Patrician wrote:
Prediction: Artists will start to focus on concerts, 1960s & 70s style, to make money. And actually, I think that is a good thing.
Yeah. That's a pretty good prediction. And I also think that will be a good thing. What a lot of folks don't realize is that bands did not used to be all about record sales. Even back in the 70s when I was a kid, the profit margins on record sales wasn't that great. The focus was on the live performances.
What we've seen really is that in the last 20 years, as CDs have permeated the industry, is an absolutely huge amount of money being made by the recording companies via those record sales. Back in the day, you might find a handful of record stores selling albums in any good sized town. Today, you'd be hard pressed to not find almost as much density of such stores as there are fast food restaraunts. All of that grew out of the extremely high profitability of CDs.
The reliance on record sales is not "normal". It's literally just a phase. A phase that was very good for certain businesses, but a phase nonetheless. I think that artists will have to go back to a model where their recorded music is an advertisement for their live performances. This'll probably wreak havok with the studio bands, but those weren't "normal" either...