SANTA MONICA, Calif., 30 August 2003 — An elaborate mobile in the front window of a new store spins gently as customers and the coastal breeze come through the door.
Revolving on the arms of that mobile are album covers that suggest a music boutique with a zeal for the eclectic — there’s the Who, Willie Nelson, the Ramones, Marvin Gaye, 50 Cent, the Flaming Lips and dozens of others. Inside, though, you will find no CDs, much less vinyl, and with a bit of romantic license, you could imagine it’s the winds of revolution that make those album covers dance.
The shop is the new Apple Store, and in its sleek interior you will find the computer company’s hardware as well as assorted gear and software. The albums in the front window are essentially an advertisement for a music store called iTunes, which exists only in the digital ether of the Internet and sells songs for 99 cents apiece.
In a music world in upheaval, iTunes, with its paid downloads of music, is the closest thing to an interim government in the lawless land created by Napster and its revolutionary ilk — and Apple has a foothold in a brash new world.
The sunny visions seen in Apple commercials are hard to reconcile with the gloom and doom that have been pervasive in the music industry in recent years. The grim chorus is now as familiar to the public as any Top 40 hit: Piracy has gutted profits, CD sales are going steadily south for the first time since the format was introduced in the 1980s, corporate conglomeration has stultified any art in the commerce of record labels, radio and the concert business.
All of that is true, but here is the funny thing lost in the histrionics: Today may be the very best time to be a music fan, especially one looking for a connection to a favorite artist or guidance and access to the exotic or rare.
Be it the iPod (Apple’s portable digital player), alluring satellite radio services such as XM, the fan-beloved minutiae posted on websites, the availability of live music performances on AOL, the esoteric music videos streaming off Launch.com or the self-tailored satisfaction of burning a homemade mix on CD at home, there is a singular zest to the modern fan experience today.
All that has been flummoxing to the formal music industry, which has little control or obvious major profit source in any of the above. Mainly because, in the past five years, the experience of being a music consumer has been increasingly determined by that consumer, not the artist or the industry.
Still, the currency of the music industry remains the compact disc, and that is a problem. Sales of the CD are down 20 percent since 2000 and a major comeback is as likely as a boom in Laserdisc sales. In a wry twist, the CD itself is one major reason the business finds itself in dire straits today. The embracing of that format in the 1980s sparked a huge boom in profits as the digital quality and durability of the silvery discs inspired many consumers to replace their vinyl collections.
The windfall made the business more attractive to multinational conglomerates and led to huge investment. As profits waned, though, consolidation and a more strident corporate ethos pervaded. The “art” of music would now, more than ever, have to pay off on a quarterly basis. That set the stage for crisis when consumers, who have long complained about the price of albums, abruptly found MP3 computer technology in the late 1990s, an avenue for snatching any song they wanted for free. File sharing, via Napster and similar services, created a new model that the industry has yet to figure out.
The chaos inspires in some a belief that better times are ahead, not just for fans but also for artists and the business thinkers willing to jettison the view that giving away music is tantamount to condoning high-tech shoplifting. Revolutions in music are nothing new. In the 1950s, the rebellion was in the sound of rock ‘n’ roll, in its swagger and raunchy swivel, and in the 1960s the lyrics reflected and shaped youth culture, fashion and politics. The 1970s had punk and disco skirmishing with big-money rock, while the 1980s saw the rise of hip-hop, music that waged a street fight against the music industry status quo.
By the end of the 1990s the revolution wasn’t in the music itself but in the medium — and for the first time the consumer called the tune.
The result is a sea change in how consumers can shape their music experience beyond radio and buying recorded albums. Take the iPod — by taking songs off of CDs or from the many Internet sources (where the vast majority of song trafficking remains unsanctioned) and transferring them to a computer and then the iPod, music fans can walk around with thousands of high-quality songs and create mobile soundtracks for their lives.
Among them is Alan Price. He’s 41, works in sales in the aviation industry, lives in downtown Los Angeles and for a year and a half has carried an iPod as religiously as his car keys and wallet. The 383 songs it holds range from the luminous pop of the Alan Parsons Project to the Swedish death metal of Dark Tranquillity.
“Look at it, it’s pretty scarred,” he says, holding up the small, hard plastic device, which is roughly the size of a television remote control. “It goes where I go. I listen to it driving, when out, when I travel, everywhere.”
Price now abhors commercial radio and constantly scours the Internet on a sort of musical safari to find the next underground sound to add to his portable archive. He can’t remember the last CD he bought, and that makes him part of the music industry’s problem. After years of paying for CDs that had only one or two good tracks, he feels less than guilty about his collection.
The iPod has also had an impact on his longtime relationship with music. “I have never been more active in finding something new I like,” he says. “I’m constantly changing my collection, constantly finding something new. It’s not like radio, where they play the same 10 songs over and over.”
Singer-songwriter Michelle Branch is one of the young artists who has immersed herself fully in online activities. She used to visit online bulletin boards devoted to Hanson and Alanis Morissette and try to drum up support for her own music.
Before her debut album climbed the charts, she performed in an America Online forum devoted to breaking promising new acts. She turned 20 last month and received three iPods as gifts (she already had one of her own).
After finishing the follow-up to her 2001 hit debut album, “Spirit Room” (which led to a Grammy nomination for best new artist), she visited AOL offices this year to play the music for executives.
Branch is among the 250 million worldwide users who visit Kazaa, the music swapping entity that has replaced Napster in the online lives of many fans, and also iTunes.
“Really, everybody in the music industry needs to learn to not be afraid of all this,” she said. “It’s not going away. And it makes things so great. In a few seconds I can find any song ever. How great is that?”
