The Value of Narrative

The music industry is in a tailspin that’s been going on for several years. There’s more music than ever before - 70,000 new CD titles are being created every year in the US with bar codes making them ready for retail - but total sales continue to spiral downward. Legal downloads aren’t making up for the loss in CD sales. What has happened in less than a decade is the value that consumers place on a single song or an album has plummeted. Essentially, if it isn’t available for free, many consumers just aren’t interested.

There are many reasons for this change that people have cited. The demographics of music buyers are young, and the young don’t feel any remorse or concern when they download “illegally” (I put quotation marks around “illegally” because when something is so common as free downloading, it’s for all and intents and purposes, a legal act). It’s easy and quick to download or rip a CD. The iPod has made music portable and hard/flash drive based, so CD packaging is obsolete.

People’s iPods are filled with thousands of songs. They have all the music they need at their fingertips. Do they really need to buy something new? Selling music right now is like selling oranges when everyone has an orange tree in their own back yard.

What’s interesting to me is that equivalent media have not suffered the rampant downloading present with music. Book sales are not robust but they aren't in a downward spiral. It would take little effort to scan any book and make it available for downloading. The bandwidth necessary would be about 1/5 smaller than for a song. In five to ten seconds, you could download an entire book. That isn’t happening. I don’t think it ever will.

Movie revenue from box office sales rose last year despite active downloading of movies. Yes, if bandwidth increases, if the ease of using illegal movie downloads increases, movie revenue will suffer. But I’m going to make a prediction. Movies will continue to have an increasing audience in terms of legal sales from DVDs, on demand downloads and broadcasts, and movie theaters. The movie industry won’t befall the same fate as the music industry.

About the only media industry that has encountered the same hard times as music as a result of the internet is newsprint. Newspaper sales are also dying. People are getting their information online for free. Why bother to buy a newspaper? There is the exact equivalent online and reading news online is certainly not “illegal,” not in this country at any rate.

Books and movies seem to be somewhat refractory to the presence of the internet. Some of that is due to the “poor translation” of the media in a digital form. Reading a book on a computer is painful and cumbersome. The print resolution of a screen is much less than that of that of paper. And printing out a book and carrying around loose-leaf pages is far from ideal. The printed and bound book format isn’t going obsolete perhaps because it is an ideal way to transmit lengthy amounts of text.

Similarly, watching movies on a computer screen isn’t anything you would want to do with your friends and lovers. Movies tend to be a communal experience. Of course, all you have to do is burn a DVD and you can watch an illegal download on your TV with all of your friends. My feeling is that while this will happen increasingly (or perhaps you’ll simply send your movie over a WiFi signal to your TV), such behavior is not going to gut the movie industry.

The reason I’m fairly sanguine about the future of books and movies (at least relative to music, which I consider to be, in terms of sales at any rate, a dying industry), is that ultimately what they are providing is something quite different and more valued than what the music industry provides. Music is trying to sell catchy little three-minute sex teasers. The singers come and go in the marketplace over a period of months. Ultimately, music is a quick little high.

Books and movies in contrast are selling a narrative. Even some stupid, lurid bodice-ripper of a book is designed to hold your emotions for a few hours. It isn’t just the format of a book or movie that is keeping legal sales vital. It’s what they are selling. The public inherently values narrative. It goes back to the time of Homer, people sitting around the hearth listening to one person tell their story. Narratives sustain us. We value our storytellers. I expect we’ll always be willing to pay for a select few of them to tell their tales. I expect any type of entertainment that focuses on narrative will always have a potential paying audience.

There are exceptions to the death of music sales by the way. I note that the most narrative based musician of the last 50 years continues to sell one million CDs a year from his back catalog. His name is Bob Dylan. He’s been doing it since the 1960s. Forty years from now where will Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani and all the rest of those thin voiced, sexually charged Twinkies be on the radar screen?