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1999: The year the music industry broke
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that 1999 is the year that set the stage for the changes in the biz. 1999 was the year Goldenvoice founded Coachella and the year British concert promoters Barry Hogan and Helen Cottage inaugurated All Tomorrow’s Parties as an alternative to corporate music events like the Sprite Liquid Mix tour, the Vans Warped tour and, yes, various Tommy Hilfiger productions. It was the year the RIAA invented the Diamond, a term for albums that sell over 10 million copies. And 1999 was Year Zero for the file-sharing phenomenon, otherwise known as the birth of Napster.
These are snapshots anyone might note when reviewing that year in music. Together, they form a larger picture. The Diamond offers a window into the corporate record industry’s hubristic faith in endless growth. All Tomorrow’s Parties was an early indicator of the underground’s more modest vision of music as a curatorial exercise. And Napster was the catalyst with the power to set corporate America’s overzealous hopes and indie rock’s half-baked dreams on the odd collision course playing out today.
This is what happened: 1) By making “popular” synonymous with “piracy,” Napster almost single-handedly eliminated the possibility of 10-million sellers. (Basically, it’s far easier to find and steal tracks by Eminem online than it is an obscure indie band.) 2) Napster opened a back-door distribution channel to any band with good songs, a unique sound and access to a computer, solving niche pop’s eternal problem of distribution and access. For a band with buzz or good ideas but no access to typical gatekeepers – commercial radio, distribution through Wal-Mart – there was now a radically streamlined infrastructure for getting heard. 3) Napster allowed people to hear what they are going to buy before they buy it. The result is that good indie records are selling more copies, and bad major-label records are selling less.
This was only the beginning of a larger trend. Napster opened the floodgates to the notion that we should be able to preview music before we buy it. What followed were more and more audio samples on Amazon.com, on artists? Web sites and on a hundred smaller sites and e-mail lists. This raised the bar for brick-and-mortar competitors. Barnes & Nobles nationwide now have listening posts with access to thousands of CDs. Formerly, you could have expected to sample a few dozen at best.
Previewability is probably the most important revolution in recent music. Despite what the RIAA would have you believe, the shifts the industry has witnessed haven?t been a matter of quantity so much as they’ve been a matter of quality. People are making their purchasing decisions less on the basis of hype and blind faith, and more on the basis of what they actually enjoy listening to.
And that has really screwed up the trend-driven marketplace it took the major labels more than 40 years to perfect.
