By James Montgomery, with additional reporting by Gil Kaufman
In April, Trent Reznor released Year Zero, a concept album about a future society teetering on the brink of apocalypse. It was supposed to be a grand work of fiction, but it could just as easily have been about the music industry in 2007 — a bleak, burned-out world where the sky fell on a daily basis and the rivers ran red with the blood of record execs. (That the album didn’t sell well only furthers the analogy …)
Make no mistake about it, 2007 was a b-a-a-a-d year for the industry. According to Nielsen SoundScan, album sales were down 15 percent from 2006 (a trend that’s continued for eight straight years now); big-name artists jumped ship in increasingly complicated — and messy — ways; and the powers-that-be seemed to get even more heartless and disconnected, thanks to a series of lawsuits, feuds and terrible decisions.
In fact, you could probably say that 2007 was Year Zero. Things started to change because they couldn’t possibly get any worse.
In the first installment of our three-part series on the future of the music industry that is rolling out this week, here’s a blow-by-blow recap of just how bad the year was ….
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