AC/DC just recently dropped a new album called ‘Black Ice’ that quickly soared to one of the best selling albums of 2008 with nearly 800,000 copies sold already. Even AC/DC themselves are surprised by the numbers they are seeing this early in the albums life. What does this mean for the rest of the industry?

It means that if you put out a good album, people will buy it.

Piracy kills

The big argument by industry officials is that ‘piracy’ is killing the industry and that these people are ’stealing’ the livelihoods of musicians and other artists. My response to this argument is: ‘Black Ice’. AC/DC are a group of proven musicians with a long track-record of successful albums. It’s no surprise that their latest offering is already receiving record sales for the band and critical acclaim.

The industry has spent millions of dollars making sure you believe that artist’s sales are sorely damaged by P2P mediums. I say that artist’s sales are sorely damaged by the artists themselves. Creativity in music has gone out the window in the past 15 years and it is a sad sight to see. Only a handful of albums have really stood out to me, and most of them are hard to find because they are by little-known bands that don’t produce mass records you can find at the local FYE.

Garbage in = garbage out

People are simply not stupid. You can’t shit out a record and hope to sell a million copies anymore. If you produce garbage, expect garbage sales. With the option available to download it for free from various mediums, you have to produce an album that makes people want to buy it (go figure, huh?). You need to produce an album that is so good that people don’t just want the music, they want the hard medium… the CD, the cover art, the liner notes… everything.

With it being so easy to download music, artists are simply going to have to find new ways to attract people to buying their music and their product. Convincing people to actually buy your tunes these days is no easy feat considering there are so many ways to get it elsewhere for no cost. Put simply, only a tiny percentage of albums in the next decade will be commercially successful on their own, the rest will have to rely on sales of other merchandise.

‘Black Ice’ is proof that commercially successful albums on their own still turn up from time-to-time, but they are few and far between. Hell, even AC/DC is surprised that they pulled it off.

Better business models

P2P is something that artists should be embracing, not shunning. I know many musicians have found ways to be successful in the face of P2P but not enough to bring to light the idea that you can live in a P2P world and still be profitable. If artists want to be successful these days they need to turn out a good album and give it away…. here’s why.

Since your music can be interchanged with others for free, the worst case scenario for an artists is that just one person buys their album and everyone else has a copy. While this is an extreme view, its theoretically possible. The best way to capitalize on your art is to give it away and encourage people to make you profitable in other ways: merchandise, tours, appearances on shows, etc.

If I was still in the music game, I would be putting my music on every P2P source possible in order to get my name out there. The end hope being that it would draw attention from other musicians or big-wigs looking to pay me in some way for my art. This is the business model of the 21st century for musicians: make money off things other than your album because your album sales simply will never be what they were.

Customers making the rules

All told, ‘Black Ice’ shows that the music industry is still profitable and still kicking just as strong as it ever was. People will buy CDs if the music is worth it. If your music sucks, you have no right to bitch. There is no golden rule that if “XYZ Label” releases an album, people have to buy it. The industry just wants you to believe that. They can’t believe that, for once, the customer is setting the standards.