Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again 

 stevesaccone 

interesting...

Nicole Skoff 

What would labels do now?

Look up the 360 deal. They basically have acces to every penny that comes into the artist pocket. Before they only took a share of the CD's sold. Now they take most of the share of the tickets sold per show, merchandise with the artist's name, face, etc. It's a shame.

Invest in mobile french fries vendor trucks....

or hot dogs (to be converted in ice cream in summer)

That year (1999) one of my best buddies had his fortieth birthday party. All the guests where music biz professionals, many from the majors. He had a guy at the door taking musical requests from the arriving guests. Then later in the evening when all the requests had been played, my friend gets up from the table and explains that all their requests where downloaded from Napster in less than the time it took to have the pre dinner drinkies. Most of them had never heard of Napster and some of them flat out refused to believe him. From there everything went stright to hell (with the biz, not the party) that is :)

This article is very far from the truth. The music industry was very well aware of the coming change from CD and had been for many years (most of them sold-off/outsourced CD-manufacturing in the early 90s', at least in europe).

And remember that the services the record company provides is financing (paying advances so you can finish the songs), rights management and promotion. The media it is distributed on have never been important.

I still remember the discussion in the industry in the late 80's. Everyone was aware that the next thing was downloading (even though this was before the mainstreaming of the internet) and some sort of re-writeable hardware (disk, memory stick, whatever). One main spot of the discussion was payment and privacy - systems to handle payment without "big brother" knowing exactly what you listen to, they didnt beleive the public would accept what they today obviously are accepting.

What we are seeing today is the disappearance of mass-culture and replacing it with highly commersialized entertainment controlled by the ad -buyers. A small percentage will leak/leap from mass-culture to more exclusive culture (that is not under threat since there exist more deicated listeners). The internet plays a big part in this and especially Google which today has a monopoly to finding anything on the web - Googles refusal to index any site that has a businesmodell the does not benefit Google is a big problem here.

AS a person who has been in negotiations with all the major labels on bhalf of telcos and various tech companies since the turn of the century, I can tell you that you are completely wrong about this. While they may have been aware that a change was coming, they never understood that it would completely change the power structure and drastically reduce their distribution power. The arrogance and attitude they all displayed just when they should have been trying to stay ahead of the curve was considerable. I guess a good comparison is how people go into denial about the impact of global warming.

This sounds about right,

MP3 technology was theorized in the late 70's and recieved it's first grants for r&d in the early 80's.  The writing was on the wall. 

As far as how the industry handled it, it's kind of amazing how poorly it all went down. Another thing to remember is this happened relatively right after the Format change to CD, where an entire population literally replaced the majority of their already purchased content with the same thing...in a new format. 

I believe the denial is now on the part of the consumer and the entire industry on the whole, as it's content creators that are finding themselves in the precarious position right now...

More on that here..

http://thequietus.com/articles/06318-how-the-music-industry-is-killing-music-and-blaming-the-fans

All too true. What is potentially optimistic is how creative musicians are getting with the brick wall of the label system. I see indie musicians finding other ways to "brand" themselves - doing workshops, integrating with writing programs and educational outreach - in short, they're doing all the same things that musicians from all genres are doing to find ways to make a living.

And I agree that the writing has been on the wall for a long time - the blip that was huge sales in the industry was simply that, and it's gone now. We're back to an industry that has never really been financially viable as a corporate enterprise. This is something that music history teaches us but we don't want to hear (especially the label execs).

exactly what i saw, and couldn't beleive they couldn't understand or project themselves in the future....

 Jj Haggar 

lol... seems like a lifetime ago.

 eric eitel 

sweet memories, I assume ;)

Jonathan Cohen 

one word: wow

hmm...i must've been an early adopter. i remember having mp3s for the slim shady lp AND the britney spears single.

then again, i remember when one could visit an angelfire- or geocities-hosted page and click on a plain old "a href" to an mp3 stored on *their* servers.

am old.

Yeah, I remember that, too.  MP3s were already out there on different sites like Angelfire and Geocities (which were basically the precursor to MySpace).  But, it wasn't until Napster came along and made it so easy to share music and for everyone to have access to a seemingly endless amount of music that the game shifted.

What's funny is that if the major labels had been the ones to create Napster instead of some punk kid, things might have played out differently.  Instead, they were caught snoozing.

I remember in 1996, has set up (one of) the first french website with audio, strictly for uncharted artists.... real audio, lol...  In that time, it was sooo easy to get authorization from DA and producers even in major labels, for their smaller or personal projects... a few month/years later, came mp3.com, napster, and that became a completely different picture... napster - or more exactly mp3 - is like the meteorite that extincted the dinausors... :-D

 Dove 

Seems so long ago.

Imagine a world with no new music. 

We're headed there, for there is getting to be no incentive to create for most artists.

Think not, look back and tell me where are we now. If you're an Indie like me, you know.

Nostalgia is the killer of innovation.

What does that even mean?

Jackie Liu 

WOW.

The record companies claimed CDs were more expensive to produce hence the high price.  Yet even when CDs fell to pennies (or cents) to produce, their retail price did not drop.  No wonder the record companies was enjoying such healthy profits :)   Bless them...

ahhh... I remember the days well.