I recently read a very simple blog post, included in the newspapers “youth” section, describing in colorful summary the recent changes to the music industry. It got me to thinking, these changes are not only occurring in the music industry but in our entire culture, that this young man’s description on the music industry is applicable to a much larger, overarching change.
I remember in 2005 sitting at a university lecture about music appreciation, as part of an interdisciplinary communications course, thinking to myself how the future was going to look. I knew then that the mere fact of having access and or so many outlets to find new music was going to change the entire face of the industry, things were already in motion. The pure fact that I could download, illegally or legally, pretty much any album/track I wished caused my musical tastes to increase tenfold. I didn’t conceive of it then, as the aforementioned article in the local news does now in depicting the current state of affairs, that artists must now perform again. It is no longer acceptable to produce a studio album and have some talented producer “spruce” up the vocals/tracks; you have to sing for your supper, you have to be “talented”. Creating a much larger demand to see musicians live.
I have witnessed and continue to witness the benefit of these changes; qualitatively superior music that is cheaper, and my own willingness to attend concerts because the music is as it’s meant to be there. Everything is somehow more real or tangible. Top 40 radio, CDs and the predictability game have been slain; it is no longer possible to “push” music to the passive masses as they have become active. More so then losing profits on record sales (it’s been suggested this is a contemporary fallacy, now staunched) it is the loss of the power of predictability that angers and scares record company executives more so than anything else.
Sometimes ideas, like the ones presented on music in the paper, eerily coincide with information and debate found elsewhere in other adjacent areas of cultural life. The latest issue of Sight and Sound magazine addresses the film industry in a similar manner, the columnist Nick James suggests that UK based filmmakers might want to consider lobbying for lower ticket prices to combat the tide of illegal downloading of films in the country. To me his suggestion is all too familiar and widely applicable; it reminds me of precisely the same set of similar circumstances in 2005 pertaining to music. A quick educated guess is that film lags behind music simply because of broadband speeds, that if we hearken back to 2005 it took forever to get your hands on films you were looking for and then to download them, compared to now when it takes about 10-20 minutes (not to mention HD streaming), fast approaching the now instantaneous delivery of music, that was then precisely as film is now.
The film industry, just like the music industry, has suffered from qualitative problems from its product to its distribution methods. Both areas of interest I believe are now in their death throws. Living in Sweden where films are released months after their premiers elsewhere in the world provides illumination as to one reason for demand pertainting to downloading pirated films; it is of necessity in order to keep up with the global contemporary “lunch room” discussion that have migrated to the internet. This demand and activity shows that supply is not keeping up, distribution methods are far too archaic. There remains then the issue of availability of quality films; a scan of the local movie theatre, if you don’t live in a major metropolitan hub, will typically reveal limited choices that internet piracy does not suffer from. One can find the discussions online and then find the films just a few clicks away, removing the element of force feeding the “predictability complex” successfully acomplished when communication and mobility were a premium. In the end if the film industry is hemorrhaging money then I guess its acts and actors will simply have to begin performing once again, to sing for their supper, or improve upon the exhibiting experience.
