What are people buying instead of music*?
Dipped my toe into the ever-circling “piracy debate” again this week: little new to be said. So this is a question I’ve wondered about a few times but not really seen answered. Let’s assume that the music industry has a point and that significant chunks of its core audience are spending less money on records than they did 10 years ago**. What are they spending money on instead? Real incomes are basically flat***, and people aren’t saving more, so perhaps something else is doing well out of the decline in music sales. What is it?****
*or other forms of digitally shareable culture?
**the idea that a download equates to a lost sale is silly, but the industry is still contracting, so saying “less money is being spent on recorded music” doesn’t seem controversial.
***real incomes for a lot of young people are non-existent, of course, but the record industry has done OK in previous periods of high unemployment. On the other hand, real incomes for a lot of people are falling so it might be that buying non-digital media has been sacrificed to rising prices of everything else.
****my own cheeky suggestion is that the decline of the recorded music market and the rise in interest in good food, craft beer, etc among young consumers aren’t wholly coincidental.
only slightly related, but this reminds me that i haven’t listened to any new music in a long time, or any music at all really. i don’t know what this means.
but uh as far as this goes, i really don’t know. i know back in ye olden days i would buy a lot of music and then as i got older i had to start paying for more and more things so going to the mall and buying some cds was definitely out. ACTUALLY i think it’s really really hard now to buy a cd that’s not by a big artist now unless you happen to live near an independent record store (which seem to be growing fewer in number anyway) - the FYE in the local mall is closing and while they were usually expensive, they had a bigger selection than, say, target or best buy. and i know that you can buy CDs on amazon but it’s really more of a “i am looking for x” thing than going into a place and seeing something and going “oh this looks good.”
actually i think none of that had to do with the topic at hand. i can say now that i don’t really buy physical media unless it’s cheap or i REALLY want it on/near release date. (but this is mainly because i am broke) i think a lot of people now are more taken with gadgets like smartphones and gaming systems (i don’t know how easy it is to pirate a ps3/xbox 360 game although i don’t doubt that it’s possible, somehow). i don’t know! i was terrible at economics.
