Ten years of itunes transformation
Sunday marks a decade since Apple’s iTunes Music Store opened its virtual doors. It was the first serious attempt to impose order and profitability on an unregulated digital landscape. Overall, iTunes has sold 25 billion tracks from a catalogue of 26 million in 119 countries. People are listening to more music than ever. Music has never been more popular. But what are the drawbacks, and what else have the past 10 years taught us about digital music and its future? ❚ Stephen Bass runs the independent label Moshi Moshi, which has released music by Florence + the Machine and Hot Chip. He has also worked in A&R at Virgin and Island. ❚ Tim Dellow is the director of Transgressive Records, home to the bands Foals and Two Door Cinema Club. ❚ Anthony Mullen is senior analyst at a global research firm and a parttime musician.
HEADS NEEDED TO BE BANGED TOGETHER
“It wasn’t just a light bulb going off,” Mullen says. “It was a firework going off. It transformed the slightly gout-ridden music industry into something a little bit more vital.” Stephen Bass remembers the early 2000s as “a bit like the Wild West,” until iTunes “created a way for digital music to make money for bands.” Some record companies dug their heels in at first, as did a few artists: Def Leppard and Garth Brooks remain iTunes refuseniks. But the influence of iTunes has been largely positive, Tim Dellow insists.
MP3S CAN MAKE MONEY — AND NOT JUST FOR APPLE
In the U.S. digital music spending reached $4.1 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow to $5.5 billion by 2017, while in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the U.K., it was 1.5 billion euros in 2012 and is expected to be 2.6 billion euros by 2017. How the profits are sliced depends on the act and the label, but one example had Apple taking 11 per cent of the price of a song and an independent label 53 per cent, which they split 50/50 with their artist. Bass says when you factor in the lower cost — no CDs to make — income isn’t much less than it was in the pre-digital era. He recalls the cost of packaging and transporting thousands of CDs and then seeing many of them returned from shops unsold.
THE DOWNSIDE OF THE PICK AND MIX APPROACH
iTunes is said to have encouraged musical promiscuity, with consumers increasingly cherrypicking songs from different genres. That’s mostly healthy, Dellow thinks: “When I was a kid I had lots of different phases and that was at the cost of listening to other music, but now recent additions to my iPod include Ghostface Killa, Justin Timberlake and David Bowie.” But fluidity of taste can also bring with it a lack of engagement, he warns. THE ALBUM IS DEAD ... LONG LIVE THE ALBUM It’s also commonly said that iTunes celebrates songs at the expense of albums, allowing us to buy individual tracks without purchasing their parent LP. The UK iTunes store recently sold its billionth single, for example, but last year album sales fell by 11.2 per cent in the U.K. Bass thinks that we sometimes overeulogize the album, a format that “was born by the accident of a record being able to hold approximately 45 minutes of music.” But, he adds: “The idea of a world in which you can only have singles is quite scary.” Dellow agrees: “There is still an affection for what the album can represent. The challenge is to develop records that are that cliché: all killer no filler.” YOU NEED TO MOVE WITH THE TIMES “iTunes looks incredibly oldfashioned,” says Bass. It was designed for a world of PCs and dialup modems, using an MP3 format that minimized the size of files in an era when they took an age to download. “But we’re still using it!” Bass adds. “Could you imagine using a computer or a phone that was 10 years old?” Back then smartphones were “still the talk of science fiction” but by 2012, 24 per cent of digital spend came from mobile or tablet in the seven leading European markets, and by 2017 this is expected to rise to 43 per cent. “The functionality and power in a person’s smartphone is just being ignored by iTunes,” Bass says. We should be able to unfurl an array of extra goodies on our mobile screens, he says, liner notes, photos, links to merchandise and gigs. THERE’S SUCH A THING AS TOO EASY So you have Duran Duran’s entire back catalogue on your hard drive — what now? Bass thinks people are starting to realize that their vast digital collections have “come to them easily for a good reason, because they aren’t actually worth as much as something you have to work for.” Hence the resurgence in vinyl. It’s also one of the reasons why there is a renewed emphasis on the visceral experience of live music, and on exclusive services such as backstage access at gigs. MUSIC IS SOCIABLE “Apple still hasn’t understood that,” Mullen says. “I’m amazed that they still haven’t got on top of it.” They did try to in 2010, launching Ping, a social network for shoppers at the iTunes store. But it closed two years later. “It was a walled garden,” Mullen says. “Sure, people want to share music they have bought but limiting things in this way was a bit of a death knell.” Spotify showed the way through its partnerships with Facebook and Twitter, and iTunes is following suit, linking to the Shazam app and Twitter’s newly launched #music service. But the fact that #music users are posting more links to Spotify than to iTunes shows that Apple has some catching up to do on the social media front. NICHES CAN GO NUCLEAR The iTunes Store is a global marketplace for what would previously have been marginal interests. Dellow says, “people are getting deeper into niches. iTunes presents a really great opportunity for labels who have a deep catalogue. For relatively little cost you can stick up everything.” YOU CAN’T IGNORE STREAMING The rise of streaming services such as Spotify (six million paying subscribers and rising) has presented iTunes with some formidable opponents. The likes of Spotify pay a fraction of a penny per play so most artists make much more money from downloads than they do from streaming. A study in 2010 calculated that, to earn the monthly minimum U.S. wage, you would need to sell 1,161 CDs, 12,399 downloads or have your track streamed 849,817 times. But Bass can see a time when streaming royalties outstrip download profits and Apple is obviously worried; it is poised to enter the streaming market with a service that has been unofficially dubbed iRadio. It will follow the model of online radio stations such as Pandora and Last FM, which let you choose the type of music but not the individual track. The hope is that consumers will be introduced to new music and then buy it from iTunes. THERE’S LESS ROOM FOR ACTS SHORT ON TALENT Thanks to falling revenues, music is no longer a place for the lazy and the talentless to get rich quick. “It’s not an easy buck any more,” Bass says. “You need to be very committed to music these days.” Fewer Jive Bunnies and more Radioheads? It could be the best iTunes legacy of the lot.