Saturday, September 24, 2005

Movies, Newspapers, and Maybe Even Record Companies...

...Will be a thing of the past, so says this columnist for PC Magazine. And it is awfully hard to refute his argument. As for record companies, I think they're going to have to do some serious downsizing as well. Gone are the days when a record company could put out an album with three or four good songs, six or seven other "filler" (i.e. substandard) songs, and expect to make $13 gross profit off of the CD sale. Online internet stores like iTunes, with 30 second snippets of songs for sale for the low price of .99 cents per, are eating the record industry's lunch; people are buying the quality tracks and leaving the filler behind. Couple that with the ability of bands to now sell their product over the internet and bypass their record company (Pearl Jam, par example), and the record companies on the whole are in an even bigger quandary. Thirdly, with the advent of computer recording software (ProTools, Logic Pro, Reason), it is no longer a huge cash outlay for the unsigned musical artist (me) to produce professional sounding recordings at a tiny fraction of the price of recording in a big recording studio.

About twenty years ago, every town on Long Island had its own movie theatre. Those days are long gone, eradicated by the ten movie multiplexes situated around the county. The theatres were smaller, but the choices were more, and the profit margins were higher. And now, according to the author of the linked article above, even those are in jeopardy. In the same light, I feel that the advent of rap is the equivalent of the multiplex: there's a lot of product, and it is more cost effective to produce (just a rapper, a drum machine, and a sampler are needed), and it also represents the downgrading of the music experience. (It is not music, as music is played by musicians, not people who rhyme in ghetto slang over a sampled beat, but that's an argument for another time. I take that back; there is no argument.)

It also represents the end of mass produced music by corporate entities.

And none too soon.

2 comments:

Ayaz Yasin said...

This dude is lame! He wanna yell loud af while Wiz Khalifa talking.. GTFO here with that bull.
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Ayaz Yasin said...

the thing is, journalism has to be free. or else that creates a class of informed vs uninformed people based on your ability to pay for it. what we need is to find a way to stop rewarding greed, and start rewarding 'caring about stuff.'
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