This Week's Attitude
Rock & Roll Survives The Decline Of Album Sales
By Neil S. Friedman

Since rock and roll became the dominant pop music force over fifty years ago, its production format has changed several times. Now, Internet downloading is drastically shifting the way the music is acquired.

For years, new techniques improved the quality of music, but, more recently, newer technology seems to have had a negative impact on the recording industry. The music compact disc has been around for more than 20 years. Within a few years of its 1983 American debut, CDs surpassed sales of prerecorded cassettes and eventually vinyl records, which had been around for decades. The first stereo LP was introduced in 1958.

Earlier this month it was reported the CD album sales had declined by 15 percent for the first six months of 2007, with a projection that by the year's end, this could be the worst year ever for record sales and the seventh consecutive one of fewer album sales.

With the largest bloc of music buyers - teenagers and twentysomethings - preferring the ease of downloading music on the Internet for the last five years or so, rather than strolling the aisles and scanning bins in record stores as their parents did a generation ago, the retail music industry has gone through some trying times.

Vinyl LP, compact disc and 45 single.

More than 2,500 large and small record stores have closed from coast to coast since 2003. Last year, the eighty-nine store Tower Records chain, went out of business, and the corporation that operates hundreds of stores under the name Sam Goody, filed for bankruptcy. Furthermore, the record industry has laid off more than 5,000 employees over the last seven years as the number of major labels has shrunk to four from more than a dozen in the eighties. A large part of this downsizing has been the steady decline of album sales, which was nearly 800 million in 2000, but dwindled to less than 600 million, including Internet downloads, last year.

About 23 years ago, I began selling my vinyl LP collection, which had mushroomed to around 1,800 since the mid-60s, as I swapped them for compact discs. Several years ago I purchased a CD Recorder and started copying vinyl records, still in top-notch condition, onto blank discs then tossed out the LPs.

I never purchased prerecorded cassettes or eight-track tapes, though at one point I had about 200 homemade tape compilations of favorite or themed tracks from my vast record collection.

I also own about a hundred 45s. For the uninitiated, that's a flexible, 7-inch vinyl record with a hole in the middle - like a compressed, black bagel! Each 45 typically had an "A" side, with the song intended for radio play that was supposed to evolve into a hit single, and the flip or "B" side that was, in most cases, just an afterthought. In rare instances, the flip side might become a hit, if some enterprising disc jockey took the time to listen to it and thought it, too, deserved to be heard. I've also transferred many of these onto disc.

It was originally believed that CDs would sound better and surely last longer than fragile vinyl LPs, but music purists scoffed at the discs' sound quality, preferring vinyl. This was typically true because the sound quality of many first and even second generation CDs was disappointing because record companies rushed them into production, looking for profit over quality. Gradually, CDs were prepared with original or master tapes that vastly improved the sound. But, in some instances, consumers had to buy the same disc two or three times if they wanted the outstanding sound quality that CDs promised.

As baby boomers replaced scratched vinyl records encased in tattered album covers with 5-inch silver discs, there was a marked increase in CD sales in the early 1990s. However, as that significant consumer bloc lost interest in modern music and new consumers found alternative methods of obtaining it, there was in a slow decline in CD sales that has culminated in the industry's increasing setbacks.

The only CDs I buy these days are remastered classic rock albums or the occasional rock veteran who's giving it another try. I have a short attention span and lack of patience for 99 percent of music that has emerged in the last ten years. The generational music gap caught up with me when free form and classic rock radio - the only outlets that played my kind of music - began to disappear.

Despite plunging music sales, it does not signal the demise of popular music. More than half a century later, rock and roll is still going strong, but state-of-the-art modifications have made more options available to obtain it.

The music hasn't died, it has just additional methods of delivery.