"The Book of Souls" - Official pre-release thread (CONTAINS ALBUM SPOILERS)

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SinisterMinisterX said:
https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/121457

Music is becoming a purely digital product. A digital- only recorded music company will be a much more profitable one after one-off restructuring costs. It will have lower revenue and higher margins. Its revenue will be very stable and grow with the overall digital music market growth. It will be a much more valuable company with its revenue base solidly coming from subscription and ad revenue. It will be valued like music publishing companies or cable channels, not like recorded music companies today. Margins for recorded music should eventually be above 40% on that lower but growing revenue base.

Physical distribution is going away- it doesn’t need to be eliminated prematurely but it needs to follow digital and not drive it. The record company will want to milk the physical CD business but not worry about supporting retailers with credit to make quarterly numbers. Jamming product into the channel needs to be eliminated and the digital business needs to be the priority.

If other companies are following the same logic, that final sentence I bolded explains why they aren't pushing CDs to Amazon.
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That's beans. This is some Bradbury shit right here.
 
gleggzg said:
That's beans. This is some Bradbury shit right here.
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That barely scratches the surface...

Digital licensing strategy needs to change dramatically. The record company and the publishing company need to understand the economics and the ecosystem of the DSPs and work to help them grow profitably but also to ensure that there are multiple providers. Pandora should be incentivized to build a subscription business, Spotify to enter the radio space...

Publishing needs to extract itself from the tax of the PROs (ASCAP, BMI). The technology is available today to enable direct licensing of public performances for radio and TV- if the costs of the PROs was shared equally between broadcasters and publishers, this could result in an incremental 7%-9% revenue increase to publishers on the same base of content. In addition, record companies should be able to get a US performance right for analog radio by pushing hard to move as many listeners to digital radio as quickly as possible.

Translation: the record companies want to reduce their payments to artists. To do this, they want to push digital radio until it's so popular they can force digital radio to take over the royalty payments currently generated from terrestrial radio. But it's not a break for old-style radio: they still pay out that same money, now as a "performance right" to the record company.


Catalog provides 50% of the revenue and 200% of the profits of recorded music. This has generally been the case for the other recorded music companies when the analysis was correctly done. The correct analysis requires including reissues, live albums, greatest hits releases in catalog. Catalog needs to be defined much more broadly to include all music that hasn¹t been created in the last 2 years- EMI used to call the Beatles releases “new music” even though they clearly weren¹t under a new album contract. In addition, streaming revenues tend to be more heavily weighted to catalog. Pandora and Spotify are probably 65% catalog under this definition. Licensing and synch revenue are mostly catalog as well. Therefore, if Sony Recorded Music (ex-Japan) is doing $250MM in EBITDA today, catalog is probably generating approximately $500 MM and the new release business, which is 98% of the headcount, is losing $250MM per year. The catalog is also primarily generating this revenue off “deep” catalog that is at least 5 years old or older. The great classics of pop music are stable earners, much like the consistent songs that generate most of the music publishing revenues.

With catalog providing the base profits, new releases need to be cut back dramatically to the point where the new business either breaks even or loses a small amount of money (justified by the long term catalog income stream of those songs). Thus, if the new release business is oriented towards building new deep catalog, it changes the entire process from trying to pick big hits to safely getting some good music out that has longevity. This will bias new releases to genres like rock and country that typically have had strong catalog. These also happen to be the genres that don’t have expensive producers so more music can be created for the same A&R dollars. The record company needs to act like a music publisher for new releases- putting up very little money but not trying to hold artists for long contract periods or to keep as much of the revenue. Advances would be $50k with a 40% revenue share after the advance. Losses in new releases are generally driven by expensive fixed headcount...

Translation: the good news is that they see a bigger future in rock bands that can last than in pop stars of the moment. Bad news: they're looking to keep artist advances and production costs down. The reference to "headcount" at the end is their own payroll; the end of the email makes it clear the plan is to lay off as many as they can as they reduce new releases.
 
Donner said:
I understand the decline in the physical format. But if that's their reasoning it doesn't make sense to ship to other retailers. I mean, I haven't bought a physical single in years so the whole Speed of Light on CD thing makes even less sense if they are pushing to digital media.

It makes no sense whatsoever to have the new album from one of the world's biggest bands unavailable from the largest retailer - especially since I imagine I'm not the only one to pre-order. It's complete idiocy.
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I'm puzzled too. It just seems so damn counterproductive to do this.
 
Moonchild said:
Btw, here is my tattoo in progress. It will be finished in next 10 days.

21nqn29.jpg
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You're having Gollum tattooed on your arm?
 
Hmmmmm, I don't even see a standard edition of the actual CD here on Amazon USA. What is interesting is that they have a separate page for an mp3 purchase for every song on the album.
 
could the issues with amazon.com be a case that there is a delay in the physical formats being pressed in the States? I'm sure stuff has been delayed like that before, death on the road springs to mind?
 
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