Who Killed The Hit Album?

What caused a generation of the industry’s best customers—fans in their teens and twenties—to abandon the record store? The industry’s answer was simply “piracy”: The combined effects of Napster and other online file trading and CD burning and trading gave rise to an underground economy of any song, anytime, for free.

And there’s something to that.

Despite countless record industry lawsuits, the traffic on the peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file-trading networks has continued to grow, with about 10 million users now sharing music files each day.

But while technology was indeed behind the customer flight, it didn’t just allow fans to sidestep the cash register. It also offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what they could hear.

The average file-trading network has more music than any music store. Given that choice, music fans took it. Today, not only have listeners stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to make them throng those stores on release day.

Given the option to pick a boy band or find something new, more and more people are opting for exploration, and are typically more satisfied with what they find.

Peer-to-peer file trading is so massive that a small industry has now grown up around it to measure and learn from the experience.

The leading such analyst is Big Champagne, which tracks all the files shared on the major peer-to-peer services. What it’s seeing in the data is nothing less than a culture shift from hits to niche artists.

Today, music fans are trading more than 8 million unique tracks, almost all of them far outside the Billboard Hot 100.

There is a thriving subculture that’s into “mashups” (playing a track from one artist over atrack from another artist), and another that’s into music composed on the eight-bit chips once found in Nintendo video-game machines. Plus, a lot of indie rock of the sort that makes for great shows but no radio play.

Notably, boy bands are not particularly popular.