Windowing record releases
Great read from the Trichordist: “What’s Good for Adele Sucks for Everyone Else”
However, windowing still feels like trying to control something we can’t control; a return to piracy.
I’m wondering how many music fanatics, and even casual music listeners, partook in one these actions:
1. borrowed friends CDs to rip them to your harddrive
2. visited the library to check out CDs to rip them to your hard drive
3. traded external hard drives full of music with friends and copy them
4. downloaded music from an illegal pirate site (like Napster, Limewire, Pirate Bay)
5. used software to transfer and download a song off Youtube into a .wav or .mp3 version
From 2000-2011, some music fans did all of them. Most of us did at least one or two of these actions to grow our music collections between 2005-2011.
Am I wrong to assume most of us don’t do any of these actions anymore?
Once Spotify became available in America, all of this time storing, downloading, cataloguing music wasn’t worth it for me.
The fact is streaming didn’t make sales diminish. The nature of the song no longer being connected to the physical product (a CD) started the inevitable decline years ago.
Streaming replaces actions 1-5.
Adele is having record sales this week and holiday season. One reason she’s able to do this is because she’s the biggest, most talented artist in the world right now; and another reason is because most of the other music available is on streaming sites.
Look at it this way: If most of the music heavy consumers don’t do actions 1-5 because of streaming, they aren’t going to do 1-5 for one or two albums a year
But if every major label artist tries to window, what would happen? A return to 1-5, not record sales across the board, at least not for long.
The Internet doesn’t disappear because you window your record.
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