Ordinarily, I’m super careful to attribute my sources, but I failed to write this one down when I saved the link. I think I got it from ArtsJournal.com. I also haven’t independently checked the facts and figures in this article. Now, after all those disclaimers, here’s a quote from the article that knocked my socks off:
According to a new study, of the 13m songs available for sale on the internet last year, more than 10m failed to find a single buyer.
That’s according to this article in The Guardian. The author, Sean Michaels goes on to state that this is proof that most of what’s out there is not very good. (He said it in more colorful language.)
These are not classical pieces, but it might partly explain why sales of classical music do so well on the web overall. Compared to the large amount of junk out there, classical is the cream that rises to the top.
It’s also good news for the record industry that believes it has curated and promoted the best of the lot and you don’t need to bother with the rest. If the statistics are true, they challenge the “long tail” theory that there’s a scattered market out there for everything. To me, it’s just more proof that there’s way too much noise, and we have to be selective on how we filter it out.
It’s also proof that good content has real value no matter where it lives — online, on the air, on your telephone, on a CD at home. Just think of all the stuff you DON’T have to listen to, and smile.
Subscribe Via Email
Enter your email address to subscribe to Scanning the Dial and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Thank you for subscribing.
Something went wrong.
Marty-
This goes also to the point of the “Long Tail”. I buy music in .mp3 from Amazon. Only because of the long tail, I have been able to purchase music by Conlon Nancarrow, Harry Partch, Edgard Varese, George Antheil, Henry Brant, Glen Branca, and Nadia Sirota, among others. Now, how much of that stuff do you think Amazon sells compared to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, etc. Mostly, the stuff I mentioned just sits there on a server.
PC World did a review of Amazon’s .mp3 service and totally messed it up. They said that Amazon’s “…7 million songs are aimed at a mainstream, pop audience…” I think that this was in the June issue. I took them to task in a letter which is in the August issue.