis 30 Years Ago" that showed a clip from a 20/20 television news show back in 1980 about the music business. Only the first half of it was available as the second half was reportedly taken down by Universal Music.

Reader Brad Wilson took the initiative to reach out to the person that originally posted the piece (thanks, Brad!), who then posted the entire 20/20 show clip one more time.

Here it is in it's entirety. It's a hoot to look at the fashion, editing, production and opinions from that period, but it's also a little bone-chilling how close some things are to our current slice of the music industry as well.

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The Music Industry Crisis 30 Years Ago

While many may think that the music industry has only recently begun taking it severely on the the chin, it should be noted that 30 years ago, it was in the midst of a similar crisis. Sales were way down, everyone was panicking, and the industry was pinning their hopes on a shiny metal disc called a "laser video disc" to bring them back to profitability.

Here's a segment from the television show 20/20 from 1980 that sounds so eerily familiar. Take notice to the statement of Joe Smith, then the president of Elektra-Asylum records, a little ways into the video:

"Records, you don't have to buy to hear music. There's sensational equipment out there. There's great FM radio. There's enormous amounts of music out there, without having to buy a record. Counterfeiting, home-taping, and the failure of major artists to deliver records on some kind of regular basis."

Understand that this was before the creation of MTV and the CD, both of which eventually bailed the industry out.

The second half of the video is now being blocked due to a copyright claim from Universal Music. Speculation is that there's something in the report that Universal finds very embarrassing. We'll just have to wait until someone else posts it again.

Regardless, it's well done and interesting to look at everything from a historical perspective.

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What Really Makes Up The "Music Industry?"

Chris Castiglione wrote a thought provoking article over at Music Think Tank the other day regarding what really makes up "the music industry."

Chris cites a number of articles regarding the demise of the music industry as we know it, but postulates that the death of the industry depends on how you look at it. Until Music 3.0, the music industry revolved around the major and large indie record labels and their subsidiaries, with their trade organization (the RIAA) leading the way. The RIAA has long been the propaganda arm for the majors and those in the know would take their missives with a grain of salt. The further we get into M30, the more totally out-of-touch the RIAA (and hence, the majors) becomes with their pronouncements. That being said, it's foolish to believe that this is the totality of the music business.

In fact, there's more music being consumed than ever before, according to several recent studies, although it's being consumed in different ways and forms, which doesn't fit into the old Music 2.5 model at all. We all know it - everything has changed. The difference is that some of us change with the times and others (the major labels) don't.

So what is the music industry today? Certainly the major labels are a big part of it and still sell an enormous amount of product both digital and physical goods. That number is declining like  crazy (at least 10% a year) so the "industry" as we knew it isn't central to what the industry is today. Publishing is doing as well as ever and even growing a little (a fact hardly ever publicized) so that's not a factor either way. But parts of the industry that were just a rounding error a few years ago now have a significant impact on its overall strength.

The live concert business is growing slightly in revenue, but having a tough time selling tickets lately. Live Nation (soon to merge with Ticketmaster) and AEG have gone into the management and promotion business, cutting deals directly with the artists and bypassing agents and smaller promoters. That's become a bigger part of the industry than days past.

Music licensing is a bigger business than ever even though the individual fees have decreased. There are a lot more revenue streams thanks to the ever increasing number of cable networks.

Brick and mortar record stores and traditional broadcast radio have declined in importance in the "industry", but Internet radio and online music stores like iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and Spotify continue to grow. They're now a big part of the industry.

But  perhaps the largest part of the industry is the one that's the most difficult to count, and that's the thousands and thousands (maybe even millions) of independent artists that now have the ability to deliver their music directly to their fans, who consume it in silence, oblivious to Neilsen Soundscan ratings. That's the core of Music 3.0. Even though we haven't had a huge breakout from this group yet, you can be sure that's it's coming.

So the music industry has gone from being built around the major labels to a much more diverse group of related businesses. No one sector dominates like before even though they may be formidable. But the leveling of importance between the industry sectors continues as we speak. Music 3.0 is about artistic democracy, and democracy always comes slowly.