Stuart Bruce wrote:
CD sales across the board are dropping. This creates a vicious cycle of competition that means that major record labels are leapfrogging each other, always trying to push 'the next big thing' (because first albums tend to sell more than second and third albums)....
and...
Ultimately the reason that bands like the Orb get dropped are because they aren't selling as many records as the record company need them to, and while there are various factors to that...
There is a weird inability to scale back promotion and expenditure with the major labels. If your 1st album sells 500,000 and your second 100,000 they drop you, because they spend the same amount promoting both albums. If they spent 1/5th the money on the second one, it would be just as profitable per unit as the first, but despite this pattern happening to 90% of artists, they never learn from their mistakes - probably because promotional budgets are recouped from artist royalties. Another weird thing is that singles are now promoted for many weeks before release in order to pile up demand for a high entry into the charts. I do occasionally buy a pop single, but I have recently been going off tracks before they even reach the shops. Another factor is the self-inflicted bad value for money rules on CD singles, where you can only have 3 tracks totaling 20 minutes to qualify as a single (as opposed to 4 and 40 minutes). If the record companies deliberately give us worse value for money, of course sales will fall!
whole load of people out there who still don't have the bandwidth/time/knowledge to download MP3's, so surely the whole percentage fall can't be attributed to people who download this stuff!
Not the whole percentage fall. But a significant portion of it is caused by the availability of bootlegs.
Don't forget the drop in sales is caused by the gradual decline in people who are replacing old vinyl albums with new CDs of the same material. Once we have all repurchased the ones we want, that market collapses. I expect that will account for a far bigger drop in sales than bootlegging will - there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that bootlegging actually boosts sales, I know I have bought quite a few CDs because I have been able to hear enough of them via the net to know they would be a worthwhile purchase. - Andy_R