Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music > Is the Music Industry Dying?

This seems pertinent to the net radio threads (here and here and here), but also, in a more general way to the future of music itself.

http://www.newyorkmag.com/page.cfm?page_id=6099

A New York Magazine article on the business of rock and roll.

In other words, there'll still be big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen King), but even if you're fairly high up on the music-business ladder, most of your time, which you'd previously spent with megastars, will be spent with mid-list stuff. Where before you'd be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone. Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.

The author blames the industry's reaction to Napster and netradio in part, but also the blandess of corporate radio.

And then there's the third factor:

And then there is the CD theory. This theory is widely accepted -- with great pride, in fact -- in the music industry. It represents the ultimate music-biz hustle. But its implications are seldom played out.

The CD theory holds that the music business actually died about twenty years ago. It was revived without anyone knowing it had actually died because compact-disc technology came along and everybody had to replace what they'd bought for the twenty years prior to the advent of the CD.

The music business, this theory acknowledges, is about selling technology as much as music. From mono to stereo to Walkman. It just happens that the next stage of technological development in the music business has largely excluded the music business itself.

The further implication, though, might be the more interesting and painful one: You can't depend on just the music.

Rock and roll is just an anomaly. While for a generation or two it created a go-go industry -- the youthquake -- it is unreasonable to expect that anything so transforming can remain a permanent condition. To a large degree, the music industry is, then, a fluke. A bubble. Finally the bubble burst.

Think the article is onto something here?