Is the CD in decline?

With the rise in media streaming and mp3 downloads increasing, the question of whether CD sales are declining has been risen, and I'm going to look more into that.

The rise in online purchases and streaming websites such as iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora and a host of other services has made music more easy to access than ever before. But the music industry’s backbone, the album, isn’t benefiting from the transition.
During the first six months of 2014, only 62.9 million CDs were sold, less than half of 2009′s six-month total of 136.4 million.

While this drop may seem to be as a result of digital outlets becoming increasingly popular, the reality is that digital sales aren’t fully replacing the lost CD sales, leading total album sales to decline.
Since 2009, total album sales have diminished compared with the previous year, excluding 2011, which saw a slight rise (most likely due to Adele’s blockbuster album, 21, which sold 5.82 million copies that year). Without a similar blockbuster on the horizon for 2014, the negative trend is likely to continue. Six months into the year, only one album, the 'Frozen' soundtrack, has crossed 1 million in sales.

• Pharrell Williams had the top-selling digital song of the period with “Happy,” which sold 5.63 million copies and won the most radio airplay of the period with 571,000 spins.
• 42% increase in on-demand audio and video streams
• Digital track sales are down 12.5 percent, from 356.5 million to 312 million.
• Digital album sales went down 14.2 percent, from 32.4 million to 27.8 million.
• CD sales have even higher losses: they’re down 20.5 percent from last year’s first quarter, from 40.1 million units to 31.9 million.
• There were 34.28 billion on-demand song and video streams in the first quarter, up from 25.44 billion streams in the first quarter of 2013.  This is a 34.7 percent rise.
• Billboard's Caulfield said that so far this year, about 44 million digital albums have been sold, compared with 40 million during the same time frame last year. But while digital sales have increased slightly, CD sales have dropped from 147 million last year to 114 million this year for the same time period.

   

Despite this decline, one sector’s growth is on the rise — vinyl. In the first half of 2009, just 1.2 million vinyl albums were sold. However, this figure has jumped to 4 million in the first half of 2014. “Vinyl LP’s 40% increase over last year’s record-setting pace shows interest in buying and consuming music continues to be robust” said David Bakula, senior vice president at Nielsen Entertainment.

I'm not worried about this decline in relation to the sales of my band's album and vinyl record, because the statistics show that the majority of people are still purchasing their music rather than downloading it. Also, vinyl sales are increasing, so I think my idea of releasing a vinyl record will be more successful than I first thought.

Crowdfunding

Last year, my media class attended the ASFF (Aesthetica Short Film Festival) in York. It was extremely beneficial for us when it came to our research and planning for our final project, and so we are attending it again this year.

While we are attending the 'A-Z of Producing Music Videos' master class, ran by Craig MCNeil, which will be very helpful for us when it comes to filming and editing our final piece, a master class I wish I could attend is that of 'Crowdfunding'. So, as I'm not able to go to the master class, I've researched a lot into Crowdfunding and below is what I have found...

"Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, typically via the internet." - Wikipedia definition

Crowdfunding is becoming increasingly popular, moreso in the film industry than that of music videos, but I have no doubt that it will be in the future.
In 2013, the crowdfunding industry grew to be over $5.1 billion worldwide, generating the financial backing for features such as 'Iron Sky: The Coming Race' and 'Palo Alto Stories' by James Franco.

According to WordSpy.com, the earliest recorded use of the word 'crowdfunding' was by Michael Sullivan in August 2006 with the launch of fundavlog.

Crowdfunding gained traction in the United States after the launch of ArtistShare, the first online platform for crowdfunding, in 2003.

Crowdfunding websites helped companies and individuals worldwide to raise $89 million from members of the public in 2010, $1.47 billion in 2011, and $2.66 billion in 2012. And, in 2012, more than one million individual campaigns were established globally.

A May 2014 report, released by the UK-based 'The Crowdfunding Centre', titled "The State of the Crowdfunding Nation", presented data showing that, during the month of March 2014, more than $60,000 dollars were raised on an hourly basis via global crowdfunding initiatives. Also during this time period, 442 crowdfunding campaigns were launched globally on a daily basis.

The report identified the existence of two primary types of crowdfunding:

1. Reward-based crowdfunding: entrepreneurs pre-sell a product or service to launch a business concept without incurring debt or sacrificing equity/shares.
2. Equity-based crowdfunding: the backer receives unlisted shares of a company, usually in its early stages, in exchange for the money pledged. The company's success is determined by how successfully it can demonstrate its viability.

 'Abundance Generation' was the first debt crowdfunding platform in the UK to be regulated by the Financial Services Authority (Financial Conduct Authority). It was approved in July 2011 and was launched to the public in 2012, and provides democratic finance to UK-based renewable energy developers.
Also, in August 2012, Richard Branson announced his support for crowdfunding

The highest reported funding by a crowdfunded project to date is 'Star Citizen'; an online space trading and combat video game being developed by Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games. Which, as of 10 March 2014^[update], had rasied $40 million.

