via The 9513 by Miss Leslie
I'm a honky tonk gal. I was raised on the sounds of Bill Monroe and Ray Price. But I'm a nerd. I graduated in the top 10% of my class. I read books for fun. I worked in the Information Technology Industry for 10 years. And I think it's important that musicians today realize that we're living in a different world from even 10 years ago–it's time for all of us to embrace the tech geek within us.
In 2000, SoundScan reported that 785.1 million albums were sold. In 2007, that number dropped to 279 million. I know that this isn't a revelation to you–selling CDs is NOT the future of the music business.
Then what is? Technology. Song downloads have gone from 143 million in 2004 to 844 million in 2007. And that's just the ones that were paid for.
Forget the record labels and the old guard. What's the business model for an artist today? Historically, what has made a musician successful? In any era, it has been connecting the fan with the music. The media changes from era to era. Whether it's fees paid for performances, sheet music, vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs, digital song file downloads, the principle is the same. Somehow the music of the artist has to connect with the fan.
Acts like Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Coldplay have been revolutionizing the music industry with their business model experiments. They've offered free music downloads, "name your own price" for music, "optional" pay for music, free DVDs of the performance to concertgoers and free downloads of live music performances.
You can call these experiments gimmicks, but I notice that the common thread is not about making money, but that the acts are focused on connecting with the fans.
What I find curious is that the same thing is not happening in Country music. I don't see acts revolutionizing anything. Or are they? I decided to peruse some music websites to see how a random sample of us country folks are measuring up.
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