Another Excellent Blog: Building Bridges: Music, Methods and Madness « Dwayne Winseck's Mediamorphis

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Excerpt from a long detailed analysis -worth the read with useful links:

"...Here, I want to focus on two other things that I think are helpful. First, a list of handy-dandy resources for the do-it-yourself kinda researcher that Jen Laengert from TMKO — a music and entertainment law firm in Toronto — nicely compiled for me and which I have augmented with a few other sources. So, without further adieu, here’s a list of some useful resources for doing research and analysis of the Music and Concert Business in Canada1, although you’ll need plenty of judgement and more than just this useful list to be successful. I wish you well.

The second thing I want to stress is just how damn difficult it is to cobble together meaningful and accurate data that covers a reasonably long period of time, say since 1998 or so. Time is of the essence, because you want to capture durable trends, rather than exceptional years, which by definition are anomolies. That is, they stand out because they are atypical. And by durable trends, I mean nothing less than ten years, and the more the merrier is a great principle to lean on.

The music industry is and has always been notorious for picking and choosing years according to whatever suits their interest. So, for instance, in our own time, the world’s two leading music industry lobby groups — the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) — like to choose 2004.

Click on the two links that I just gave you for the RIAA and IFPI, and you’ll see what I mean. You can also go to your local branch of these international operations, like the Canadian Record Industry Association (CRIA) here in Canada, and see pretty much the same thing.

So why is 2004 so important? Because it was a historical all time high, and the slope down afterwards for ‘recorded music’ sales is tremendously steep by any measure.

And that’s only part of it, too. The other part is figuring out just what you want to measure, and how you’re going to do it. The industry likes to focus on record sales: I think we should cast the net wider...."

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