Benefits of crowdfunding for the creator(s):

Crowdfunding campaigns provide producers with a number of benefits, beyond the strict financial gains. The following are non-financial benefits of crowdfunding:

• Profile – A compelling project can raise a producer's profile and provide a boost to their reputation, especially on social networking sites.
• Marketing – Project initiators can show there is an audience and market for their project, and they can market to them directly.
• Audience engagement – Crowdfunding creates a forum where project initiators can engage with their audiences. Audience can engage in the production process by following progress through updates from the creators and sharing feedback via comment features on the project's crowdfunding page.
• Feedback – Offering pre-release access to content or the opportunity to beta-test content to project backers as a part of the funding incentives provides the project initiators with instant access to good market testing feedback. In the case of an unsuccessful campaign, it provides good market feedback.

Crowdfunding also comes with a number of potential risks or barriers:

• Reputation – Failure to meet campaign goals or to generate interest result in a public 'failure'.
• IP protection – Many Interactive Digital Media developers and content producers are reluctant to publicly announce the details of a project before production due to concerns about idea theft and protecting their IP from plagiarism.
• Donour exhaustion – There is a risk that if the same network of supporters is reached out to multiple times, that network will eventually cease to supply necessary support.
• Public fear of abuse – Concern among supporters that without a regulatory framework, the likelihood of a scam of abuse of funds is high.

Crowdfunding has, so far, been extremely successful, and I think its appeal will definitely be on the rise, especially because of the increase in social media and online platforms used in the marketing and distributions of films and music videos.

Questionnaire

To get the views of others on music to help me with my final piece of research, I conducted an online survey and distributed it.

It reached 29 people; 19 female and 10 male; twenty six 16 to 18 year olds, one 19 to 24 year old, one under 16 year old, and one person whom is 45+.

This graph shows that pop, rock, indie, and dance are the more popular genres, with alternative close behind. This is great for my band because the its genre is a mix between rock, indie, and alternative.

 

 

 

 

I asked this question because I thought it might be worth thinking about a possibly tour to add into the digipack for my band. Nearly 50% answered that they go to around 1 to 2 gigs a year, which means that I will have to promote the tour a lot more effectively and more widely than I otherwise would have.

 

 

 

I then asked the question: The name of my 'band' is "Little Gone Life". What genre(s) would you associate with this name?

 

15 people said that they would associate the band name with the indie / alternative rock genre, which is exactly what I was going for. Others said they would relate it to pop or metal, which isn't too far from the genres I was hoping they'd pick.

 

 

 

For the next question, I got a lot of different answers, but I have picked out a few answers that relate to exactly what I was looking for:

 

What words do you associate with the band name 'Little Gone Life'?

• Kid growing up, life being hard
• Small, death, wasted
• Colourless
• Alone, loss, loneliness
• Sad, lonely, pessimistic, depressed
• Tiny, Sad, Pessimistic, Insignificant, Lonely, Colourless

 

These answers were perfect for me, especially when people used the word 'colourless', as my band's whole brandity is based around a black and white colour scheme.

 

 

I then asked a question which was "What was the last music video you remember watching? And where did you see it?".

 

12 people said they saw the music video on YouTube, and the others said they saw it on a music channel. Therefore, these will be the platforms that I will target when trying to get my video to reach the audience.

 

 

The last question I asked was the following:

 

 

It is clear from the above answers that people either purchase an online version of the song, download it from online, or listen to it via music streaming websites such as Spotify, rather than purchasing the album in store or online. This means that I will definitely have to target my audience a lot more specifically in order for them to want to purchase the hard copy of the album, rather than illegally downloading it or just listening to it online.

 

Age Ratings

From today, October 3rd, the BBFC are going to pilot a scheme which will see online music videos being classified with age ratings. However, this will only be for artists signed to British labels.
The BBFC haven't released specific details about what would make a music video a specific age rating, but, based on their regulations for film classification, I believe that my music video would be rated at a 12.
I think this because I will have clips showing a guy drinking whiskey, a guy smoking, and a scene or two of a couple in bed together. These alone would make my video a 12, because of the alcohol and implied sexual content.

I think a 12 would be the perfect rating for my music video because it fits around my target audience exactly - my target audience is young adults to people in their mid-twenties, and so the 12 rating wouldn't be a problem for them, and it wouldn't reduce my audience at all.
Taking this into account, I probably have a lot more leeway with my age rating because even a 15 certificate wouldn't affect my target audience, and so my music video can be more explicit and 'daring' than videos from genres such as pop or dance.
With this in mind, I might add more clips which are suitable for older audiences, just because I have more leeway with content.

Video Update

As a lot of my recent posts have just been text based, I decided to do a quick video update, where I talk about what I'm going to do in the next week...




My lyric video will feature clips I will use in my actual video, but will focus heavily on the lyrics of the song, and I will use the font used for my band name.

Band Name Font

For my band name, I am using the font 'ISOCT', so the name of my band will appear as below:

 

 

I came to the decision of using this font after writing the name of my band in a lot of different fonts on Photoshop. I then asked a lot of my friends which they preferred, using a method of elimination. Below is a picture of the different fonts that I trailed, and the one in blue is the font I have decided to use:

 

 

 I researched a few band logos, and found that a lot of bands in the indie rock genre have simply their name as their logo, as you can see below:

 

 

 

 

Just by looking at these logos, you know exactly who they are, which makes it a lot easier to market the bands to their target audiences, which is why I kept the style and font of the band name to a minimum.

 

It was then apparent that the font I used suited the genre and style of my band a lot better than the other typographies, and so 'ISOCT' will be the font used throughout my digipak and music video in order to keep continuity.