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Best Buy Backs CD Copy Impairment
borkus writes: "Chief Operating Officer Allen Lenzmeier of Best Buy, Co, owner of Best Buy Stores and Musicland said that his company would support industry efforts at copyright protection, though he didn't specify any particular technology. Although Best Buy stores sell MP3 players, CD-Burners and tape decks, they aquired Musicland in 2001. According to the article, the 10% decrease in music sales in 2001 was caused mostly by Internet file swapping. As a major retailer of both electronics AND music, Best Buy could have a huge impact on the future format of music player hardware as well as software."
And if people can't use CDR's for writing CD's then they are going to notice a far greater drop in profits than those caused by file-swapping systems.
Geez... Instead of assuming that the loses are because of us evil consumers, they should look at the feeble economy. People who are scared they might not have jobs (or actually don't have jobs) usually don't run right out and get the latest treasures from N'Sync and Britney. Survival is more of a concern.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I'll get my stuff off the net from people who don't assume that I'm a criminal.
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Just like Circuit City had a huge impact on the way we watch DVDs.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
This reminds me of a hilarious study I read about in college... Several pigeons were put into identical boxes that would spit out a food pellet once every minute. Within a few minutes one pigeon was hopping up and down constantly, the second was continually spinning, and another wouldn't stop bobbing his head... It turns out that they were assuming that whatever action they were doing when the food first was dispensed was causing the food to be released, so they would continue to do it indefinitely to keep the food coming! If A is happening, then it MUST be a result of B....
so... yeah... um.. it must be the file trading!
Excuse me? 10% drop in music sales over the past year? Lets be a little level headed here and realise that the economy hasn't been that stellar for the past bit and I can see a 10% drop in the purchasing of Compact Discs that cost $15-$25 a piece.
Lets also put this into context. How many people are on GNUtella or Kazza? Well, on GNUtella it is hard to tell due to how the system works, but I wouldn't be suprised if it was in the 50,000 - 100,000 range. KaZaA is probably at a similar level. How many people out there listen to CDs they buy legitimately? I am sure there are more people with legit CDs than those who have burned MP3s or OGG Vorbis files on to CD-ROMS.
Utter bullshit.
Perhaps a polite notice that what they're doing is very, very wrong would be appropriate. The EFF has already asked its member to mail a thank you note to Gateway. Best Buy has an address to send "general comments" to. I believe I'll be sending them a piece of my mind on this issue quite soon.
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Wow, your smart. Mediaplay is owned my musicland, and guess what, Best buy owns them too, along with Sam Goody and Suncoast. So go ahead and take your buisness to mediaplay.
...that the 10% decrease in sales could be because consumers have finally realized what SHITTY PIECES OF CRAP THE MUSIC INDUSTRY SELLS?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
I'm a techie. When I want music I find the mp3 and add it to my collection. I own hundreds of CDs... from a few years ago. I haven't bought a CD in ages. There is no technical need to do so. My father is a computer newbie. When he wants music even he finds the mp3 version. Same goes for my sisters. The only person in my family that still buys CDs is my brother. He likes music stores and like having "real" CDs.
.iso?
There is no doubt in my mind that mp3's are destroying potential CD sales.
There is also no doubt in my mind that the RIAA is fighting the mp3 threat in the wrong way. They are hurting people that buy CDs! They are tartgeting their own customers! Rather than fighting the format, or better yet, positioning themselves to control the format they actually think that CD sales will improve with more restrictive CDs.
Its hilarious.
The VPs and Money-mongers are so wildly out of touch with their customers that they are willing to cripple their own product to control the situation.
How about monthly mp3 download subscriptions? I'd pay $10 a month to get a mp3 version of new releases as they happen.
How about cheaper CDs. $9 with more content. Better yet, include the mp3's on the CD itself. Or treat the CD as a license to download the mp3 version... no ripping/searching required.
How about a website where I can create my own CD complitation and have it mailed to me... or download the
How about some friggin creativity...
The RIAA and the music industry is sitting on a vast pile of money-potential and THEY DON'T EVEN SEE IT. They are so stuck "in the box" that they can't imagine that there is any other way of capitalizing on their investments.
