Sony Vows – You Will Buy Bundled Singles! …er Albums!
Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, was interviewed by Welt Online (a german site) and lamented that customers were choosing only the best songs. He said “CD sales will continue to decline. We are observing a fundamental transformation.” He added that now music is now sold in a “singles industry,” – where customers know what they want and buy only what they want, leaving the rest to whither or collect dust.
Why would he be so concerned that customers buy only the song they like? He says, “there was a time when we made a lot of money with albums.” These kinds of statements are something you would expect to hear from a monopolist, a person who can force a product on the market. It just goes to show what is wrong with Sony and why they are so set on DRM as a solution. Through DRM Sony can force a purchase over and over as formats change OR require the presence of the entire album before the right to listen to the songs kick in.
Sony (and Howard Stringer) HATE the single! So, what’s not to like about the single? Well, not a whole lot if you are the music industry. Jim Fishel, of the RIAA, said in a 1987 New York Times article, “’Singles have always been an important avenue for breaking new artists and individual songs,. . . but in recent years they’ve become a kind of loss leader.” There you go. Singles are loss leaders and are supposed to entice you to buy the ENTIRE album when you have not had the chance to listen to the whole album. It forces a risky purchase decision which, in my experience, is more often a loser than a winner (how many albums have you bought that you believed were filled with GREAT songs?).
The internet has killed the uninformed music purchase decision. In fact, because it is so easy to listen to an entire “album” online, the music must be of exceptional quality before a customer is moved to make a purchase. That is the music industry’s big problem. They want to sell CRAP at steak prices, but can’t anymore.
The labels are dying. They know it.
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