does the internet kill music sales by increasing interest in past music at the expense of new music?

err, "kill new music sales" should the title read

The companies losing money because of the internet own the royalties on lots of old music too.

the average price of a cd went up two bucks from like the 90s to 00s, not even sure what it is now....

i find this dubious

doobie-ous, morelike.

no, it's actually spelled dubious

I don't understand why the internet would necessarily increase interest in past music rather than new music.

I could definitely agree. I wouldn't be as knowledgeable about (or just straight up into) music without the internet. Piracy is one obvious way - not only because of the sales it takes away. It's now easier for us to find out about - AND access - music we'd have to dig through in record stores for. It's why I discovered Talking Heads and Aphex Twin in high school and college. Even more acutely, it's how I troll around on message boards reading about old Stax compilations, African music, Blondie, which is the best Dylan or COstello record to buy, etc. I'm young - my limited budget would have made it hard to buy enough music to develop my tastes into the state they're in today. Without the internet, I'd also have found much less of it. It's increased my interest in new music, sure, but I'd be buying more new mainstream BMI artists' shit if I weren't busier developing a musical background I've actually enjoyed. Also, pirated music is pretty easy to amass and sort through for the good stuff, unfortunately.

Much of my collection I'd attribute to the internet falls into a few categories. 1) Weird shit - foreign bands, Dan Deacons and Gang Gang Dances, noise, techno (which, if you've ever approached as a beginner, is hard as hell to get into, given that good stuff and bad stuff all usually share similar album covers and non of them are really familiar). And 2) Old shit - mostly stalwarts, like the Smiths, James Brown, Pixies, Orange Juice, Gang of Four, Built to Spill, Smiths, Costello, Velvet Underground, Al Green, Cure. I'd have known and recognized some of these names, but I got to experience more through both internet research and downloading. Both the "weird" stuff and the "old" stuff are fringe areas to a typical mainstream listener that I wouldn't necessarily have the time, money, or facility needed to get into them in depth.

To answer Bimble, I'm thinking of new music put out by the big companies, which are the bulk of record sales. I've definitely discovered a lot of new music through the internet and gone ou and bought more because of it. Still, I can see old music eroding a lot of profits in the record industry, which is how at least I'm interpreting the question. New (and better) music, usually independent or from smaller companies by nature, is hopefully a consequence of the internet as well.

* I mentioned the Smiths twice, had a typo, and meant to say "usually from independent or smaller companies" toward the end. Such is life.

it's these sort of minor errors that are killing music sales

This argument makes a certain kind of sense. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, our access to music was like a funnel, with the wide mouth being the present moment (double fistful of current major label acts in every genre), and the narrow end trailing off into the past. As you got farther and farther away from the now, fewer and fewer period-representative musical options existed in easily accessible form in the consumer marketplace. This was a simple function of economics and media: distribution, air time and shelf space cost money, records and tapes were bulky and fragile. While there was certainly money in a well-curated and exploited back catalog, most of a label’s promotional dollars had to go to here-and-now stars and the would-be stars of tomorrow. Therefore, the past became smaller and smaller in the distance. Given 20, 30 or even just 10 years, the vibrant and complex musical cultures of any given era were reduced to an ever-shrinking handful of token, supposedly representative big names that most people knew and that you stood a decent chance of finding in your local shoppe. As a result, if you were really engaged with music, if were interested in it as something other than a sparsely populated museum of familiar "greats", you were probably primarily engaged with contemporary musical culture.

Of course, diehard fans and scholars kept tabs on the obscurities, and the canonical stars of the past weren’t exactly fixed in their orbits. The deck was always being shuffled and reshuffled, but economics and the nature of the existing media still made the past functionally small relative to the present. That’s no longer the case. Anyone with even a modicum of curiosity now has access to a cabinet of curiosities that eclipses the wildest fantasies of the most compulsive and expert late twentieth century sound-hoarder. Where once the past was small, it eclipses the present, all those bygone eras suddenly reborn -- more dense, inviting and accessible than they ever were in life.

I don’t know that this is hurting the music of the present day, though I think we’ve become momentarily overawed by the past and are going through this weird, conservative culture-bubble as a result. But it’s undeniably affecting modern music and probably the marketplace for it, too.

this question only works if you think that everybody should be allowed to break the law

all of the new (post-2004) music I've purchased in the last year or so is because I learned about it either from a movie score (via netflix) or from these boards - I don't listen to radio anymore, and I don't watch TV

so otherwise I wouldn't have paid for jack of all shit new records - the majority of my music $$$ still goes to old stuff, but that's because I never had the capability to just go "oh shit david axelrod and blue note" and run out and spend $30 on 70s non-canon jazz releases immediately

so the internet is responsible on me spending MUCH more money on music in 2007-8 than I would have otherwise, an order of magnitude, in fact

I remember reading something that posited the success of Amazon and magazines like Mojo and Uncut (in the UK) as symbiotic; people reading about old records could have them delivered two days later for the first time ever. That made a lot of sense.

yeah, for me, it's the symbiosis of threads about classic house and electric jazz and anybody willing to let me pay for a download of same

pretty much what you said upthread. i'm actually paying for most of the old records i'm digging into by way of rhapsody, nothing is compelling me to buy albums in a store other than amoeba nostalgia. i couldn't find a seksu roba album i had fond memories of through the usual channels and i just paid for a used copy and the album sucks.

what tom said. the more i download or explore blogs, the more i spend on music (even if i download even more).

but then i don't think either of us is really typical; we're voracious music consumers (of old stuff more than new perhaps) and won't be sated by a few downloads.

