News

This time last year the music industry was ready to celebrate. Compact disc sales were up for the first time in years, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks were reeling from lawsuits, ringtone sales were proving unexpectedly profitable, and legitimate (paid-for, that is) downloads were rising. But this year, Jim Urie, president of Universal Music Group, told The Wall Street Journal that Christmas 2005 was "a bleak holiday season at the end of a bleak year."

Why? Because CD sales for 2005 were down nearly 8% compared with 2004. For some outlets, the numbers were even worse—Virgin Megastores reports sales down by 20% this year. What happened to all the good times?

Music executives are making their lists and citing them twice. The usual suspects get their usual slagging; online piracy, CD burning, high prices, and the evergreen "competition from DVDs and videogames" are all trotted out again. There was also an interesting pair of villains blamed this time out: the iPod and iTunes.

The iPod is, of course, the world's most popular personal music player and iTunes has become the seventh largest retailer of music in the US, so how do they get cast as the bad guys? Some record company executives point to iTunes' practice of selling individual songs as counterproductive, claiming out that the company's a la carte system favors individual songs to the detriment of the sales of complete CDs. At least one label chief fulminated that iPod owners ripped their CD collections onto their personal portables and then stopped buying music altogether—it seems that transferring your own music to an iPod now irritates some record folks as much as illegally downloading them used to.

As a veteran of the music industry, I've heard all of this before—more than once, in fact. Every time the record labels suck all the juice out of a popular music scene, they look around for a patsy. It's always some other guy. The reason why people avoided buying CDs in 2005 is as simple as the CDs themselves: Most of them were easy to resist.

Quick, name the 10 best albums released in 2005. Couldn't do it, could you? If you're like me, you either came up with a bunch of titles that weren't actually released this year or you faltered somewhere around number six. If Stereophile readers (and writers), who tend to be a bit more passionate about music than the average Joe, have a hard time naming 10 memorable recordings released in the last 12 months, you know the market's a vast wasteland.

This isn't just the usual aging-audiophile whine about how much better things used to be. It's a shout out about how debased things have become. Don't believe me? Listen to howDon VanCleave, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, described the current scene to the WSJ: "an absolute, gigantic cesspool of really bad bands."

Mr. Record Executive, there's your problem right there. You feed us crap and you treat us like crooks—now you're blaming us for loading up our iPods with our own records and refusing to buy yours. How stupid do you think we are?