Is Rock Dying?

I guess the real question would be, is music in general dying? I'm sure you've heard of the many woes that are currently besieging the music industry. They're getting hammered pretty hard financially and they primarily blame Peer-to-peer file sharing. However, there are many arguments against this assumption, arguments that I'm liable to be sympathetic with. I never really put too much thought into their argument, took it for granted, yeah, people are downloading music for free, so I guess that could be what's hurting their sales. But since the RIAA has started really cracking down on file sharing, I'm beginning to become dissuaded from that argument. I haven't downloaded new music through peer to peer networks in over a year. Come to think of it, even when I was downloading music, it was mostly older music. I have probably purchased as many CD's in the past year as I did in any year that I was downloading music (Fall Out Boy, it's a solid CD, with few gaps in the quality of the tracks). Actually, I may be buying less music now then I did before, because before when I downloaded random music, it would encourage me to buy the CD's. Now, all I hear is the new crap on the radio...and that my friends is at the heart of the woes of the music industry.

My argument is brought about by a poll conducted this past January by the Rolling Stone and the Associated Press. From this we see that most people consider CD's too be too expensive (especially considering that most new CD's are over 15 bucks, that's about what I pay to own movies). And while 33% of respondents attribute the declining sales for the music industry to people downloading music illegally, I feel like this can largely be attributed to the availability heuristic. Much like the fact that people assume that more people die in plane crashes than in car crashes because plane crashes are more likely to be on the news (in actuality more people die from car crashes), I feel like people are likely to assume that the music industries decline is due to file sharing because the music industry is telling people that that is the reason and it's been making all sorts of headlines over the past decade.

Meanwhile, two other arguments are brought up by people quite strongly and rather independent of any sort of heuristic, those being competition with other forms of media (29%) and the decline of quality of music being produced (21%). I feel like these two issues are somewhat related, people resort to other forms of media because the music sucks. It is the quality of the current music being produced which I would like to address now. If one thinks over the music that has been produced during my lifetime, it is markedly different from all past generations. This becomes apparent when one tries to think of the legends of our time, the music that people of future generations will pick up and enjoy. Could you imagine someone in 2030 picking up Eminem, N'Sync, or Brittany Spears, as people of our generation have picked up the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Led Zepplin? Sure we have some solid band like Green Day or Weezer, but could we really put either of these bands with the likes of Led Zepplin? I strike this up to a lack of continuity within today's music industry. There seems to be a lack of attention to what audiophiles want and focus on teeny-bopper's who are out of sight, out of mind within 5 years of their debut. The last band that I can think of to have such staying power would be U2, as they will be selling out shows for years to come. Nirvana may have had that sort of impact, but sadly that is not possible at this juncture.

All in all what plagues the music industry is something that plagues many businesses, they have no long term focus, the go for short term spikes rather than long term growth. This can be illustrated by the parable used by Steven Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. This post has already gotten far longer than I had intended, so you can read the Goose with the Golden Eggs parable yourself.

As we celebrate mediocrity
All the boys upstairs want to see
How much you'll pay for
What you used to get for free

There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
Who says what he wants to say
Hey, hey, hey
There goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice
There goes the last DJ