A Quote By David Geffen

"The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content. Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it's no longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music. And there's no clear answer about how to fix that problem." - David Geffen

There was a time when the consumer could righteously declare that they hated the economics and questionable business practices of the record industry. Since the advent of filesharing, however, that moral center has shifted back against the consumer. Every year, the record industry is seeing a 15% drop in profits--soon it will implode. While that may level the playing field and herald the dawn of the indie era, at the same time it's killing creativity on all fronts: musicians are spending more time worrying about how they're going to make a living in the industry, and less time on actually making good music. And what's causing all this? Piracy.

Geffen's right to say that the soul of the major labels has been forcibly removed by piracy--their very own lives are at stake, and they no longer have the luxury of focusing on releasing good music. Instead, their focus is simply on survival: meaning, focusing on selling music, not on making quality music.

On the contrary, my focus with Calling All Dawns is in making as good of a product as possible, but at the same time, my greatest fear is that it's going to be financially disasterous for me. The mindset that kids these days have is that music is free--and while an artist like Christina Aguilera can afford to see her album sales cut in half, she'll still make a bundle of money on tour. Indie artists such as myself, however--particularly those of us who do complex, expensive orchestral/choral/world-music collages, are going to suffer first.

(Quote taken from New York Times article The Music Man.)