Chris Anderson has been repeatedly asked “what’s going to happen to the music industry?” His answer?
“Which music industry? You don’t mean just the one that sells CDs, do you? Because it’s a big mistake to equate the major labels and their plastic disc business with the industry as a whole. Indeed, when you stand back and look at all of music, things don’t look so bad at all.”
His post, Everything in the music industry is up!, tells us that “it appears that every single part of the music industry except the sale of compact discs is up.”
Read the whole thing for details, but even sales of vinyl singles have more than doubled in the UK!
But here’s the coolest point of his post (and it just happens to echo my sentiment from this morning):
“I’d point out that the other group poorly served by the labels are those at the bottom of the curve, the many thousands of bands who fall below the radar of the hit-driven majors. I’d argue that they, too, have nothing to lose by letting their music go free, nothing to lose but the prospect of becoming indentured to companies stuck in last century’s model of monetizing music.”
Exactly.
