We, the audience series; (part 3) the lost audience – how the music business broke faith with its main supporters (I)

One music industry expert recalls;

When I was a kid (we’re talking Bedrock here, folks: stone cars you drove with your feet, birds on perches using their beaks to play rock music on real rocks) I spent my “discretionary money” on two main things – guitar accessories and records. These were the black plastic kind that you could scratch and stuff. Oh, yeah – I also bought concert tickets. And snacks…

He further states; I was the poster child for music marketers. I heard a song on the FM rock station; it moved me. I cracked open the piggy bank, begged Mom and Dad for more money (piggy was invariably empty), and bought it. The record industry rose over the 1970s and 1980s because it was largely the only way for 12- to 25-year-olds like me to use our discretionary funds, money that ran into the tens of billions.

I have two teenagers now. I’m also in the music industry. I can get them pretty much any record they want by asking for it, and they know it. You know how many records they’ve asked me for recently? None.

For the music fans in my children’s demographic, downloading music has become de rigueur. Many 12-year-olds have never bought a CD. They think of music as a free commodity. This early branding could devastate the business, but if it does, the business deserves it.

During my childhood, and even for several generations before that, the music business owned the 12- to 25-year-olds. From Sinatra to Elvis to the Beatles, and even through Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi, “the kids,” as the music business liked to call its core customers and constituency, bought music at the rate of billions of dollars a year.

The record companies still see this 12 – 25 demographic as theirs, despite all the evidence to the contrary. They wallow in this particular fallacy, gearing their promotional dollars to radio stations focused on the “youth market,” despite the increasing difficulty of getting music onto these stations’ decreasing playlists. Yet they ignore folks like me, hard-core fans raised on records, in favor of a generation of kids raised on robbery.

How do you convince the record industry that this older demographic is the one more worth targeting? It becomes hard, because the business sees teens as a group that breaks into easy-to-reach monoliths: X percent listen to rap, Y percent pop/boy bands/girl groups, Z percent punk-pop/metal. It perceives the kids as easily swayed by peer pressure, so if their friends own record, chances are they will want to own it as well. While this becomes less and less true every year, sales of Eminem, Nickelback, Destiny’s Child, etc. show the logic can still work if enforced with a ramrod.

Conversely, the musical interests of 30- to 56-year-olds generally expand as they get older; travels through life and time expose these listeners to more and different sounds. Less influenced by others, these music fans develop their own, continually changing personal tastes. The teen who wouldn’t listen to Sinatra, opera, or John Coltrane on a bet may count one or all as passions at 30.

Sure, peer pressure still exerts a subtle influence on adults, as the coolness factor still applies. One record exec explained this to me in terms of “the dinner party album du jour.” The CD gets put on during dinner and everyone goes, who is that! The exec’s example was Norah jones, and this is how she gained the traction that eventually led to her eight Grammy Awards and sales of over 14 million albums.

However, you can no longer sell adults all the same things that their friends buy. Their diffuse tastes make the record companies less interested in this group as a whole. The reasons are obvious. To feed the behemoth that the business has become, conventional wisdom says a major label has to sell 250,000 – 500,000 copies of any given CD, just to break even (I’ve seen this figure cited as high as two million). This creates the alarming situation in which 5 percent of the albums the major record companies release support the other 95 percent. Unfortunately, for it and us, right now the major music business is retrenching. This happens in waves. A major one of these declining cycles happened in 1979. That lasted a few years, until the introduction of the CD pulled us out of it.

But this wave might just capsize the major record business. Not since the Depression have we seen 20 percent decreases in record sales. The majors seem busier looking for a scapegoat than trying to find an actual solution to this problem, save scaling back on employees and signees.