I hope that someone in the "industry" wakes up and smells the cash. I'm willing to fork over a ton of $$ to get music, I simply don't want $15 CDs anymore. They're bulky, prone to scratches and a poor "investment" for my entertainment dollar. Give me access to clean, high-bitrate mp3's (no crippleware, special players, ads, and other BS) and I'll for over serious cash.
Here's the thing. We'd all like to be able to buy music on-line. The RIAA probably even wants to sell us music on-line (There are at least hypothetical situations in which the RIAA would embrace online sales of music. Their current hypotheticals may be technologically, legally, and/or economically unsound, but they exist). But how is that ever going to help Best-Buy? Their entire business, as far as music sales go, is based on getting physical copies of CDs from a manufacturer to you.
Online downloads, legal and pirated alike, ruin that business model, so Best Buy naturally feels that it's in their best interests to oppose anything that lets you acquire music on a non-physical medium.
It seems unlikely that there's room for a middleman like Best Buy in online distribution of music. If you were able to purchase and download music direcly from an artist's or label's website, why would you want to pay Best Buy extra money on top of that? Best Buy probably feels they have a lot more to lose than the record companies do.
Have they actually given serious thought to the possibility that the reason sales are down is because the fanatical followers of bubblegum pop have started to grow up?
There's always been shitty music that only teenagers like. "Bubblegum pop" is not a new phenomenon. Hell, don't you remember New Kids on the Block?
The reason demand is down is because the economy is down. It's Occam's freakin' razor.
This is offensive in so many ways, it seems like a shame to let facts enter into the equation, but...
1. Much of the copying the RIAA complains about is completely legal under the Home Recording Act. As such, it isn't piracy at all.
2. It is amazing that the record industry seems to think it has a right to be immune to the economy. 2001 was a year of massive layoffs and dot.com implosion. IT workers, people who ordinarily have the kind of discretionary income to support large CD collections were especially hard-hit.
3. Napster, the largest and most visible source for swapped files spent much of 2001 under an injunction that severely hobbled it. If anything, 2001 should have brought less so-called piracy than 2000.
4. C'mon now. Weren't boy bands and teeny-girls starting to grow a little stale in 2001? To generate sales, you gotta deliver product worth buying.
But, the biggest kicker of all:
2. The RIAA very politely posts sales figures for the last ten years on its web site. Some interesting nuggets:
Total CD volume in 2000 (a year with Napster in full force, by the way) were the highest level in history and nearly 3 times the level of 1991.
However, from 1991-2000, sales of cassettes dropped off about 80%,
Sales of vinyl LPs continued their slide into oblivion, at about 45% of the 1991 levels.
Sales of CDs increased every single year except for 1997, covering all of the years in which Napster was unencumbered by injunctions. Sales rebounded to record high levels in 1998, by the way, hitting new records in 1999 and 2000.
One more thing: 2001 mid-year volume, in a recession, was 397.9 units. That may be 22.7 units lower than the same period in 2000, but it is 1.1 units higher than in 1999. In fact, those recession-year statistics represent the SECOND HIGHEST volume from 1991 to the present.
I'll bet a lot of businesses would have been thrilled to book their second-best year in history during 2001.
Arguably, this was already valid 10 years ago (many would say even 20-25, but I'm not that drastic)
That's because people tend to equate "what's good" with what they grew up with. Music today is no better or worse than music 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or 200 years ago. Its just different.
There are two main reasons why CD sales have fallen in the past year: the slow economy, which has hurt sales of many other things besides Backstreet Britney CD's, and the fact that the "Next Big Thing" or "killer app" in the music industry hasn't revealed itself yet.
It seems that this is the first time in 50 years that no replacement currently exists for a tiring music phenomenon. Since rock 'n roll came of age in the 1950's, it seems like there was always something ready to take the place of acts and genres that were losing their appeal. Motown and other genres of the early 60's replaced the first generation of major rock stars. Then Beatlemania took over. When the Beatles were on their way to breaking up, so-called classic rock acts took their place in the late 60's and the early to mid 70's. Then there was disco, followed by punk rock, then the pop revolution led by Madonna and Michael Jackson, then teen sensations like Debbie Gibson and the New Kids on the Block in the late 80's, grungers like Pearl Jam and Nirvana in the early to mid 90's, followed by Teen Sensations Part Deux starring 'NSync and Britney Spears. Of course this isn't a comprehensive history of popular music; there are certainly been stars outside of the genres I mentioned that have sold millions of copies of their acts. But I do think the ones I have listed are enough to illustrate the fact that the music industry's demand machine has been running essentially non-stop for half a century. Until now, where for some reason it has temporarily stopped. However, soon enough the industry will figure out what's broken, fix it, and then get it running again.
