A pair of Wired stories recently reported evidence of a significant uptick in the sale of vinyl records, showing that while CD sales have declined 11.7 percent this past year, vinyl sales have increased 36.6 percent.  This recent resurgence of vinyl is beautifully ironic. This is the digital age! Music is cheap, convenient and portable. Innovations in technology have propelled us to places no one could have dreamed of a couple of decades ago. 8-Track cartridges came and went. Cassette tapes came and went. We’ll soon be able to say the same thing about CDs. Yet here we are, watching the sale of vinyl records climb like it’s 1976.

 There are those who may see this as a step backwards for physical media, but in reality that couldn’t be further from the truth. For the past few years the recording industry has been increasingly commoditized, and listeners have consistently chosen quantity and convenience over quality. The MP3 is the poster child for this idea. You can download, copy and share it almost instantly and carry it anywhere, but it sounds terrible. The result is a glut of recorded music on the Internet and a largely devalued product. Listeners were ok with this for a while, but it seems the masses (or at least an increasingly large subset of the masses) have had enough.

Vinyl could be the perfect answer to listeners’ digital fatigue, and could provide the flailing music industry with something it desperately needs – value. Digital files are nearly worthless as a product. You can’t see them or touch them. They are infinitely reproduce-able and instantly available. If over abundance commoditized a physical product, inite-ness devalues a virtual product completely. Vinyl on the other hand can’t be easily reproduced, and is a much more sensory medium. The sound quality is better, there is more room for artwork. You can see it, hold it, smell it, taste it. It has the ability to foster a much deeper connection between the listener and the music. How many times have you flipped through dozens of songs on your iPod without really listening? You have to work for vinyl – finding the right album, placing it on the turntable, finding the groove, flipping it over when the first side finishes. You can’t just let it play forever in the background. Vinyl has the potential to return some of the appreciation for music as art that this industry has lost.

CDs are not the answer. Digital files have made CDs redundant and obsolete. Why do we need a physical version of a digital file? That makes no sense. We have iPods for that, which better represent the advantages of digital anyway – convenience and portability. MP3 players don’t scratch or skip and you can carry your entire library in your pocket. CDs were always flawed, and now they are finally on their way out.

Of course, we’re talking about vinyl replacing CDs not digital music in general. We have only just begun to realize the potential of digital technology, but digital is still more effective when a physical medium is also available. Labels like Matador Records have recognized this and have begun including coupons in record packaging that can be used to download digital versions of the album’s songs. According to Matador the coupons have been a big hit. Programs like this are a great way of providing fans with the best of both worlds.

I’m not old enough to have any real nostalgia about vinyl records, but the benefits a true resurgence could bring to our struggling industry is exciting. Vinyl provides the artists and labels with a real product to sell again, yes - and that’s great. What excites me, though, is that vinyl has the potential to get listeners to connect to recorded music as an art form again, and that is something we can all get behind.

Free markets are cyclical. Economic trends will start out slow, pick up speed, boom, plateau, BUST. Take our current recession – three years ago even someone like me could afford a McMansion and a four car garage (boom,) and now we’re losing sixty-thousand jobs a month (bust.) The same can cycles can be found in the cost of goods and services.

Apply this principle to the cost of music and you end up with what Seth Godin has coined “the new free.” Here’s what he writes in a recent post to his marketing blog:

Free online has two distinct elements. Breakthrough free, like the first free ebook or the first free email service, and sample-this free, which decreases the cost of trial and lowers boundaries of the spread of an idea.

As the market for free gets more crowded, we’ll see more and more people promoting their free products, stuff that people used to have pay for. A complete shift from ‘you will pay’ to ‘it is free’ to  ‘I will pay for ads to alert you it’s free’ to ultimately, ‘I will pay you to try it’.

Mr. Godin is not a prophet – this cycle has already begun to run it’s course in the music industry. In fact, as we reported several weeks ago, at least one band has reached what Godin might call the final stage of free. The industry should have seen this coming a long time ago when CD’s began climbing higher and higher in price until they became downright ridiculous. A bust was always imminent.

Where does this leave musicians?

