How Music Got Free by Stephen Richard Witt

We’re no longer willing to buy A Night at the Opera because we like “Bohemian Rhapsody.”īy the same token, we don’t want to commute 35 minutes each way to the office, especially if it’s only or primarily so our bosses can watch us work. As a lot, these folks are hoping that employees will soon forget the qualitative life improvements that the pandemic has afforded them. These days, it’s not hard to find old-school leaders who think that remote employees are stealing from the company. In both cases, entrenched interests want to preserve an increasingly untenable status quo. The history of the CD is particularly instructive when thinking about the future of work. Fast forward nearly a quarter-century. Yeah, vinyl is making a comeback, but when was the last time that you bought a CD? Streaming is a far more convenient, user-friendly, and affordable-if unfair-method of listening to tunes and exploring new genres and artists. Also, it’s essential to include Radiohead and Marillion in the pantheon of music pioneers.Īt a high level, these folks and bands saw that low-cost or free music was entering what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible in his superb book Where Good Ideas Come From. Exhibit A: David Bowie famously predicted as much back in 1997 and issued bonds against future song royalties. The status quo benefits consumers at their expense. Still, a few in the know saw this coming a mile away. Musicians aren’t happy with the current state of affairs-and they shouldn’t be. (For an excellent history of how this happened, see How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Richard Witt.) If you can tolerate ads, then music today is basically free-and it has been that way for a while. (If you think that DVD sales have followed an eerily similar trajectory, trust your judgment.) 1 Today, CD sales have dropped 97 percent from their halcyon days: Of course, we know what happened to the CD: Thanks to Napster, the iPod, iTunes, and early streaming services such as Grooveshark and Rhapsody, rare is the individual today who will plunk down any amount of money for a physical album.

Even if you only liked a single song, you grudgingly paid $16.99 for one simple reason: there really wasn’t another choice. At the turn of the century, consumers bought about a billion of them per year. Those of us of a certain age remember the compact disc.

How Music Got Free by Stephen Richard Witt