Welcome to the new paradigm...
Well, Mystic Dave has been holding forth for a while. "The music industry is broken..." quoth he, maintaining that there needs to be a new business model if the industry is to survive, let alone flourish.
We're already seeing the internet, medium-sized touring, direct and distribution sales indie (broad terms not jangly guitars meaning) artist carving out a small scale career for themselves. "Send me a tenner and I'll send you a CD in 8 months when I've actually recorded it" etc
But Mr H's personal hankering to a return to the simpler, more song based days of the 60s seems a little closer. The says when the song, the single and the EP were the thing. The days when bands recorded two or three songs and put those out as they were recorded and albums were an afterthought rather than the be-all and end-all.
The following from the BBC website: Muse 'might ditch album format' http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/music/newsid_7292000/7292404.stm
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None of it matters really
It is quite interesting to see all the gimmicks and gizmos that bands and labels are desperately trying to employ to get music out there nowadays but at the end of the day it doesn't have a great deal to do with music does it. Music is songs - distribution, marketing and packaging is just the business side of it.
A hundred years ago there was no recording industry of any kind, in fact recording hadn't even been invented, but I'm pretty sure that music as an artform thrived just as much then as it does now. Wax cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, MP3s - it's all about as relevant to music as the colour of the wrapper is to the chocolate bar inside.
Yes the music industry thrived...
...through sales of SHEET MUSIC! Popular songs were sold in sheet music form and they were big selling items - genuinely in the same way that singles were big selling items in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I can't remember what was the first million selling song on sheet music but as I recall it happened in or around the 1920s or some time like that. In those days there would be sheet music salesmen who travelled aruond hawking the latest Irving Berlin or Cole Porter numbers to various outlets. This was still seen to some degree up to the mid/late 80s when sheet music for the main chart hits would still be available alongside the singles (very occasionally in a specialist record shop) but more likely in the sheet music racks of your local musical instrument shop.
The music _business_ has always been about getting music out there to people (and to some degree always will be whatever the paradigm it operates under). Whether that is by live performance - contrast the lonesome blues singer walking and hitching between local juke joints with the current Stones mega-tours to the folk musician scratching a living from touring the art-centre/folk club circuit (with the odd self produced CD to sell) - or through the sale of a physical format - contrast sheet music with the progression from 78 through 45 to the album, CD to MP3... Where there are musicians who are profesional and a business infrastructure to service them there will need to be some profit generation to support their livelihood. Without a viable business model for the music business as a whole or inpart what one ends up with is simply a form of oral tradition and access only to locally produced music.
Absoluitely, music is about the songs - the music business is about the product. As someone once said, the medium is the message. To take your chocolate bar analogy and stretch it a little further, the issue here is not the packaging. It's whether or not Cadburys can afford to keep running their factory, whether it has any lorries to drive their chocolate bars from their factory to your local shops and whether you have access to any shops which stock your favourite choccies... or are you happy only to have available to you those little dark chocolate sherry liquers that Mrs Miggins makes and sells in her cornershop at the end of your street?
Harrumph...
... well that's my argument destroyed!
I see what you're saying - although I know nothing about the economics of sheet music sales - but surely all it proves is that it doesn't matter if one format runs out of steam or becomes obsolete, another one will come along. But the music it carries will be exactly the same. When I'm listening to Mississippi John Hurt's 1928 recordings on my MP3 player I'm listening to the man himself plucking on those strings and singing his heart out, it matters not one jot to me that these songs which have been converted into ones and zeros and are being electronically fed into my ears have gone from format to format and been released in a thousand different ways and sold from a million different shops, market stalls, websites and jukeboxes.
I neither know nor care how Cadburys make and transport their wares into my local shop, I just likes the sweet sweet candy. And so long as I, and others, keep eating it I'm confident Cadburys (other chocolate brands are available) will keep ensuring it's there.
Interesting to note that Muse
may be giving up on the album format, seeing as they gave up on the "tune" format some time ago.
Bada-boom tish!
Brilliant!