By Diana Mendes
If you listen closely, you can hear it. That sound. That’s the death of the CD age.
With the announcement last month that Music World, the last Canadian-owned CD store, is filing for bankruptcy protection, the long and protracted death knell has finally been sounded.
Goodbye compact discs, hello digital age, right?
Not so fast.
Though compact discs have been dying for years, the music industry is now taking its death particularly badly, progressing through the stages of grief.
First there was denial. After file sharing services such as Napster were introduced, the record industry pretended CD sales weren’t declining, that file sharing was a fad and people would still buy over-priced discs in stores.
Ten years later, file-sharing hasn’t disappeared. No longer the domain of geeks, sharing has gone mainstream and CD sales have crashed.
Gone are the days of selling one million copies in a single week; now 500,000 copies is a stellar debut for a new recording. Disc sales continue to fall and according to Nielsen Canadian Soundscan, CD sales this year are down 11 per cent from last year.
Faced with this reality, the music industry began to bargain – the second stage of grief – with fans. Labels and music stores slashed CD prices, in hopes that massive sales would lure music lovers back into stores.
No such luck.
By this time, online music stores such as Apple’s iTunes, launched in 2001, were racking in the dough.
Faced with sagging sales and irate investors, record companies moved to the next stage: anger. Furious at consumers for sharing songs, labels tried to recoup sales by suing downloaders.
What began as an isolated incident against file-sharing pioneer Napster in 1999 became a crusade as when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) seemed to go after anyone with an Internet connection.
In 2002, the RIAA tried to get Internet service provider Verizon to release the identities of file-sharing clients. When they were blocked by the courts, they started going after individual downloaders.
While this hasn’t happened in Canada, the RIAA’s Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), has taken up its own angry campaign: lobbying the government to toughen copyright law (to make downloading or making a file available for sharing illegal).
Then there is DRM.
Also known as “copy protection,” digital rights management (DRM) technologies are used by labels to limit the reproduction of digital media.
Though it sounds like a good idea, the use of DRM on digital music files is turning many music lovers into music haters.
In 2005, Sony released a particularly vicious type of DRM that, once inserted into a computer, installed undisclosed files on users’ computers which could expose them to attacks by third parties.
This software automatically installed and could not be removed. Eventually Sony issued a public warning. By then, consumers were so angry many sued for damages.
But DRM isn’t restricted to CDs. Online music stores like iTunes and Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace offer DRM-crippled music as well.
That means, despite the fact that you’ve paid for your music, the labels – or software giants such as Apple or Microsoft – can dictate how you use it.
The iTunes version will only play on an iPod and contains restrictions on the number of times a playlist or song can be copied; it also prevents users from editing songs.
Some versions of DRM delete downloaded files after a certain time from the user’s hard drive. These restrictions never existed on CDs.
Are consumers really going to let record labels tell them what to do with music they’ve bought legally?
One would think that after a while, record labels would get the picture. Adaptation is the key to a successful business.
And it’s not as if this is unprecedented: from vinyl to cassettes to CDs, the music industry has survived many incarnations of music recordings. Digital is simply the next one.
The key is to harness the digital age for all its potential not hampering innovation through DRM. It annoys the consumer and it doesn’t even work as hackers can crack it within hours.
Some in the industry are listening. In April, EMI allowed Apple to sell DRM free downloads from EMI’s catalogue and this September, Amazon created its own DRM-free music store.
But these moves are too slow. If the industry doesn’t move quicker, it’ll be mourning more than just the loss of the CD age.