The Americana and roots music authority

what if we just stop putting out new music for awhile and see how it goes?

The past few weeks have been insufferable. Too much to hear and not enough time. I've probably added about thirty or forty new releases to my collection and almost every single one of them have been more than just merely good. Quite a few are enchanting, some are great. The rest are all damn good. Which makes it all so confounding to me.

Here's the headline from last week's Billboard Magazine:

Album Sales Plummet To Lowest Total In Decades

Sure...we all know music sales are down and out, but seeing it statistically in black and white is more than a little scary. Ed Christman who has been covering the record retail beat for a gazillion years had this to report:

For the week ending May 30, the U.S. music industry sold a total of 4,984,000 albums, according to Nielsen Soundscan. This figure, which includes new and catalog releases, represents the fewest number of albums sold in one week since Soundscan began compiling this data in 1994.

By comparison, album sales for the week ending May 31, 2009, totaled 5.76 million. The highest one-week tally recorded during the Soundscan era is 45.4 million albums, in late December, 2000.

That's quite a swing in nine and a half years...no? Forty million units off the mark for one week. Here's more:

The week's record low comes as the major record companies continue to reckon with a decade-long decline in sales, and as other prominent sectors of the industry, such as the touring business, go through sea changes of their own.

Live music performances being hit hard too? A friend wants to see Neil Young. Tickets were $200. She passed. Too bad...she could have bought an eight dollar hot dog, five bucks worth of pop and a t-shirt for forty bills and helped out the economy.

Can anyone here guess what the "music industry" response might be to this news? C'mon...anybody?

Universal Music's Jim Urie cites the low album total as "all the more reason why everyone in the industry should be focused on getting the U.S. Congress to introduce legislation that makes the Internet
service providers our allies in fighting piracy. Piracy is getting worse and worse and the government
needs to focus on that."

Oh Jim...please not this tired old conspiracy theory again. The problem isn't downloads, it's overload.

(Note: Urie is the guy who is spearheading a $10 CD price point and was quoted as saying something like research has proven that lower prices stimulate sales. Hey, you know...nice guy and all but he's a bit out of touch. Corporate offices will do that to you. )

There's simply too much good music out there now compared to the old days and consumers just can't find it anymore. They don't sell it at Best Buy or Walmart or Trans World... and at all the cool indie stores they are too busy selling used vinyl and posters. Starbucks can only promote a couple titles a month and the book stores are exiting music.

So my new idea is simply this: stop making music.

There's a huge surplus of great music. Let's make the consumer buy it all up before we give them one more new release. And while we're at it...no more concerts. We'll starve them of the live experience until they beg us to buy a $200 ticket and t-shirt.

Yes. Tongue. Cheek.

Anyway...here's just some of the stuff I've been checking out lately...not alphabetically:

-The new Mark Olson....July release
-Gary Louris at the Truck American Festival...he authorized the free download
-Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers/Mojo
-Inge Thomson...only available in the UK so far. She's golden.
-Emily Jane White
-Karen Elson...White Stripe dude's supermodel wife who sings like Neko Case I think.
-Tributes...the one for Shel Silverstein (did I spell that right?) and the indie lullaby thing.
-Jenny Whitely
-ones we discuss here: Joy Kills Sorrow/Crooked Still
-Chelsea Crowell....the daughter of those two.
-Peter Bradley Adams
-Phosphorescent
-A Weather
-Teenage Fanclub...yes yes yes...my favorite of them all.

Comment by Adam Sheets on June 10, 2010 at 10:16pm: Great post and I agree that there is simply way too much great music coming out right now for me to keep up and while price is definitely a factor in sales (that's common sense), it is far from the main factor. I wrote a review of Mojo, by the way, that I'll post here when the album is actually released.

Comment by Carol Rodriguez on June 11, 2010 at 9:07am: wow - i whined and was heard.... a hot dog maybe... soda never... and for those prices i wouldn't be able to afford lunch for the next two months let alone spare enough cash for merch - but i digress.... will i ever be so starved for live music that i gladly fork out that kind of cash? it's doubtful. neil is my god and i wouldn't even do it to bask in his glory from the 4th row. sure, i could manage scrape up that kind of dough if i really wanted to, but there's a principle at stake here - and yes, this whole experience has broken my little music nerd heart. and one more thing - you left the sadies new album "darker circles" off your list. paying $18 to see them in san francisco the other night was one of the best investments i made this year and i bought two $10 cds as well. see your artists live and buy directly from them at the show - it's the right thing to do. thanks for this ed - you rule.