I don't understand why the internet would necessarily increase interest in past music rather than new music.

www.acclaimedmusic.net
www.rateyourmusic.com

...

This is almost too obvious but, where else would someone go to find more music if not the past? Internet or not, I think we'd be seeing a similar, if not the same, interest in older acts simply because the pop-charts (where t-rex, the cure, al green, james brown all resided once) are now flooded with poorly masked young adult product. There isn't a whole lot of industry interest in producing new and interesting music unless there's a way to tie in a tv show or commercial deal,etc. Our 'musicans' today are less music, more celebrity. I don't blame the internet for our lack of interest in new music - I blame the industry's lack of interest in our interests.

i'm sure this does have some impact but i question the attitude of younger people who then only seek out old stuff.

i mean in taking the interest away from new music. i'd argue the internet boosts sales of some older music if not the new.

I don't buy any new or old music any more - I just stream it on Seeqpod and Last.fm. I don't know how typical that is, but I have no intention of ever buying any music again. The very idea of buying music has dropped out of my psyche. Other people are having entirely different experiences - some are buying more than ever before; some are listening to only old music; some are listening only to certain kinds of music of a very narrow range; and some are exploring the music of other cultures deeply. Some people I know only listen to live music and demo CDs their friends have burned them of their own music. There are no clear patterns or trends.

What I'm thinking is that it's very hard to generalise about what people are listening to, or how they are listening to it, at this precise moment. The pattern may settle in due course.

CDs did this, not the internet.

Everything used to be out of print, all the time, near enough. I remember trying to buy the records that I read about, that are pretty canonical - Stooges, Gram Parsons, that kind of thing, and you couldn't get 'em. Then CD reissuing and back-catalogue exploitation kicked into gear, and there were huge stacks of two-for-one Funhouse and Grievous Angel CDs down at HMV Southampton.

The economics of keeping something in print on vinyl are much tougher than keeping CDs in print, so the range of past music available at any given time expanded enormously around the early 90s.

I can see that the internet expanded the information available, and makes buying old music much easier, as well as listening to it without paying for it, but it also makes it MUCH easier to hear new music, and to gain information about new music, and to buy it. You can just go to Beatport, check someone's chart and buy the whole thing right there. This would have taken much trainspotting expertise 15 years ago. Plus hypemachine, blogs etc.

I've just actually read contenderizer's post, and everything he says is true, but I think the advent of CDs were a big factor in the change he describes.

Then howcum all the second, third, fourth and never-where tier acts from the good old past, but trumpeted on ILM, are all still skint?

People! Stop buying all those Eagles records at Kay-Mart! Have a heart!

also, vinyl revival

Yeah, of all the music for sale in Pasadena, vinyl makes up about 0.5 percent. People, stop being vinyl snobs and scavengers! It's killing Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus!

I don't buy music any more. If I want something, I find it on a music blog search engine and download it. No, it's not legal and I'm struggling to understand why it doesn't feel wrong to me but it doesn't. I guess the whole paying-for-individual-bits-of-music model is kerput and it's just a matter of time before another model supercedes it, maybe a monthly fee bundled in with ISP subscription or something. In the meantime, we're living in some kind of no-man's-land.

maybe a monthly fee bundled in with ISP subscription or something

this is happening soon and people may not even have choice in it

I hadn't thought about the fact that this started with CDs, which seems indisputably true, but I do think that the Internet has accelerated it. I think that in the long-run an increased interest in old music is good for new music too. For example, the re-discovery of Robert Johnson in the '60s when his little known and long out-of-print recordings were reissued by Columbia in 1961 had a huge effect on the development of the folk and rock in that decade. Something similar is happening now, I think, with musicians being inspired by long-forgotten corners of music history.

I'm struggling to understand why it doesn't feel wrong to me but it doesn't.

haha, maybe because morality is learned?

True that a lot more used to be out of print. The example I always think of is Pet Sounds, which (I am pretty sure) was out of print for a few years prior to its original CD issue in the 1990. I remember reading about it and I wanted to hear it but couldn't, at least not easily (sure I could have found a used LP, but I was also lazy and didn't have a turntable at the time).

contenderizer, good post and good points.

