Looking Back Ten Years. Are We Up Or Are We Down?
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By Moses Avalon

We have a serious problem with the industry… the CD business could be destroyed entirely in three years by the availability of free music on the Internet.
--Miles Copeland in a 2001 Interview.

In 2000 it seemed like the music business was about to end. Spin magazine was shutting its doors, MTV began its ten-year retreat into irrelevance by closing The Box, labels were losing massive market share to home video games and artists were making pennies on the dollar of what they were supposed to be making. And then, in 2001 the Napster war exploded.

But even though there are many who like to purport that the music business is still in a downward spiral (mostly those who favor tech companies) these claims defy all logic. ASCAP/BMI has reported record earnings for the past three years and music sales in general are up. This, in spite of now famous, music futurist, Gerd Leonhard who said in 2002, The performing rights organizations as we know them, will vanish.

Really?

CD sales are sliding and are destined to become the new vinyl, as vinyl resurgence makes the 12" the new Laser Disk. This is in contrast to the futurists opinions who in 2002 stated emphatically that the pricing scheme of music-buying will be shelved before 2007 and that CD prices will end up at around $5 USD per unit.

Really?

Last I checked we still managed to sell more than 400 million of those silver roof-shingles in 2009 for over $12. About the same price they were in 2001. Most were also bought them the same way we've been buying music for fifty years in record stores.

All RIAA data seems to suggest that physical music sales are down 30%-- if you start counting in 2005. But if we wind the clock back ten years, instead of five, CD and music sales are pretty much where they were a decade ago. This might sound like bad news if you worship the concept of expansion, until you remember that industries, like finance, automobile manufacturing, the stock market and other US staples have seen a sharp decline since 2000, due largely to the fall of the past two years.

By comparison, the music biz doing fine and all this while dealing with rampant piracy, evolving technology that is too fast to legislate with, no government bail-out, and technocrats who hurt the music business with dumb statements like, Mechanical royalties as we know them [in 2002] will cease to exist within 15 years. (Yes, he really said that.) And these two gems which could not have turned out to be less true when predicted by futurists in 2002 yet were hailed as forward thinking by organizations like the EFF, The Future of Music Coalition, and some very pessimistic music business professors:

1) The lifetime of copyright will be cut back to 15-25 years, to reflect the fast pace of innovation and cultural development.

And my personal favorite:

2) Piracy will be stamped out in less than 10 years.

(Gerd did get a couple of important things right. To read Leonhards full 2002 predictions go here: http://www.musicdish.com/mag/?id=6999 )

HOW COOL ARE YOU?

As one of my readers, the decade change-over should be a bit significant because it was the year 2000 that www.MosesAvlaon.com went live, bringing you in-depth, accurate, balanced, analysis of the music business that had never before been available to the public. Along with it came our advocacy efforts that in the past ten years have helped draft legislation, creating better deals for artists and being instrumental in recovering over $1,000,000 in Black Box revenue for US writers, including Sting (who never thanked me) Arrested Development, Hanson, BTO and 100s more.

We're proud of our work and I'm thankful to have you as a reader. Some of you have been on this list since day one, when Moses Supposes was little more than the rant of an author with a radical book. What a trip it's been. Here's a little stroll down memory lane and a fast look at predictions from yesterday; who was right and who missed the mark completely in the first nine years of the new millennium.