Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'll get my stuff off the net from people who don't assume that I'm a criminal.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."