String Theory Media

Off It Goes

The world teems with issues and concerns greater than my own, but I have to take a second to observe an event over here in STM land. Today's the day my book went off in the mail for the last time in any meaningfully changeable form to my publisher, the most excellent University of Illinois Press. In the works for nearly nine years, it’s the first book that, to my mind, tells the whole story of how Nashville became what it is today, at least culturally speaking. By that I mean it’s the first to be comprehensive, tracing a line from 1920 to now, and the first that isn’t directed at country music fans per se. I wanted the story to be relevant to America’s fast evolving media culture. And the only way to do that is by talking about WSM. The book is called Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City, and it’s due out in “the fall” as they put it in publishing land, which I think means November-ish.

Radio Conventional Wisdom Wrong Again

Article of faith among commercial radio programmers No. 26: new music is more likely to chase listeners away than it is to attract them. Country radio stations add one or two songs per week, and they go through mystifyingly tortured analysis before trepidaciously playing (gasp) records their audience hasn't heard before. Arbitron, of all people, is telling them to relax. Arbitron is of course the powerful monopoly broker of vital ratings information in the radio industry, and it is doing research with its long-promised breakthrough in radio ratings, the Portable People Meter. Briefly, the PPM is a device like a pager that Arbitron will loan to thousands of people in a radio market to track what they're listening to or watching and when. It's gradually starting to replace the arcane and flawed diary system.

Anyway, in a new PPM study, Arbitron finds conventional wisdom about new songs wrong, specifically at country radio. By measuring audience in the minute before a new song dropped and two minutes after it began playing, they found an average increase in audience of nearly two percent. New songs ATTRACTED listners on balance. Now on one hand this is creepy because before long radio stations will be watching thousands of citizens around the clock to monitor second-to-second twitches in total audience. But it's nice to begin to have facts instead of myths about something this important to artists.

CD Sales Do The Bus Plunge

Long time no post. Work is at Category Four, but the news has been too full of eye-popping stuff to sit silently.

For years, it's been oh so easy to write that the music business was heading toward a a historic convulsion, but it always felt abstract and far-off. This week is the first time I felt like I was watching the asteroid hitting the earth. The Wall Street Journal reports that CD sales overall fell 20 percent in the first quarter of 2007. A seven-year decline has turned into a free fall. The record business is not equipped to adjust to shocks like this. It’s probably going to get worse this quarter, where puny weekly sales of 65,000 are enough to land titles at No. 1. And as the Journal story (after the jump) makes clear, revenue from digital downloads isn't growing nearly fast enough to make up for the CD cataclysm. The idea of major record labels actually failing used to be unrealistic to me; now I’m really wondering.