Comment by RP N10 on June 11, 2010 at 10:24am: Haha. I bet the record companies would like to get together and make sure that we all bought large numbers of the same albums and only through them and at prices that mean they make billions of $$ and €€ so they can pay for their bloated cost structures and the giant profits they think are their's of right and that we all went to big artists at big stadiums for inflated ticket prices. Sadly for them it's illegal. Or as Adam Smith put it: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Plus ca change..

Now they've been rendered irrelevant by the direct artist <-> fan connection the internet provides they plead with the state for legislative support. It's ironic that a group of businesses whose sole raison d'etre is the expropriation of the work of artists by exclusive control of the means of production and distribution should be begging the elected representatives of those artists and their fans to be protected in order that they might continue to do so. As I said at the beginning - hahaha.

But I don't think it's the generation of high quality music that's ther issue; it's that it is being made available to us. We need to ration ourselves. If we can't do that we're addicts and it's time to head off to rehab. Or use a streaming service to listen to music we're thinking about buying and see what we want to listen to > once or twice. Agree on Jenny Whiteley's record; I went to see her play having never heard of her. Loved the show and bought her CD from her. In the old days that would have been €1 for Jenny and €14 for the record company (once she'd paid all her costs) even if they'd deigned to sign her ; now she gets what I pay and covers her own cost. Who's the loser here?

Comment by denton fabrics on June 11, 2010 at 12:09pm: And it isn't just the $200 for the ticket; there's the convenience fee, and the restoration fee, and the order processing fee, and the facility fee and my new favorite - the fee they charge you for printing the ticket out at home. That last one is just a little insulting.

Good article, Easy.

Comment by doug heselgrave on June 11, 2010 at 2:35pm: This article really makes me feel for the young artists out there. I understand Easy's point - and sometimes I think I should go back and really listen to all the CDS I have before opening another one, and that's not going to affect Neil Young or Willie Nelson one little bit. But, for a young player whose time is 'now' such blogposts must make them wonder if they have any chance at all.
Couldn't agree more on the concert comment - Neil cost $225 last time he was here. Same for the Eagles. But, Bob Dylan came last year and tickets were $39 Canadian and he played a very committed two hour show. Same with Bob Weir's Ratdog. Thirty bucks. Three hours. Some artists remember paying their dues and still honour their trade and calling......but then there's new artists like Danger Mouse who has sold out a show in Vancouver at $100 a ticket (16,500 tickets available) in which he'll do his DJ show - armed with only a laptop....c'mon it's not like a Rolling Stones show with 100 employees, high overhead and a fleet of trucks. Thanks for opening this up, Easy.

Comment by Easy Ed on June 11, 2010 at 5:19pm: In some ways a young musician is like a high school athlete: they all pray for a shot at fame or fortune in professional sports, but their actual chance at getting that to happen is pretty close to zero. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't try, or stop playing and move on to a career in investment banking. But they should be aware that they are unlikely to see that particular dream come true. That's a tough statement to make in a culture where we tell our kids "you can be whatever you want if you set your mind to it". A great sound bite, but not altogether accurate.

The "long tail" graph I often refer to shows a very, very small percentage of musicians (and artists and authors) having significant monetary achievement while the rest barely eek out a living. It speaks to the way that distribution has flattened out thanks to digitization and from my perspective I think it's more democratic . In some ways a young musician today has the same shot as an established one because they can compete in the same marketplace. In the old days...well even now...it's a good bet you won't find a new artist's CD sitting next to the new Tom Petty at Best Buy. But at Amazon or iTunes, they'll both be there for you to view, sample and buy. Sort of levels the playing field a bit.

Comment by Jim Moulton on June 11, 2010 at 11:43pm: I love to browse thru Amazon, so much good stuff, tons of new middle of the road labels like Vanguard, Rounder, There is a ton of new music out this year, big label too. FYE is still selling single CDS for 9.99(all of them). There are tons of festivals and concerts this summer, I don't have money for this stuff. The Eagles, Dixie Chicks (all 3 ) and Keith Urban for 150 starting prices. A new Lilith festival, who is going to all these shows.