Is there no such thing as "the music industry"?

Thought-provoking article here from Music Week editor Steve Redmond on Drowned in Sound. 


He gives his view on why there's no such thing as "the music industry", challenging whether the separate sectors work as a congruent whole, or are simply their own entities, loosely united by the common ground of music. He also touches upon the subject of Spotify, and if it has the staying power to form any discernible grasp on consumer's listening habits. 


Redmond argues that "what we can be certain of is that Spotify is not the future of the music business", and the "future of the music business will be as varied and chaotic as music itself". 


To an extent I agree with this view. As a frequent purchaser of both CDs and vinyl, I know there is a market out there for consumers willing to part with their cash for a physical product. The advent of the mp3 as a dominant music format has led to widespread cries of the CD becoming a dying breed, with scaremongers throwing statistics left, right and centre to anyone naive enough to listen. The same was said of vinyl when CDs themselves entered the market, but a recent resurgence in spending on black wax has (hopefully) set those rumours to rest.


From a strictly business point of view, it may transpire that Spotify is simply not a financially viable business, despite being an excellent, easy to use program that has proved to be very popular. But the very popularity it has achieved may well be its eventual undoing. 


Along with advertising revenue, Spotify gains most of its income through subscribers paying £9.99 a month for the benefit of advert-free listening, with the added bonus of offline streaming. But how many people do you know who actually subscribe to this service? Very few I imagine, as most are willing to put up with the intermittent advert breaks. But with Spotify recently introducing an invite-only policy for free users, it clearly isn't getting the subscriptions it was anticipating. 


This new policy may have also served as a hopeful solution for another problem: the program's rapid growth. Spotify operates on the basis that each track streamed earns the relevant record label a small royalty. With little cashflow and an increasing amount of users, Spotify will possibly fall by the wayside in a similar fashion to other ambitious music programs who have failed in the past, most notably Napster. 


For the sake of record sales, the demise of Spotify may prove a fruitful one, but its ability to gift a single user with a huge library of music, for free in some cases, is a utility not worth losing.