The Walls Fall Down - an Industry Headed Towards the Way of the Romans

The Walls Fall Down:

An Industry Headed Towards the way of the Romans

The Music industry’s current approach to business is misled and does not follow the basic fundamentals of sales and customer satisfaction. The customer’s always right. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? I’ve held positions in customer service for the past three years or so, and from what I’ve observed, this is most likely considered the most important rule of business. So when you start accusing your customer base of wrongdoings and lack of loyalty, what rule of business are you following? It doesn’t matter whether the customer is making the appropriate choice or the wrong choice, whether there are smart or dumb, informed or totally in the dark, they are still always right. When you are providing a product to people, you are supposed to give them what they want, no questions asked and without any argument. Given, the music industry has a lot of leverage when it comes to what they do (virtually everybody listens to music) that doesn’t change the fact that they are taking a short-term approach to a long-term business.

The higher-ups, or “suits” as I like to call them, of the music industry complain about a decrease in record sales. As pointed out in the article “The Money Note” by John Seabrook, music production teams complain about a lack of interest in good music, “forcing” them to make bounties of low quality, yet still expensively produced work. Now here’s the thing. Wouldn’t one assume that the lack of sales and the surplus of shoddy music might be related? I’ll admit it, I’m not an expert on the matter, but doesn’t this seem like an easy enough conclusion to come to? Also, doesn’t it seem almost asinine to pump so much money into an obviously unsuccessful business plan? It seems if the majority of music was “good” music, that people would eventually be forced into buying it. People will always listen to music, so why not make the worthwhile material that you as a producer feel you should be fabricating?

The unfortunate plight of the music industry doesn’t make anybody happy. Nobody benefits from it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of hard to feel bad for a huge industry that brought these pains upon themselves, but this predicament isn’t really providing any sort of plus for anybody else. None of the other industries make any sort of gain, financial or otherwise, off of the music industry losing ground and becoming weaker. The only way this downward spiral that the music industry finds itself in can do anybody any good, is if they take this chance to reexamine their business and start making some drastic changes.

The music industry’s dilemma is not unlike that of the auto industry. In this example, the advances in music such as iTunes and file sharing can be compared to the impact of Japanese econo-cars. The North American auto industry was huge, and thought of themselves as untouchable. Unafraid of the impact that imports from countries like Japan would have on them, companies like Chrysler, Ford, and especially GM, refused to