The Golden Age of Music

A recent New York Times article about the popularity of the South by Southwest Music Festival begins by proclaiming that "music still has fans," as if the author were surprised to find evidence that people still listen to music and show up to see their favorites bands perform in person.

The author clearly has missed the point, and it seems that a lot of people are making the wrong conclusions about what's currently taking place in the music industry. Yes, there has been -- and will continue to be -- a significant decline in the number of physical copies of albums sold; the sale of digital music, however, is increasing rapidly, and this bodes well for the future of music. Granted, it doesn't seem that digital sales have yet made up for the drop in CD sales, but I believe there's reason to be hopeful if you can look past a few common misconceptions about what's taking place.

Most people seem to view consumers' decreased willingness to pay more than $10 for an album (I can remember when I regularly paid $17 for CDs about ten years ago) as a drop in their demand for music. What this is, in fact, is an increase in the supply of music, which, as you should know from basic economic theory, causes its price to drop. Before digital music was available, consumers were forced to buy hard copies of albums from record stores. Consumers can still do this, of course, but they also have a multitude of other options to choose from when deciding where, and in what format, to buy music. This trend may be bad for big records labels, but it sure hasn't been bad for iTunes.

Smaller bands and labels also benefit significantly from the ability to distribute their music online. It used to be that the main concern of an up-and-coming band was to get noticed by a label because they needed help promoting and distributing their music. Now bands are much more able to focus on writing and recording music, and are able to reach out more directly to consumers online.

Most important to you and me, however, are the benefits to consumers. I recently met with the CEO of Lala (the music site you've likely heard me raving about), and he argued that right now is the "golden age of music." It's not hard to agree with him when considering how much better off the average music listener is as a result of the availability of digital music. It is significantly easier and cheaper today than ever before to discover, purchase, and listen to new music, and to take that music with you wherever you go.

Music, however, has not become free. Granted, you can sit online and download torrents all day, or you can mooch mp3's off your friends, but I say if you're a real fan of an artist or band, support them. Buy their music and merchandise, and see them live. Otherwise, they're going to quit making music, or they're going to sign to a major label and alter their sound to reach a larger audience, which is almost always bad. So get on Lala (or iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, or whatever) and download some music, and keep in mind that you're getting a lot more music for your money ($.10 for a web song?!) than was ever possible before.