Bon Jovi Tries New Approach To Fight Piracy

Dudio writes "80s-era rock band Bon Jovi is taking a novel approach to fighting piracy of their upcoming album, Bounce. Retail CDs will be distributed with a unique serial number with which the purchaser can register in order to receive such exclusives as prioritized concert ticket purchases and unreleased music. Finally, somebody in the entertainment industry is attempting to adapt to the changing market rather than rushing to protect an outdated business model." All Bon Jovi jokes aside, it is nice to see a fresh approach.

Comments

Good Job!

[Locke!Erasmus]

Locke!Erasmus feels that this is a prudent and wise course of action for Bon Jovi to take. I only hope that they will keep some records on whether they profit from this strategy, and how much they profit. Hopefully, if it works, we will see more labels/artists try new tactics such as this one instead of simply threatening to DOS people who are running a P2P application.

Re:Good Job!

[DESADE]

Thank goodness!!! I proposed this idea to a digital music list almost two years ago hoping that things would evolve this way. The labels could marginalize piracy if they approached the problem intelligently.

The Nature of Demand
It seems to me one of the key problems facing the music industry in the
digital age is the "commodity" approach to marketing music. Who was the
genius that first determined that the real product is a piece of plastic?
When I buy a CD, it's not because I simply want to be able to play the music
at my leisure. At the core of every music purchase is a connection between
the artist and the consumer. For some, it's an association of ideals. For
others, it may be image, lust, identity, craft or a myriad of other
possibilities. This is the real nature of demand in this business and it's
being completely ignored under the current model.

Pissing Off the Consumer
This whole idea came to me as I was driving to work one day listening to
"Celebrity Skin." I'm on my third copy now and it irks my hide a little each
time I buy a CD that I have previously owned. Especially considering the
fact that I know so little money is going to the artist.

Why can't I just buy personal rights to the piece of work and pay a media
fee for whatever form of media I choose as a playback device? If I lose the
CD, why can't I just pay a reasonable media fee to replace it? Why can't I
be a patron of the artist rather than a consumer of plastic? The value of a
CD is in the beauty of the work, not in its physical manifestation.

In a Perfect World
I'd pay $25 bucks for a CD. It would come with a serial number. I'd go to a
Web site managed by the artist or their representatives and register. Once
registered, I'd be able to download the CD in MP3 format. Maybe I'd get
access to a couple of bonus tracks as well. Maybe I'd like a second copy of
the CD or a tape for my car. I'd be able to buy a second copy for 5-7 bucks.
Call it a media fee.

A Different Approach
Now here's the real power of this model. Now that I've registered, the
artist can send me an email telling me about what's going on in their
creative life every now and then. Maybe I'd be able to get an early copy of
the next album in MP3 format for pre-ordering. Maybe the artist could send
me a link to some live tracks from concerts or some things they have been
playing around with in the studio between major releases. Maybe they could
point me to a couple of older albums I might be interested in. Maybe once I
have purchased the rights to three albums I would achieve "distinguished
patron" status that allows me special access to other material. That's
value. Now I feel like I have a relationship with the artist. Now I feel
like a patron who helps support the artist so they can spend their time
working on their art. Now the artist has a direct way to build a
relationship with me the fan. Foster that relationship and the artist is
meeting the real demand of a music consumer.

Maybe when the artist comes to town, they can put on a special show at a
small venue for "distinguished patrons." I think a show like this would be
good for the artist and the patron. The artist would know they are
performing for a select group that appreciates their craft and has shown it
by supporting them. The patron gets to see his or her favorite artist up
close and personal. The patron would be willing to pay a higher price as
well. The next day, maybe a special commerative t-shirt would be available
at the web site when the patron logs in.

Also, think about how valuable the database would be.

Watch the Money Roll In
So under this scenario, I'd probably spend at least a couple hundred bucks
with an artist. Under the current model, I might have shelled out $100 for a
CD and a couple of concert tickets. Why allow labels to take so much money
for "managing" the artist, when what they really should be doing is managing
the relationship with between the artist and the patron? The marketing
potential under this model is a no brainer. Some might abuse it, some might
manage it well. At the end of the day, it's the relationship that counts.
Piss off your registered fan base with a load of spam and chances are the
fan won't cough up any more dough. Provide a real value to registering and
watch the money roll in. The better an artist manages the relationship, the
more money they make. Make the management earn their keep for a change.

