Marketing Strategy in the Music Industry

Although the music industry has millions of hungry customers the record companies are in big trouble. Since the 1980's the record companies have been in trouble but now the crisis is worse than ever. This is because they are marketing their product wrongly. All the major record companies- EMI, Warner, Sony etc- have failed in the transition from vinyl to CD and then from the transition of CD to digital format. In the 1980's during the transition from vinyl to CD the record companies made their first big mistake in pricing the CD too expensive - as they still are now. Setting the price of the CD at £12-£15 was too expensive for their customers to buy and so they were pushed away. If the prices were set lower then they would have sold millions of more albums and in turn increased their total revenue. Also putting these CD's with 12-15 songs of which only 2 or 3 are any good was another mistake. Selling songs as single or in a more compact CD of only 4 or 5 songs and priced lower would have achieved more buyers. The composer and artist of the songs got barely anything from the amount of money the record companies were making, considering each album cost about 30 pence to create and were being sold at more than 30 times that price.
The successful company in all this is Apple iTunes of whom sell singles at a reasonable price and albums at half of what physical copies were being sold for. this has racked up iTunes sells to 25 billion. The biggest mistake for record companies was marketing the music as if it was not an art and that it was just another product. The record companies told the musicians what to make and so they made it - this is why most music nowadays sucks compare to that of Queen who made their music because they wanted to. According to the record companies what they say will sell more than music that is made from passion and is inspirational.