Ten years ago, the industry was complaining about dual tape decks and DAT as major threats to the viability of the labels. They got some concessions from Congress and the DAT manufacturers, such as collecting taxes on recordable media to offset the effects of piracy and ensuring that digital tapes could be recorded at most to one additional copy before both the original and new copy could not be used as masters for a second-generation copy. Then the economy turned around, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" gave them a new way of milking money from the masses, and everything was all good again. I believe the same situation will occur again in the next year or two. Something new will become wildly popular, and the industry's wolf cry will suddenly become a lot fainter once the cash starts returning in droves.
Right. And there are no people on earth under the age of fifteen anymore, just because you and your friends finally entered high school? Look beyond your nose, there are babies being born every day.
If I can't do as much with a CD, and if they're using it to thwart copying, they're reducing 'unauthorized copying' of their music. This means they can't possibly b losing as much money due to piracy, right? So make these CD's cheaper! Give me INCENTIVE to buy these instead of giving me incentive to BOYCOTT.
"Derp de derp."
What percentage of people who buy from bestbuy will even hear of the boycott?
And what percentage of those that do actually give a crap about anything other than saving a dollar or two on their next purchase?
3. Napster, the largest and most visible source for swapped files spent much of 2001 under an injunction that severely hobbled it. If anything, 2001 should have brought less so-called piracy than 2000.
Unless the pirates simply switched to Morpheus or Kazaa or Gnutella or were content to listen to their 80 gig collection of ripped music or even legal services such as Internet radio.
Sales of CDs increased every single year except for 1997, covering all of the years in which Napster was unencumbered by injunctions. Sales rebounded to record high levels in 1998, by the way, hitting new records in 1999 and 2000.
One more thing: 2001 mid-year volume, in a recession, was 397.9 units. That may be 22.7 units lower than the same period in 2000, but it is 1.1 units higher than in 1999. In fact, those recession-year statistics represent the SECOND HIGHEST volume from 1991 to the present.
As we all know, statistics can usually be manipulated to say whatever you want. When analyzing statistics, people often neglect to account for the possible effect of lag. Ridiculous claims, such as the assertion that the correlation between the advent of Napster and the increase in sales is in fact a causation, simply defy common sense. What the RIAA realizes is that CD sales are going to drop again this year, and next year. Maybe instead of looking at the first derivative of sales, you should look at the second derivative instead.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
As a major retailer of both electronics AND music, Best Buy could have a huge impact on the future format of music player hardware as well as software."
Yeah, they said that about proprietary DVD formats, too. How many people remember was DIVX used to be, and who financed its development?
Further to supply-and-demand, one only needs to look at the population curves to see that there was a massive "baby boom" that's now entered its fifties and sixties; a mini-boom formed by the boomer's kids, who are now in their late twenties/early thirties; and a substantial decline in younger populations. Look at what's happening in public schools: elementary schools are being shut down and amalgamated, because there simply isn't enough student population to support them.
So, yes, of *course* there's been a decline in sales: there are fewer buyers. And there are especially fewer buyers of the crap pop that BS and her ilk have been pumping out.
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~#3~
"MTV (TRL) / VH1(Top20) contribute to the downward spiral the industry is in..."
The last time I checked, Viacom didn't own any record labels. For being such an integral part of the devolution of music, they aren't that attached to it.
~#2~
"... the music industry only offers pre-selected artists... making a mockery of the whole system..."
The record labels can use their marketing muscle to promote the hell out of an artist, but if music listeners (consumers) deem the music to be bad, no amount of marketing can keep said artist in the limelight for too long. Artists may artificially be placed at the top, but without sales & popularity, they don't stick around.
~#1~
"...the music out there today sucks... no wonder music sales aren't stellar anymore..."
Easy to say when you think myopically. Yet, Slashdotters like to mod this kind of trite comment up. Why? I have yet to figure this out. This sort of comment is simply a stab at the mainstream, spoken from someone high upon a perch of musical elitism.
Typical American cheering for the underdog... until the underdog gets too popular. (insert eye-roll here)