Thinking It Through: The Death of Scarcity
During the ’90s the major labels started playing a really dangerous game called “creating demand.” There’s a demand that exists naturally, the portion of an individual’s income that he or she is willing to spend on purchasing recorded music. When you start to fuck with it, there are heavy consequences.
At one point in time the amount of music one would consume was all that you could afford up to what you could “digest.” The idea of acquiring five hundred songs in a month’s time was unfathomable. A purchase was, to a certain degree, a commitment. It was something tangible & it was something you would put on & listen all the way through. The attention required to experience recorded music would allow artists like the Beatles to explore the subtleties of the album, which led to consumers buying larger bodies of work (i.e. albums, i.e. more expensive products). This worked out well for everyone because it allowed artists to explore their craft, it allowed for a richer, more enduring, & more rewarding experience for the consumer. And of course it led to more profits for the labels. And it did satiate everyone for a short while. But over time the labels started looking for more profits.
Two things happened in the 80’s that would seed this shift in how the industry viewed demand. The first was the launching of mTV. Many would trace the youth attention deficite back mTV, citing their rapid camera angle changes, flashy animations, & their championing of attention-grabbing style over substance. It would be very hard to argue against these accusations. Whether these were conscious decisions or not is beside the point; they were, at the core, chasing ratings & making choices that were the most effective, regardless of the consequeneces. And those consequences were far reaching, transforming music from a commital experience to a passive experience, the background soundtrack to glitzy & glamourous lives.
The other big event was the move towards compact discs in the mid-’80s. The compact disc was the industry’s third major move (following 8-tracks & cassette tapes) towards a format more portable and easily consumable than vinyl. The idea was that the more often and more easily one can listen to music, the more they will consume.
With this shifting tide what would happen in the ’90s was a move towards shallow, easily accessible, quickly digestible products. It stands to reason that if a sale can be made with the minimal amount of artist-to-consumer connection, the consumer will become bored and move on more quickly, coming back for more music. The less music means to the consumer, the more demand it creates for replacement music. At a certain point repeated listens begin to cut into profits. So the market became saturated with one hit wonders and bands that simply released new versions of the same single over and over. By the end of the ’90s, sales of music were at an all-time high and the quality of popular music was at an all-time low. It was not uncommon for the rest of the album to be far less interesting than the single.
And all semt great for the labels until Shawn Fanning unleashed Napster & unwittingly revealed to the labels that they had created a monster. By artificially increasing demand, the labels had undermined the relationship with the fan and also the relationship between the fan & the artist. They had conditioned the music listener to view music as a cheap, disposable product. So anyone who came of age during this watering down period had a very new perception of music that the labels had never before contended with. This actually worked to the labels’ advantage for a while, with sales ballooning right up until the advent of mp3 audio compression technology, which caused gigantic problems.
From a consumer perspective, mp3 audio files would seem like the next logical step for the music industry. After all, the replication costs go out the window & everyone already has the hardware to play them. It’s the cheapest, most flexible format around. But the tragic flaw of the labels’ plan was that it was contengient upon sarcity; they could lower the quality of music all they wanted & consumers had no choice but to keep coming back more and more frequently to get their fix. With the mp3, this was no longer the case. They had no idea how to reign in all of the music that began pouring onto the internet, but made little effort, anyhow. This is how the scarcity of music disappeared. Of course this was unforseen and the labels might not have taken the same steps to devalue music if they would have known what the ultimate consequences would be.
The real nail in the coffin might have been the labels’ choice to do away with the cd single, instead demanding that consumers pay for a full album in order to get the one song they hear on the radio. This made the internet ripe for trading by consumers who wanted a single song, but were not willing to pay for a full album to get it. Due to the drop in the quality of music, demand was so low that as soon as an alternative means of acquisition reared it’s head, legal or not, many consumers stopped paying for music all together. This was when it became obvious that scarcity had long been taken for granted by the labels.
Consequently a union was formed between dejected pop music fans and diehard underground music fans and from there a giant pool of music became freely available to anyone resourceful enough to find it. Until the lawsuits and news coverage, at which point it became freely available to everyone.
What followed was a total transoformation of what it means to consume music.
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