A great way to refer to what the music industry is doing to itself . . .

"Music Industry Intent on Committing Hari-Kari" from the Big Picture. There's really no way to say it better!

From the post:

"After 3 years of a overpriced, recession driven, anti-competitive, alternative entertainment choice induced sales slow down, the music industry -- for a brief instance -- found religion. The industry settled many of their own litigation/criminal issues; And then, the Universal Music Group slashed prices.

What-do-ya know, sales increased!"

Add to the list above suing your own customers and not improving audio technology since the 1980's. Come on, everyone's heard of DVD-Audio and SuperAudio, but the industry's so busy suing its own customers that it's pissed off by overcharging for 1980's technology, they haven't been working on these new formats. The funny thing is that super-high-end products (at super high price points) usually sell very well because of exclusivity.

After a success in lowering CD prices, what does the industry decide to do? Raise prices for legal downloading, of course! I posted about this before.

Here's what it boils down to, according to Big Picture:

"That's one of key misunderstandings of the Music biz -- their competition is for the consumer's entertainment dollar (DVDs and Video Games) -- not one CD versus another."

Of course, what the music industry faces is what every company faces -- trying to get the consumer to spend his/her dollar with them rather than with some other entertainment source.

Big Picture has written a very succinct and easy to understand article. The only thing they did not cover is the inevitable climb in the price of concert tickets -- the industry is now trying to make up for lost CD sales by charging ever-increasing prices for bands, which translate into ever-increasing ticket prices for fans. Once again, as concert ticket prices reach the stratosphere and sports and other entertainment tickets remain the same, the music industry faces the same problem as that presented above.

As a final thought: the music industry seems to be spending no real amount of time in renewing itself. The majority of talent these days seems to be one-hit-wonders that disappear immediately following their first few tour dates. There are a precious few that make it big and appeal to a wide audience, but it is a very precious few. Meanwhile, every dollar possible is squeezed out of old acts that should not even be performing anymore (but still do because it's a pay day for them even if no one shows up).