Friday, January 3, 2020

Article: Purged: How a failed economic theory still rules the digital music marketplace

 

"Many of the participants in the music industry and particularly in the electronic music industry have unknowingly built their careers or at least their aspirations for one on a dead, discredited theory written by a techno-utopian magazine editor with no education in economics. There wasn’t supposed to be this mass of unsold tracks. They were supposed to sell a few copies of each. The shelf was infinite. Less of more.

The unspoken but universally held laws that guided the digital music industry for the last two decades weren’t true. They were never true.

Everyone told you that releasing 52 tracks a year was better than 14, that more tracks meant a higher royalty statement, that you have to ‘get on all platforms’ for some kind of ledger-bound magic to happen and make you rich. Moreover, if you didn’t get rich, the problem wasn’t the system: it was you. It wasn’t the inevitable result of an economic theory based on bullshit. It didn’t fail: you did.

And it turns out it was nothing but a great big fraud."

(Via Purged: How a failed economic theory still rules the digital music marketplace | 5 Magazine.)

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