PR 101

I read an article Sunday about how the depressed the music industry is this summer. It said that in order to make up for income lost because of decreasing CD sales, many top bands had upped concert ticket prices to above $200 for the best seats. Given the current state of the economy, no one with an ounce of sanity is spending that kind of money to see a concert. So concert ticket sales are down and a number of acts have canceled summer tours.

This is, to me, is the beginning of the end game for the music business as it is presently constituted. As anyone with marketing experience can tell you, this is an industry that is doing itself in. The music industry didn’t do the same thing American car manufacturers didn’t do – respond to a changing market place.

“Billboard magazine recently predicted that summer 2010 could be the toughest touring market artists and promoters have had to face since the mid-’90s, citing a spate of nixed shows and canceled tours,” The Washington Post reported July 2.

Performers including the Eagles, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera and Simon & Garfunkel have either canceled dates or “postponed” entire tours because of weak ticket sales.

Why is this happening? Well, let’s get into the way back machine and look what happened when CDs were first introduced. That’s when the problems began.

In 1982, Sony and Phillips Electronics introduced the first CD recording – “The Visitors” by Abba. One would have thought that choice of a first release would have strangled the fledgling format in its cradle. Incidentally, the first CDs had a capacity of 74 minutes. That’s the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I guess that makes up for the Abba release.

This is where the recording industry made its major mistake. Vinyl albums contained between eight and 10 songs. Whether out of hubris, stupidity, greed or something else, the recording industry put the same eight to 10 songs on those first CDs. Those CDs sold for $21.50, according to a 2007 report prepared by Recording Industry Association of America.

That worked until CD burners were first sold to the public in the middle 1990s. People discovered a blank CD actually held between 15 and 20 songs. That was a “hey, what a minute” moment. True, CD prices had dropped to just under $13, according to the RIAA. It was too late. A lot of people felt they were getting ripped off and got angry.

Free file sharing sites such as Napster rose up in response to that anger. The feeling seemed to be if the record companies were going to rip us off, we are going to fight back. Without rehashing the history, this eventually led to the creation of ITunes, where a complete album can be purchased for $9 or $10. The recording industry essentially ceded control of its product to Apple and other such sites.

Plus, feeding that anger, I feel, was rock stars went from being one of us to one of them. The Rolling Stones bought estates in the south of France. Eric Clapton flies around in a private jet. Why should a college kid making $60 or $70 a week delivering pizza or a laid-off worker feel any sympathy for some over-privileged musician?

Apparently not wanting to give up the valet and butler, those fat and happy musicians raised concert ticket prices to make up for the lost CD income. That is so damned odd to me. Did they think somebody not willing to pay more than $10 for a CD is willing to pay over $200 a ticket? I mean, Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics. Did he skip the lecture on “elasticity of demand?”

What that term means according to the Business Dictionary is “responsiveness of the demand  for a good or service to the increase or decrease in its price. Normally, sales increase with drop in prices and decrease with rise in prices.” Or the less you charge, the more likely people are to buy your product. Well duh!

As I said at the start, I think what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the music business in its current form. Unlike the American auto industry, they are not pulling up before they crash. I don’t think they know how. Rather than find a solution, they would rather waste their time going after teenagers downloading music. Sad really.

I work from a home office.

That’s good because it cuts way down on costs, my commute takes about 30 seconds, and I don’t have to share the bathroom with anyone other than my smarter half. It’s bad because there are way too many distractions in my house.

One of those is the television. I am a news junkie, so I flip on the television on during the day to see what’s happening in the world. I haven’t been a working reporter for almost a decade, but I am still hooked on current events.

So the other day I turn on the tube only to see a commercial for denture adhesive. Three women of a certain age were singing about the joys of this adhesive to the tune of the Everly Brothers “Bye Bye Love.”

My first thought was WTF?!?! I am sure Phil and Don Everly were not thinking about loose teeth when they were recorded the song in 1957.  (I was three-years-old when the song came out. My late older brother was big fan of the duo, so I heard it a lot.)

“Bye Bye Love” was one of those bouncy little pop ballads that were so prevalent in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Hearing that song made me realize that the industry I am in is co-opting my formative years. I don’t like it.

For those of you who are not Baby Boomers, I realize we get pretty boring rhapsodizing about how great things were 40-years-ago. But, we had to listen to my parents stories about their generation. Now it’s your turn to listen to us.

You have to remember how controversial rock was in the ‘50s and ‘60s. When Elvis appeared for the first time on Ed Sullivan, they only showed him from the waist up. It was thought way too scandalous to show his gyrations. Seems a little tame now when you think about Madonna kissing Brittany Spears or Adam Lambert going all bi-sexual on national television. That’s one of the things we love about it. It was considered untouchable by anybody but us damned hippie kids.

Abbie Hoffman - the man who predicted our music would be co-opted.

I don’t think Steppenwolf would have been allowed to play “Magic Carpet Ride” on broadcast television forty years ago. After all, whether it is actually true or not, we always assumed the song was about getting high. People sang about such things in the ‘60s.

So, I Google the song and discover Wendy’s used a version of it in a commercial. Well, I suppose that marriage of music and marketing kind of works. You know, munchies ….

In fact, that Google search turned up three pages on About.com of popular songs used in commercials. What used to be the anthems of rebellion are now background music for selling hamburgers and cars.

Excuse me, but I have to say it: Bummer Dude!

Well, the late Abbie Hoffman did predict this was going to happen – I think in his opus “Steal This Book.” (Which I did, but then someone stole from me. It’s what Hoffman wanted to happen, but I digress.) The point he made was that eventually society co-opts everything. Oh, well, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Although I have yet to hear any commercial using the lyrics from John Lennon’s song New York City:

Standing on the corner

Just me and Yoko Ono

We was waiting for Jerry to land

Up come a man with a guitar in his hand

Singing, “Have a marijuana if you can”

His name was David Peel

And we found that he was real

He sang, “The Pope smokes dope every day”

Up come a policeman shoved us up the street

Singing, “Power to the people today!”

So, maybe there are some corners that are still untouchable.