Standing on the headland taking in the scene.

[reddragdiva]

"If people spent 1/10th as much on music as they did on corsets for instance, you wouldn`t see LJ full of bands whinging that the scene is dead." (markeris, on the goth scene, from here.)

I can hardly believe how much money I used to spend on records and how little I do now. Not that I spend it on clothes either. Nor am I making it up in MP3s. Mostly I'm just wishing I had my old vinyl here. With a laser turntable.

Discuss.

(By the way, full points to mickmercer for switching on comments at last. A lot of interesting ones, too.)

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

A factor that the whingers haven't considered much is that even as little as five ago, they wouldn't HAVE CDs to sell. A decade ago, which was about when I at least was buying most of my goth music, CD production for even a small run was a $20k-$30k investment, and "small" was 5000 discs. Bands fought for label attention, not public dollars, because that was the only way that CDs got made. Unsigned bands might have cassettes for sale, if they'd been around for a long time, but mostly they just sold shirts and stickers at shows. Where I might have even the opportunity a decade ago to purchase 10 goth cds a year, I now am presented with about 150 opportunities to buy goth CDs, most of which are NOT showing up on RIAA's counts.

[reddragdiva]

Ooh, good point! The crapness really doesn't help, no.

The good thing: anyone can do it. The bad thing: anyone can do it.

It's interesting, though, to see what happens with a half-decent band, e.g. Deathboy - deathboy was putting up MP3s of everything he did for a few years before getting a live band together and recording a pretty good album. Which I think has sold within expectations but nothing like it deserves.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

The crapness is a whole other issue. DB's CD is a windfall situation, if I'm understanding it right; a collection of tracks that in the "normal" scheme of things would never have been released, and never counted. One or two tracks migh someday show up on a "Rarities" disc or something, but that's it. Instead, DB got some sales out of it. Are those completely new sales? No, the majority of them are probably cd purchases that would have simply happened on other CDs that the owners now have not bought, and at least some of those are likely to be the one that RIAA et al. would point to as "record sales are down!", and some might have been from any of the various whingers.

[markeris.livejournal.com]

????

I`m sure i`ve gottent the wrong end of the stick, but I`m reading that as "Deathboy CDs don`t count because people had already got the (incidentally different) .mp3s and therefore this release is stealing sales from other people with proper releases?" and I`m sure that`s not what you meant. And if that *is* what you meant can you explain why not buying a proper CD because you`ve already got it off soulseek is different?

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Okay, I think I misinterpreted RDD's words: I was reading this as Deathboy released a self-produced CD of tracks that were working versions and bits left out of an "official" album released in parallel. I don't see that kind of thing as likely to pull sales from the "official" Deathboy release, but I suspect that those that purchase the self-produced will be buying it out of the "money I have to buy CDs with", which may well mean than a CD from a less-favored band may not end up getting purchased. If that other CD was a Brittany Spears album, then Brittany lost a sale, and the Industry says "Sales are slumping!"

How it differs from soulseek downloads is that while MP3s for download *may* (and I don't believe they do much) "steal sales" from the same band. Deathboy downloads may hurt Deathboy sales, and that's what the Industry bigwigs are maintaining. In the case of a parallel CD, few people are going to choose the parallel CD *instead of* the production album, but rather will puchase it *in adddition to* the production one. Since the parallel CD costs actual money, though, there's the perception that the buyer has purchased two CDs and spent 2 CD's worth of whatever mental budget for CDs they have running. And that probably means that some other CD doesn't get bought. So, instead of "stealing sales" from Deathboy, it steals sales from (a hypothetical only) Machinae X, who released a CD around the same time, but isn't as favored by the buyer of the full set of Deathboy.

[reddragdiva]

No, no. The Deathboy thing is that the MP3s are just stuff Scott does anyway; the album is a recording by the band and only one track is officially up (you're supposed to buy the CD).

I mention Deathboy as an example of a non-crap band lost in the flood of crap, and getting little notice because of it. markeris or lee_chaos know the precise sales, but the point is Deathboy have nothing like the fame they deserve. Though the Deathboy Minions won't rest until they do ;-)

[reddragdiva]

The other point is that live bands don't do so great either here, except the ones with popular records. But the live band scene in London is pretty much a tumour on the side of the record industry, not something alive in any rocking sense.