I’ve been telling people to give their music away for a while now, and I don’t plan on stopping. Regardless of where the market cycle is taking us most indies don’t have the resources to stand alone as the sole band still charging for their recorded music. If you don’t give your music away you won’t find the audience you need to fill venues and build a solvent career.

On the other hand, more progress needs to be made in the search for ways to add value to recorded music. We really can’t get to the point where everybody is pulling an Officer Roseland and paying fans to download – where would those resources come from?

I can tell you right now that the first place bands should be looking as they evaluate how to elevate their music above the din of a saturated market is the quality of their songs. It sounds simple, but in the social-media driven world we live in it can be easy to focus all of our energy on marketing and PR and forget about quality all together. Are your songs really all that good? Are they better than the thousands of other songs freely available to the same listeners you are trying to hook? That may sound harsh, but it’s what it will take now that you can’t price your music any cheaper.

Imogen Heap

I have talked ad-nauseum about the opportunities that social media provides artists to get the word out and connect with their listeners. Sometimes I feel like I am beating a dead horse – surely everybody get’s it by now, right? But the more I talk with new artists and record labels the more I realize that everyone really doesn’t get it yet. They either don’t believe that something like Twitter can actually advance their career, or they just don’t know how to use it properly to get the results they want.

I follow a lot of different artists and musicians on Twitter, and I love to see some of the innovative things they are doing to engage with their fans. Recently rap/reggae artist Matisyahu offered to send out the address of his rehearsal hall to the first few followers to send him a message. Everybody had so much fun that he did it again for the next couple of rehearsals. Singer/songwriter Imogen Heap posted a link to a live web-stream where fans could eavesdrop on her as she played piano just for fun. The four ‘heapstreams’ that she has hosted have garnered thousands of hits and a lot of positive comments and tweets from grateful fans. The majority of the comments expressed how much they appreciated being allowed a window into the artists private creative process. The videos also reveal that Imogen Heap really knows how to play her instrument, something that is valuable in itself.

These ideas are perfect examples of how social media can be used creatively to add value and depth to the artist-fan relationship. As technology increases and artists have more time to play around with new tools and new ideas we are sure to see many more innovations in the future. Bands should be paying attention! If you learn from the people who are out in front innovating you have the opportunity to get your name out there in ways not possible five years ago.

Business Week ran an article recently that talks about the “problem” of online music streaming services. The article claims that while online streaming was initially intended to promote music, and therefore promote the purchasing of music, it has actually had the opposite effect. The author describes a 23 year old man who has gone from spending over $100/mo. on music purchases to only $10/mo. because he figures he can simply stream whatever music he wants to hear at any given time.

Despite the account of the single consumer they interviewed, I disagree that online music streaming has really caused the sale of recorded music to decline. The fact is that online streaming does promote music. The listener is exposed to music that they may never have encountered otherwise. When a listener hears something she likes, she will look for more music by that artist and may end up a loyal fan down the road. Does that guarantee that she will someday purchase the music that she has enjoyed via the music streaming services? Of course not, but she is much more likely to do so than if she had never heard the artist in the first place

This perspective also seems to ignore the fact that conventional radio has been doing the same thing for decades. (Of course, Billy Corgan has decided he doesn’t like that either – but that is another post entirely!) Listeners do not pay the radio stations that they tune into, and the stations - particularly online stations – pay big royalties on the music they play. It is understood that the artists benefit from the free publicity, and the radio stations make their money from advertising dollars that exist because so many people are able to listen for free. The listeners obviously get to enjoy music in their homes, cars or wherever else they happen to have a radio. It works the same way online. Granted, there are at this point fewer listeners, and the ad dollars haven’t caught up with conventional radio, but the free publicity piece remains unchanged. If both services ‘stream’ music into the home, why is one generally accepted as promoting the sale of music, and the other as discouraging it?

The answer is that this entire discussion is irrelevant. Free online music streaming is not discouraging it’s listeners to purchase music any more than conventional radio. In fact, it is almost certainly helping music sales, especially for lesser-known artists. The real issue is that the old Industry models are broken in far more serious places. Consumers have decided what they want – free music that they can listen to whenever and wherever they want – and the established Industry doesn’t like it. The argument against online streaming is just another straw man that the Music Industry has erected in an attempt to reclaim some of it’s former control.