Also, the internet's introduction of music as "free" upended music consumption trends not only because it's free and easy, but because it was the first time in a while that music was available at a price other than $10-$20 per album. Music was the one form of art that was priced relatively equally across most of its genres and forms. Sure, there were cassette singles, vinyl, box sets, rarities, but most of the time and for most people in the 90s-200s I was going home with some artist's work for $12.99, whether it was Jay-Z, Clash, or Weird Al. Besides being free, pirated music on the internet introduced a new price scheme per se to the market. Now the whole reason the cops are involved, the RIAA's lawyers are getting paid, and we're having this debate is because music isn't $12.99 anymore and no one knows what we should pay.

why do people think musicians/music companies deserve money?

You hang out here and think musicians don't deserve money?

they should quit whining and get real jobs.

So you're explicitly thinking that it's the non-major label ones that don't deserve money. I'd think you were joking but your first comment seemed pretty sincere.

"This is almost too obvious but, where else would someone go to find more music if not the past?"

Um… Major labels alone put out north of 30,000 albums per year. There's plenty of music out there now, enough that you'll never hear all of it.

"Internet or not, I think we'd be seeing a similar, if not the same, interest in older acts simply because the pop-charts (where t-rex, the cure, al green, james brown all resided once) are now flooded with poorly masked young adult product."

Why not just say you're old? T. Rex, Al Green, James Brown were all young adult music in their age.

"There isn't a whole lot of industry interest in producing new and interesting music unless there's a way to tie in a tv show or commercial deal,etc."

Broaden your conception of the industry.

"Our 'musicans' today are less music, more celebrity. I don't blame the internet for our lack of interest in new music - I blame the industry's lack of interest in our interests."

You mean boring old people music without vocorders? There's plenty of that around too.

I agree with whoever said this started with CDs, sorts. The melée of (commonly superfluous) deluxe reissues of shit didn't really take off until post-Napster tho, which makes sense in lieu of downloads.

The question now is: when the kids get tired of mining the past, what then?

Wait for the new kids to come along to mine the past?

sadly, I think you're right.

It is now easier to find, get, make, and buy new music than ever. I suspect the total revenue brought in by new music (including concerts, t-shirts, knick-knacks etc...) is greater than ever before, thanks largely to the internet, but music in general probably consumes a smaller percentage of discretionary income.

Look at it this way -- how easy is it now to start a band and amass an audience (however small it may be) versus say... 10-20 years ago?

There might very well be some interest in new music that is "stolen" by these vast repositories of the old, but obviously not to any great detriment.

The question now is: when the kids get tired of mining the past, what then?

Are you sure the kids are those who do?

Sure, yes, there are kids who do too. Like the sudden increase in Iron Maiden's and Metallica's popularity surely has to do with a new generation (strangely those new bands who have tried to mine this market haven't lasted long though - Darkness had one success album and no more while the other have mainly just been Eurovision one-hit wonders)

Moley's post makes me sad.

interesting argument. from my point of view, though: i listen to way more new music these days than i ever did pre-internet, because a) i've a constant stream of information about it (RSS feeds every morning from various sources and blogs; this place; excited e-mails and texts) and b) i can get hold of it so much more easily.

when i was a teenager/student with even less cash than i have now, i tended to buy second-hand stuff only. it was cheaper and, well, vouched for, if you like. i hardly ever go to record fairs or second-hand shops now. my interest in old music has waned somewhat, i'll admit -- i think these days i sort of think: "fuck it, there's so much of that anyway that i should really just concentrate on the new."

John Taylor of Duran Duran on why the internet may be stifling new music:

I became a teenager in 1972. In 1972, I was listening to music that was almost exclusively made in 1972. Some of it had been made in 1971, but that was about it, with few exceptions.

Something the internet has most definitely done is bring more music from more places and more eras into the hearts and minds of us all, but young people in particular, which is great.

Most students I know have an extremely broad appreciation of music. Far broader than I did. Obviously classic rock is very popular, but so too are all sorts of vintage and world music.

My stepson is at New York University (NYU) and he was telling me how he's currently into Cole Porter, music from the 1920s and swing music from the 40s. So the availability and accessibility of music on the internet today is truly incredible, and I applaud anything that can inspire interest or curiosity in anyone.

But this also means that those of us who before would have been looking towards the current culture for inspiration are now often to be found, like my stepson, in various backwaters of older music.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8347178.stm

Well I don't think this "trend" will last. New music will rebound as it adjusts to the influx of raw material. It's been a pretty traumatic decade, it's too soon to lament the state of new music. Seems perfectly logical that kids (and adults) venturing into mp3 for the first time would want to catch up on old music.

i don't think this "stifles" new music but otoh it's totally wack of how ignorant ppl are of current music given how up the same ppl are on current tv and movies.

the taylor article is amazingly lucid. i don't know why i wouldn't have expected as much.