The most interesting line in the article is this:
"The old music industry clung desperately to sales to survive, but that model is long gone."
The problem isn't content, the problem isn't market. The problem isn't even piracy - that's a by-product.
People still want music; they're still consuming it, just not in a way that's economically viable for artists. The market is there.
The problem is DELIVERY. The industry wanted to cling to a model that was obviously becoming obsolete.
Last night was the 95th anniversary of the beginning of Prohibition, which showed us that if there's no legal way for the public to obtain what they want (alcohol) when and how they want it, in a way that makes sense to them, then they'll find a way to get it illegally.
That happened with music.
We make the mistake of lumping 'piracy' into one big pile. However, music and movies are somewhat different. Movies are consumable - you see it once and move on. Relatively few people will watch American Sniper 100 times in their lives. LOTS of people will listen to (insert song here) that many times.
Studios need to charge for movies on delivery because they're consumable. Like wine, you consume it once and although you might carry the memory of a particularly good one and describe the experience to friends, when it's gone it's gone.
That's not necessarily the case with music. We listen to favorite songs hundreds of times. I downloaded Gnarls Barkley's album with "Crazy" on it when it came out. I listened to it twice, then went to iTunes and bought the two tracks I liked and tossed the rest. Since then, my play count is well over 200. It's on a variety of playlists, from my personal ones to lists I have for parties at my house.
Music - good music anyway - doesn't need to be bought before one experiences it. If it's good, people will pay (in some form) for it.
It's why iTunes and others have a 'try before you buy' preview model - though I'll argue that it doesn't work as well as it should.
Spotify is proving that there is a market where people will pay for music. Now the compensation end is another story, but I'll argue that we're in the development stage. The music industry is at least 12 years behind. Spotify should have happened when Lars Ulrich was fighting Napster. At that point, the traditional model was getting it's last rights - but the industry clung to that floating corpse for another decade instead of recognizing and responding to the shift - which is the mark of any well-run business.
The music industry dropped the ball. They allowed a public that was used to paying for music to become used to not paying for it because to the labels, it wasn't about 'music', it was about moving plastic. They lost sight of the goal and clung to a delivery method that the public didn't want. They didn't want to reinvest in a new delivery infrastructure, so someone else did it for them and cut everyone else out.
Someone describe for me how that's fundamentally different than bootleggers stepping in to fill a market void? You can argue morality, but you're fighting a lost battle with that argument. Markets are at heart amoral. That's not necessarily good, and it;s not necessarily bad, It just is.
Now, we're (slowly) switching people to the idea that you can get music in a way you want, but it's going to take time for the pricing models to work out. In the same way that the Mafia (a 50-year by-product of Prohibition) didn't die in 1933 with the passage of the 21st, it's going to take a while for piracy to flush out as well. And it will never go away.
But we're in a seismic shift in the way we consume media. Cable TV as we know it died 2 weeks ago when ESPN announced that it was going to be streaming - you just didn't read the obit yet.
Live sports was the only reason that the traditional cable model survived, and with that going away, the model will shift relatively quickly.
Within 10 years, TV will be a la carte. The Sony hacking fiasco also showed the beginnings of a change in movie experience. It is possible to release content directly (though Sony ham-fisted it) to people in their homes and make money. Soon there will be a day when you can see Hunger Games 9 in your home the same day it's in theaters.
Why will it happen? Because it's what the public wants. How do I know? Because they're already getting it. Google "American Sniper torrent" and see what you get. Try "Selma". "Inherent Vice".
We can wring our hands about piracy all we want, but as with Prohibition, it's our collective fault for thinking we can completely control humans and markets.
Change takes time, and we're in the middle of a great change.
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