It’s been quite a while though, but it seems like it happened only yesterday. Musicstore Bilbo closed shop and claimed bankruptcy. But now, owner of the mother chain has claimed bankruptcy aswell. The S.A. Sonica has been placed under curation. The reason for this bad turn of events has to do with a lot more than what has happened to the business of selling music since the coming of the digital age. They had an enormeous debt standing out, that could never get repaid and they were unable to get loans from banks anymore. Another one bites the dust due to bad financial management.

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This is my view on the product of music:

While we all know that the music business got ugly when peer-to-peer networks started threatening its sales, there is still a lot of music, dvd’s and videogames that are getting storebought. People still care about owning a physical copy of a record, dvd and cd and that hasn’t changed in the last couple of years. I, myself like to own physical copies of music too because of it being tangible and of course also due to the fact that I don’t listen to one-hit wonders. So, for me a record, be it a cd or a vinyl still has a lot of value. But seeing what digital content like mp3’s and other lossless codecs like .flac have done to transform the music business saddens me deeply. When just looking at the music business, there hasn’t been a lot of quality output for the past couple of years. I’m going to refrain from giving examples of music, but alot of it being rehashes.

Can anyone imagine the Beatles releasing Sgt. Pepper’s lonely hearts club band in this day and age? I, for one cannot. And that is simply due to the fact that Sgt. Pepper’s only works as a whole. For me,  a record used to be a musical ‘journey’ and anno 2009 it’s reduced to 13 mp3’s you can download for 1 euro a track or 12 euro for the whole cd. So the basic idea of sequenced music or media has completely guttered.

I’m not against the digital revolution, don’t get me wrong. But what used to be quality gets watered down to giving people bread and circuses. The quality levels have been dropping and lots of artists have been oversaturating the market into something resembling a crackwhore (e.g. Lady Gaga). The tide has turned and we’ve noticed that the current distribution models that are being used by traditionals are being threatened because of the digital revolution. While Digital downloads have provided a new platform to get ‘better’ quality music, there are also downsides to this revolution as I noted above.

And the fact why they are failing to comply with the user demands of today in this digital day and age is simply because of the fact that they missed the boat. Itunes was the first ‘decent’ digital content platform that offered high-quality downloads. And because of the fact that most labels didn’t dare to step foot into this market because of the high-risks has only made things worse. Because right now as I see it, we only have Amazon, Itunes, emusic, Beatport, bleep… but one has to wonder, what would’ve happened if they all offered digital content? Then we would’ve had a saturated market with too much offer and a fragmented demand? Or maybe we would have niche-sellers who only sell a small catalogue of the same music? It makes me wonder… past is present and the future is now.

Does the music business need to rethink their business model? Of course, the reason why we see a lot of business failing in this new world of internet born globals is because of their failure to comply with the demands that come with this new day and age. I’m confident that things will get better in the near future.

Here’s at least one article that gives a different view on the ‘format wars’:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-but-not-until-at-least-2011/

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