Music Industry Shrinkage

I’m catch­ing up on the starred items in my Google Read­er and as I sift­ed through posts about awe­some can­dy bars to Rosselli­ni, I came across this item from Idol­a­tor about how quick­ly the music indus­try is shrink­ing. Now I’m sure that my for­mer self could’ve nav­i­gat­ed the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics for clear­er num­bers, but there’s some­thing that comes up in Mike’s post that inter­est­ed me: the notion that at some point of labor equi­lib­ri­um, the music indus­try will return a profit.

The idea that the music indus­try is still bur­dened by the bureau­cra­cy that grew dur­ing their boom years is a pop­u­lar one. One imag­ines beau­ti­ful peo­ple attend­ing par­ties and doing lit­tle else in gild­ed offices in New York and Los Ange­les, with exec­u­tives doing laps in vaults like Scrooge McDuck.

Of course, if you’ve been to a major label’s offices in the past few years, you’ll find quite the oppo­site. When I vis­it­ed Uni­ver­sal/Is­land-Def Jam to hear Mari­ah Carey’s E=MC2, I was shocked to find spar­tan cubi­cles orna­ment­ed in lit­tle more than pro­mo­tion­al posters and the odd gold or plat­inum record. The office was staffed almost exclu­sive­ly by young peo­ple — very young peo­ple — most younger than me.

This is pure­ly anec­do­tal evi­dence, but I think the music indus­try is being man­aged in much the same way any busi­ness look­ing to scratch out a prof­it is: rely on cheap, young labor and hope for the best. “Cut­ting the fat” may help, but what does one do when all the fat’s been cut? Worse, what hap­pens when you cut the fat only to real­ize that those peo­ple would’ve been bet­ter used to build new busi­ness that’s been neglect­ed for lack of ded­i­cat­ed staff?

(Here’s an idea of their des­tiny in the New World Order.)