Thoughts on the DVD single... C/D etc.

Seriously, what the industry really needs right now is to come up with some sort of digital music system where Jimmy Musiclover can go into the "record store", go to a kiosk and upload two or three tracks for a few dollars, straight to their iPod or Nomad, or to a flash card. Free preview with the headphones, download on demand. Alternately, bring back the CD-3 for singles and start making them more widely available again, just like cassingles used to be, or 7-inch singles before that, and charge a reasonable amount for them...$5 at most, for 2 or 3 songs.

what i'd really really like to see is more DVD compilations - i mean how many music videos can you fit on one double-sided/layered DVD? A LOT. so more anthologies, more greatest hits, more albums on DVD - and really i'm not sure the DVD is going to save the single format itself as people should realise its not a practical enough use of the medium considering the capacity factor. also, in reality, how often do people watch their DVD singles? once and thats it i suspect (having downloaded or extracted the audio tracks or whatever). still i would love to be able to order DVDs of music videos that i chose/compiled myself via some website. i imagine obtaining licenses for DVD music vid compilations is a bit trickier than with just audio compilations (because the videos have their own rights issues??) but surely its feasible.

Sean I very much agree with your idea of the 3" cd being used for singles. It's cute, disposable in the same way that the 7" and cassingle always were (and at the same time weren't) and whatever savings the rec co's make on packaging can go towards keeping the FUCKING PRICE DOWN

What the industry needs right now is albums about which high school kids say to each other "holy fuck! every fucking song on this CD is good! I can't fucking believe it!" that come in creatively designed packages with bitchin' cover art and maybe some stickers or nifty drop-out cards printed on nice stock. Something, anything besides the "here's the single you've heard, the two you're gonna hear, ten unfunny 'sketches' and loads of filler" & variants. Pop-up cover art. Attempts to make genre-defining records instead of placekeepers. This won't happen, by the way.

personally yes i would, depending on the tracklisting. what i'm banking on is a conscious decision by hardware manufacturers to say 'ok, sell music is being sold to people in the DVD format with the video being the bonus, or vice versa' and introduce DVD players that are more like computer hard drives connected to your TV that basically just allow you to store a large number of DVD contents on the hard drive which you can then play and watch on the TV in the same way you queue digital music up on your PC's media player. of course the scope for that is huge as it includes TV and films and ANYTHING viewable on TV from a DVD (including games and applications). the ideal would be a TIVO style box with a DVD player combined. i'm sure this is already happening but its unlikely to take off for a couple more years yet, due to price and lack of REAL widespread interest.

The "industry" is never gonna solve their problems by endlessly re-tooling technology. They have a content problem, not a product-delivery problem. The whole "downloadin is killing the industry" is as much of a red herring as "home taping is killing the industry".

Album X by band Y on big indie label Z, based on the sales of previous albums of comparable quality/appeal expected to sell 100.000 copies @ $11 wholesale.

Variable costs: $5 a disc (manufacturing, royalties, distribution)
Fixed costs/"album budget": $500.000 (recording the album, shooting a video, advertise, send promos to journos, bribe radio stations etc)

Sell 100.000 copies, make $100.000 net profit
Sell 90.000 copies, make $40.000 net profit
Sell 80.000 copies, lose $20.000

Multiply these figures by 10 to get a typical "major label" case. On its own, selling "new" CDs is simply a shitty business - you need to make your money elsewhere. DVD's, publishing & licensing, advertising,etc etc. Which is pretty much where the industry makes its money nowadays.

One way out of this is what John is proposing: increase the quality of your music, so what once appealed to 100.000 people will now appeal to 120.000 people, 100.000 of whom will buy the album. This implies that if trends persist and more and more people will be downloading/pirating albums every year, music as a whole must become objectively better every year to keep up. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but that's a bit of an utopian thought.

My friend gets this promo thing called "The Cornerstone Player" every month, with tons of "indie" videos on a DVD and songs on a CD, it's sooo cool

That's why they need to change the delivery system; talking about "improving" the content is probably beside the point at this point and perhaps a little bit arrogant, because really, who decides what constitutes an improvement? So long as the industry exists as it is right now, with so much administrative overhead, there won't be a lot of thought into doing things that won't make money (ie. long term development of album artists, many of whom will never pan out). If you can minimize packaging and shipping costs by moving to a more compact format, that's certainly a step in the right direction if all you're going to be concentrating on is the singles artist. Getting rid of the aluminum altogether saves even more money. See, I'm more likely to bop into a store with CompactFlash card and spend $2 or $3 on a Missy MP3 than I am to buy the whole album on CD at $20 or whatnot, and I'm not particularly into chart hiphop. Hell, I might even drop $3 on a Nelly single. It's that sort of cheap speculative impulse purchase that is just not happening now; buying these songs now takes at least $5 to get the thing used, probably closer to $10 or $15, so in the end it's just easier for a good majority of people to say "fukkit" and download the thing for free.

Yeah, I really feel sorry for Coldplay and Norah Jones.