Appetite for self-destruction: How the music industry blew it.

I don’t read books. Well, a lot of them anyway. Who has time? Lately, I can just about make it through articles or podcasts because I’m scanning too much stuff for the blog to process anything running much longer. After listening to an episode today of NPR’s Fresh Air though, I might have to add one to the cue. Steve Knopper from Rolling Stone was on talking about his book Appetite For Self-Destruction, which basically chronicles how record companies have blown it when it comes to the online space and how people buy music.

Yes, it doesn’t take a genuis to see how the music industry is really behind the times in many ways, but having lived through the early days of FM to the transition to CD and now streaming sites, it sure feels like an accurate primer of how they got here. (Especially when it comes to the issue of how things are priced, because if you think $.99 to download a song is too much, try spending $18.99 for a CD at a time when there was no alternative. Yeah, it sucked.)

There’s a recurring theme in it though that reminds of something a former record exec from a major label recently told me.

We were discussing how the biggest change online, (besides downloadable singles), were all the streaming sites now like Blip.fm, Last.fm, etc., which all offer ways for people to check out bands globally from people they don’t know. Used to be that your real world friends turned you on to new stuff, (or maybe even a record/CD store clerk if you hung out at a local store vs. big box retailer). Now, it’s your online friends who you’ve likely never met before that suggest stuff to listen to. This dynamic changes everything.

As we started to throw ideas back and forth about ways the labels could promote better in the space, it came back to one thing: A reluctance and stubbornness by the industry to want to change because they’re just not wired that way. Much as they claim otherwise, this is an industry that is the last one to want to do anything remotely progressive.

If you don’t have time to read the book, (there’s an excerpt there), definitely check out the Fresh Air podcast. Then send it to a marketing director slash dinosaur who doesn’t understand why, unless they change how they do things, the record labels are going to end up like the newspaper business soon enough.