Commentary - Aaron Keith Harris: Free- fallin’ record sales don’t spell industry’s end

It’s also the song title that best describes the trend in compact disc sales, if not the future profitability of major record companies.

The fact that we still call them record companies should tell you something. The thinking about how music gets made, and how musicians make money, hasn’t changed a whole lot since Elvis was driving a Crown Electric delivery truck around Memphis.

But recorded music is simply another type of information that can be digitized. With the Internet, the cost, time and difficulty of moving digital information have steadily decreased.

As a teenager shelling out a few bucks for a cassette copy of “Full Moon Fever,” my first purchased piece of music, I couldn’t imagine the day I would save enough money to buy a CD stereo system. Much less that I would one day regard most CDs as a minor nuisance, just something to deliver the music I rip to a gadget about the size of that Tom Petty cassette.

I was in Nashville recently when a Wall Street Journal article (“Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply,” March 21) hit the streets with numbers showing sales of CDs for the first three months of 2007 were down 20 percent from the same stretch last year.

And while customers spent about $2 billion in digital downloads in 2006 — double the 2005 take — the rise in digital music revenue isn’t close to offsetting the loss in CD sales.

Of course news like that was a hot topic in a town like Nashville. Some were not surprised and said they have been trying to adapt their business or band to the changing marketplace.

Others were jolted by the news. They were shocked to learn that 1 billion songs per month were swapped on networks such as BitTorrent and LimeWire at no cost to the user. Such activity may be illegal, but stopping it would be more difficult than asking Willie Nelson to unsmoke a joint.

So how can the music business survive? In its current form, it won’t.

The CD will continue to die slowly as the cost of distributing music approaches zero. And big record companies will gradually lose their advantage at adding value to the production of music.

Industry giants like John Hammond Jr. and Ahmet Ertegun made their careers deciding which artists could most profitably use the studios, producers and recording equipment owned by the record companies.

Hammond and Ertegun picked Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Today, we get records from acts like Norah Jones, the Pussycat Dolls and “American Idol” contestants. Not exactly what I call progress.

A vastly wider range of far better musicians can now get similar results with a laptop and a few good microphones and amps, as the real estate signs in front of many Nashville recording studios can attest.

It’s my guess that more musicians will be able to make a living at their craft in a flattened marketplace with few, if any, industry-imposed bottlenecks. Recordings might simply be used as advertising to sell merchandise and tickets to live gigs.

And live music is really the best part of whole enterprise, for both musicians and listeners. When I think of the most intensely emotional experiences I’ve had with music, so many of them have been concerts or times when I’ve had my own guitar in hand.

People will chase the feeling of music as long as they can hear, and the commerce will take care of itself if the marketplace stays open and free.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.