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Article from Sound On Sound, December 1991 |
Martin Russ speculates on the end of the music industry as we know it.
Whatever happened to the 78? Do you have an 8-track cartridge lurking in the glove compartment of your car? What about Quadraphonics? The technological past is littered with products and ideas which either faded away into obscurity or never quite made it to the status of a mass-market product at all. Using the word "past" tends to make you think that this sort of thing only used to happen — after all, the LP and Compact Cassette have been around for ages.
Unfortunately, technology never stands still. The CD and the cassette have been outselling the LP for some time now, and some new releases never quite find their way onto 'black vinyl'. You only have to go into a 'record shop' (notice the way that the LP is almost part of the language!) to see how the amount of valuable selling space devoted to CD and cassette has gradually grown, whilst the bulky sets of bins full of clear plastic-sleeved albums have been shrinking.
OK, so the LP is dead. Who cares? Most people have CD players these days, and cassettes are ideal for Walkmans, so who needs LPs? The answer would seem to be that people buy music in whatever the most convenient form is at the time, and an easily scratched 300mm lump of black plastic is a bit awkward and fragile for today's micro-miniaturised world.
So what happens next? DAT seems to be fine for pro-audio and semi-pro use, but the public aren't exactly falling over themselves to replace their cassettes with DAT tapes. Recordable CDs might spin off from the computer industry. Even the audio cassette might find new life in a digital form, although trying to determine if a tape on the floor of your car is analogue or digital, chrome, metal or ferric, Dolby B, C, S or dbx might be next to impossible in most driving situations!
None of this is particularly unexpected — all that is happening is that the playback technology is being refined. Shops like HMV, Virgin, W.H. Smith's and Bert's Records will still sell the music, regardless of what type of media happens to come along. The same distributors will have warehouses full (or empty) of CDs, cassettes and LPs, and the record companies will still be the major channel for a musician to publish his work. Or will they?
We may be ready for a major technological change. Just as radio was replaced by television, and wind-up watches by quartz digitals, so the way that people buy recorded music may be about to change. The changes to the industry which will accompany this will follow the usual trends in such a fundamental upheaval — the major manufacturers, retailers and distributors will disappear and will be replaced by a new set of service providers who have been waiting in the background ready to take over. The first signs are already here...
Have you noticed that when you buy something by credit card nowadays they just swipe it through a machine and get you to sign the little slip of paper which subsequently appears? When was the last time you didn't use an ATM (a cashpoint machine, officially called an Automatic Teller Machine by banks) to get cash? The important thing to realise here is that these services are possible because it is possible to move digital data around the country relatively cheaply (for the price of a phone call in these cases) and very easily. In these days of digital music equipment, your 'killer snare sample' and information about your 'current account balance' are both just sets of numbers. If shops can verify credit cards by data links, then could they also download music?
It all comes down to that word "digital" again. BT have been busy converting the telephone network from analogue to digital for several years, and moving digital information from place to place gets easier all the time. The final link in the chain of development is also digitally oriented. Have you ever seen the machines in some computer software shops which let you select your own choice of games and then download them onto a cassette or disk? Or juke-boxes? The latest models don't have 7" singles inside them; instead they use digital technology (CD, DAT, RAM etc.) to store the music and replay it on demand. Add a data link to one of these machines, throw in a few blank recordable CDs and cassettes and you have an instant 'recorded music machine'. The data link could be connected to a central data store with all available recorded music, giving access to any piece of music. All this technology is available either now, or in the very near future.
This affects the chain of music selling. You would no longer need huge warehouses full of LPs, CDs or cassettes, so the distributor is no longer needed. The record shops would need much less floor space, but more significantly, any shop could install one of these 'instant music' machines. So clubs, pubs, live music venues, clothes shops and department stores could have them — "if you like the music we're playing, take a copy home!" Perhaps record shops are on the way out. And the record companies? Well, in order to make your own digitally recorded music available to others you need little more than a computer connected to a data link — a possible home studio accessory of the future, which could cut out the record companies too! In practice, you would need some sort of database organisation to act as a clearing house for information on where to get the music data, but a system like this could completely replace the music industry as we know it now. Now that is real technological future-shock!
Opinion by Martin Russ
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