No cure for slipped discs

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While 2012 will certainly continue to witness a decline in CD sales and an upward trend for digital downloads, let us not forget that the CD is still far and away from total obsolescence. It accounted for a healthy 76 per cent market share of total album sales in the UK last year. Nevertheless, there appears to be no innovation on the horizon that will push the sales of the CD or substitute this format, unlike the Blu Ray technology that arrived as a substitute — and a superior one at that — for the DVD market.

While the “healthy” UK CD album sales appear as an exception, in the US — the world’s largest market for recorded music — the truth is: Digital sales accounted for 50.3 per cent of all music purchases last year. The paradox here is that numbers quoted refer to “sales” not revenues, where the physical format still provides record labels — and, with it, artistes — larger revenues/margins vis-a-vis most things digital.
But one has to accept the fact that the future resides in streaming, hard drives and, perhaps, the concept of “cloud”. According to a report published in the online only Side Line Music Magazine (http://www.side-line.com [2]) last year, the publication announced that major labels were considering phasing out CDs by the end of 2012, permitting only digital album downloads, some 30 years since pianist Billy Joel’s 52nd Street became the world’s first commercial album to be released on CD in Japan. CDs gained traction in the mid ’80s with Dire Straits’ classic Brothers In Arms becoming the first million selling CD (I picked up my first CD player in 1989!). The decline of the CD occurred in the ’90s as the three lettered abbreviation, “CDs”, was substituted by another: MP3.
Still, the big picture finally resembles the one that the industry has been hearing about since Napster had its genesis in 1999, which permitted illegal song downloads, or at least since Apple started selling music via iTunes in 2003 with the underlying message: Files will eventually outsell discs. In all this, the CDs that appear to be outselling themselves are what is commonly referred to in industry parlance as “blanks” or CD-Rs, or their variants. However, global sales figures of CD-R sales are not easily forthcoming. Now, of course, most “downloaders” would prefer sharing their content through pen/flash drives or through hard discs, formats that continue to have their respective “memories” enhanced and, further, having more content saved in less space due to the ever evolving technology for compression.
In retrospect, it would have been simple for the record industry to establish to consumers, when the Internet was first globally introduced that, yes, you can download content, but it needs to be paid for. For instance, at a value of US 1 cent (and its equivalent worldwide) per song and gradually, once the principle was established, the amount could have been enhanced. However, the principle was never established and what you see is what you get, with both the recording and the audio-visual industries now seeing themselves and their content being “burnt” with existing technology.
Nevertheless, it serves no useful purpose crying over spilt milk, but that’s precisely what international governments are doing right now in spite of the impasse being completely skewed in favour of technology and, with it, file-sharing. The belated attempt by the US government in its ongoing attempt to correct the errors of the past by enacting anti-piracy legislation — Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — that pits Hollywood and the recording industry against Silicon Valley (read online companies) is an action in the right direction but, to my mind, at least ten years too late.

The writer is vice-president at Shreya Entertainment, which produced director Nagesh Kukunoor’s film Mod