Is The Future Of Music Really This Bleak?
Here’s an interesting article from the Chicago Tribune about album sales in 2008 and what it could mean for the future. Personally, I think it’s more evidence that the future is bright for the inventive independent artist.
[wpp keyword="recording studio" limit_page="2"]The Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit got rolling Sunday, an annual meeting of musicians, tech-heads, artist managers, academics and music-biz entrepreneurs. The summit’s forward-looking approach is all about making the best of the new reality created by Internet technology and how that might be affected by government policy decisions.
Sounds like heavy stuff. But wonkiness goes hand in hand with the myriad possibilities that await artists in a music industry very different from the one that existed a decade ago, before peer-to-peer file came along.
Further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists. Instead, it increasingly appears that recordings will be more like advertisements for opportunities that actually do make money: live performances, merchandise, licensing to movies, commercials and video games, ring tones, etc.
We”ll have plenty more in upcoming days, but as a backdrop for the summit, here are a few tidbits of information shared by publicist Ariel Hyatt about U.S. album sales in 2008:
- More than 115,000 albums were released
- Only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies
- A mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales
- Fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier
Further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists. Instead, it increasingly appears that recordings will be more like adverstisements for opportunities that actually do make money: live performances, merchandise, licensing to movies, commercials and video games, ring tones, etc.
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Bleak and creative depressing just the same!
Commerce destroying music…$Commerce and art don’t mix (One cant put a ‘price’ on the value of music…priceless!), and this on-top of the cursed loudness wars destroying music for the sake of $commerce, real sad I find this…Not all artists will be interested in all the mostly pure commerce stuff described there…Real depressing!