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Dec. 1996 - record corps blaming lack of talent for sales drop

  • 06-05-2003 11:33pm
    #1
    Captain Trips
    Closed Accounts Posts: 944 ✭✭✭


    [apologies for location of thread - i figured most people who MP3 would be here]

    Reading a back issue of Time Magazine (I keep them all!) I found an article from Dec 16th 1996 called "Waiting for the next Big Thing". Basically it was about the music industry's woes (what's new) but what was interesting is that they blamed the rise of alternative rock in the early 90s to a boom, and that Cd sales were dropping because of a drop in creativity and "too many record companies have signed too many one-hit alternative acts and thus diluted the quality of the genre" (David Sonenberg, manager of Fugees).

    It gave it a 10-12% in preceding years and dropping to 2% growth in 1996. It was all talk about the slipping of the "supergroups" like REM, Nirvana, etc., and that because there was nothing to replace them (yet), sales were slow.

    The quotes are from MTV, Arista, a whole load of record companies.

    It's absolutely fascinating that the reasons are attributed to the fault of the RIAA members themselves; not that vindication on the whole blame-broadband attitude is good though (little will change now).

    For anyone who's interested the first two paragraphs are on TIME's site here: http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/from_search/0,10987,1101961216-135202,00.html

    They were obviously really struggling as far back as the beginning of 1997. And of course, broadband hit the bigtime in the US by 1999. In that space of time, even more one-hit wonders were signed and the spate of TV shows. Grasping at straws for an act until laying the blame on broadband/MP3.....


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