Big labels to blame for woes

To hear the music industry fat cats tell it, the end is near, the sky is falling, cats and dogs will soon begin living together and Britney actually will be seen wearing underpants.

Basically, you’d better hope your britches are brimstone-proof.

Sure, on the surface, the stats seem grim.

CD sales are down by 19 percent this year, continuing a precipitous downward trend this decade. In 2000, 785.1 million albums were sold. This year, the industry is on pace to move about 415 million units, a whopping 47 percent decline.

Digital sales are up 60 percent, but it hasn’t been enough to offset the loss in CD sales.

“Everyone was kind of shocked when the year started out with a 20 percent drop,” says Ed Christman, senior retail correspondent for Billboard magazine. “I think by the end of the year, the overall album picture will be down 13 percent to 14 percent.”

But it’s not really as grim as it sounds.

In reality, for consumers and musicians, the times have never been better. Touring grosses continue to rise — in 2006, acts brought in $2.8 billion, a 35 percent increase from the year before — and that’s most bands’ real source of revenue.

Plus, with MySpace and various file-sharing services, a wider array of bands is being heard and some indie labels have seen sales rise in recent years.

So who’s really hurting? The four major labels, those four horsemen of the apocalypse whose woes are entirely of their own doing.

First, when file sharing started becoming widespread, instead of coming to an equitable agreement with sites such as Napster, they stubbornly refused to negotiate with anyone and lost a crucial window of opportunity to legitimize online music swapping and earn royalties, preferring instead to file lawsuits against little old ladies and Scooter in the college computer lab for downloading the latest Phish LP.

And then there was the morass they helped make of the airwaves. By teaming with corporate behemoths such as Clear Channel, they turned radio into a pay-for-play quagmire, where getting songs on the air became so cost prohibitive, only major labels could afford to be heard.

This greatly reduced the pool of acts that got played, and as a result, radio became hopelessly stale and people began to look elsewhere to hear music, such as the Internet or satellite radio, mostly benefiting indie and under-the-radar acts.

And then there was the majors’ business model itself: After the blockbuster success of the likes of Britney and ‘N Sync, they impatiently began to chase the quick buck with one prefab act after the next.

These days, some bands are dropped before their debut album is even released if the first single doesn’t take off, despite the fact that star acts as disparate as Kiss and the Goo Goo Dolls took several albums to hit it big.

So really, who cares if this fading breed is on its last legs?

Like the Edsel, the Flowbee and Tara Reid’s career, some things were meant to die.

Jason Bracelin’s “Sounding Off” column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com.