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The Download DilemmaOwen's Tim DuBois says the music industry has a future, but we don't know what it is yet
9/1/2009
8:09 am
 Longtime music executive Tim DuBois, a clinical professor at the Owen Graduate School of Management, says the onset of digital distribution is profoundly affecting the music business, putting its future in question. by Jim Patterson The worst is yet to come for the music industry, says longtime executive Tim DuBois, but the real questions may be, “What will things be like and who will still be standing when the worst is finally over?” DuBois, still active as an artist manager on Nashville’s Music Row since his return to teaching at the Owen Graduate School of Management in 2007, is one of the leaders working to keep the industry viable. It peaked in 2000, when acts such as Britney Spears and Eminem sold upward of 10 million records each time out. But in 2008, eight years after Napster marked the beginning of the downloading revolution, the best-selling artist in the world, Lil’ Wayne, only sold about 3 million records. “The No. 10 album in 2000 sold more than the No. 1 album in 2008,” DuBois said. “If you look at how fast sales of physical goods are falling, digital is not growing fast enough to offset that. The hits industry as we’ve known it has probably got some more pain ahead of it.  “This is a roller coaster that has left the platform and is not coming back,” he said. “I don’t know where it’s going yet, but it’s never going to go back like it was.” DuBois, a clinical professor of management in the Owen MBA program, teaches classes that focus on the entrepreneurial opportunities presented by the digital revolution and the music industry. He’s already shown agility over a three-decade career in Nashville that has distinguished him as someone consistently ahead of trends. He’s been successful in academia, songwriting, production and artist management. DuBois was a certified public accountant in Texas with a passion for songwriting when he moved to Nashville in 1977. He taught accounting at Vanderbilt and other local institutions before hitting it big as a songwriter with hits including “Love in the First Degree” for Alabama and “The Bluest Eyes in Texas” for Restless Heart, two of his five No. 1 hits. He went on to manage the careers of Restless Heart, Vince Gill and others after opening the Nashville branch of Los Angeles-based Fitzgerald-Hartley. He co-wrote a huge hit with Gill, “When I Call Your Name.” Tapped by legendary music executive Clive Davis to run the Nashville branch of Arista Records in 1989, DuBois helped launch the careers of Alan Jackson, Pam Tillis, Brooks & Dunn, Brad Paisley and others. The label sold more than 80 million albums in 11 years. Those were heady days, but by the time technology made it possible for fans to download for free a product for which they’d previously paid, a malaise had already settled over the industry, DuBois said. “I think there was a wave of that that passed through our society,” he said, “where kids just felt like they were getting ripped off. They weren’t relating to the music. They were buying CDs for 16 bucks a pop and there was one, maybe two songs they liked and the rest they weren’t too excited about. “And there was a lot of feeding of the idea that the music industry was all about fat cats, and record companies are pigs, and artists don’t really care about their fans. All that kind of stuff.” Surveying students upon his return to Vanderbilt, DuBois found that things weren’t quite that bad. “A huge percentage of them in their music consumption are law-abiding citizens,” he said. “Now, people will steal out of frustration sometimes when it’s the only way they can get something. But I think the iPod and the Apple system are making legit easy, and it was a very big step.” But what if digital downloads never generate the kind of money that fueled the CD era? The answer, DuBois believes, will be some sort of subscription service that allows access to unlimited music for a set price. It could be that owning downloads will soon be passé. “If you ask a 15-year-old, they don’t really want to have to mess with CDs for sure,” DuBois said. “That’s way in the past. But more and more rather than worrying about downloading stuff on their computer and transferring it to their iPod, they’d rather be able to listen to whatever they want whenever they want.” For an upfront charge as low as $5 a month, consumers might someday be able to do just that.  “If you take $5 times the total number of people who have Internet service, that’s a bigger business than the total music business right now,” DuBois said. “Then all of a sudden you’ve got a bigger number, but how do you divide it up? How do you make sure the songwriter is paid?” The reason this scenario can’t happen immediately is that there’s no one central bank of copyrights where all this activity can be tracked so that everyone gets paid correctly. “We have a bunch of individual silos of data and databases that are maintained by all of these different performing rights organizations and music publishers and others,” DuBois said. “The databases can’t communicate, so it’s really important to find a way to build that über-database. It’s really holding us back in a digital age not to have that.” DuBois is already working with a company that aims to play a part in what he calls the “unsexy side” of the music industry – keeping track of who owns what and how much various contributors should be paid. That may bring him back full circle someday to his beginnings in Texas. “In the end, it is all about accounting,” he said. Posted 09/01/09 |
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