This Kills the Napter Problem
Piracy will never go away. Instead of trying to limit access to an artist's
work, why not take a different approach... provide real value for paying for
the work. Why would I spend hours trolling Napster for bad MP3's encoded at
different bit rates and labeled with no common format when I can just buy
the CD and have access to clean copies encoded at a high bit rate for my
desktop machine and maybe another set encoded at a low bit rate for my car
or portable player? Napster's cool, but face it, it's still a
pain-in-the-ass. Today's average MP3 collection is a sloppy mess. Why would
I pirate when buying the work and registering offers me real value? Sure
some people will pirate. Face it folks, it's going to happen no matter what.
The loss from piracy would be more than covered by the additional revenue.
This would also go a long way to killing the demand for used CD's.

Eviscerate The Damn Middlemen
I'm offended that the record companies skim off such a disproportionate
amount of income from the process compared to the value they inject into the
transaction. They get away with it because they control the distribution
channel. That control is dying and all the industry seems to want to do is
come up with another way to protect it. Wake up! Fans are pissed off.
Artists are pissed off. Everyone is sick and tired of paying twenty bucks
for a CD and knowing that the artist only ends up with a buck or two. That's
why everyone is sucking songs off of Napster. We're all tired of feeding
your machine. Let go and start fresh. Didn't most people in the business get
into management or promotion or whatever because they loved music? Wouldn't
it be nice to get back to that rather than working in a system that is
basically a leech feeding upon both artist and consumer?

Someday Soon
An new act is going to make it big direct. No label. No management. No
distribution deal. Self-financed. Self-promoted. Self-Published. Another
possibility is a major act going direct successfully. The day is coming soon
and when it happens, a lot of people in this business are going to face a
rude wake-up call. Why not make a deal now while you still have a chance?

Re:Good Job!

[Locke!Erasmus]

Well, I'll tell you one thing - I've already decided I'm not going to download the music. I will buy the CD instead.

Combatting piracy? I don't think so...

[blazin]

It sounds like he's not really trying to combat piracy, per se, but more encourage people to buy the CD for the perks and benefits that would come of it.

Sounds like a great idea... Do something where people want to buy your CD more than trying to make it impossible for them to copy it.

I hope it works for him.

Back to the 70s

[cDarwin]

I remember when I bought Dark Side of the Moon back in the '70s. It came with a really cool poster and a bunch of truly groovy stickers that you couldn't get anywhere else. It added a lot to the value of the album.

Dark Side of the Moon was a top 40 record for five years running.

Re:Combatting piracy? I don't think so...

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Daft Punk put a credit card sized card inside their CD with a unique number were you could download MP3 singles of remixes and live versions of the song from a special website.

Resale

[geekoid]

what happens to the peopel, who resale the disks later? can the remove there registration?

Re:Amen to that

[Jucius Maximus]

"The guy downloading it for free probably wouldn't buy it in the first place, much less go to a concert."

Of course. But I think a better point is that someone in the industry is realising that the real money maker will NOT be CDs in the coming years. They are starting to cultivate the market for concerts instead. This priority ticket purchasing with CDs would probably cause people who would never have considered going to concerts to buy concert tickets.

And live concerts, I do believe, will be the real money makers in the future as opposed to CD sales.

THANK YOU Bon Jovi et al for rewarding purchases of the CD with real perks, as opposed to assuming the purchase is a copyright infringement waiting to happen.

Value-Added

[DaytonCIM]

It's refreshing to hear of a "retail-minded" band that is adding value to their CD in order to combat piracy. I like the idea of "perks" for those people who purchase the CD.

Hopefully, this will do well and maybe the industry will begin looking at alternative ideas, those that benefit the customer, rather than punishing, to combat piracy.

Then again pigs may fly over my house...

Don't care for the music but like the guy

[Deanasc]

From what I hear Jon Bon Jovi is a nice guy. I remember when you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing him. Then I remember when the hair became a joke. This guy has been to the top and slid down to the bottom. Lately he's been working his way steadily back up. I say good for him.

Another reason to like him is he married his high school sweetheart and stayed married through the rise and fall and so far for his second trip up the success ladder.

Anyway this seems like the kind of thing a real musician would do for his fans. Certainly not the lawsuit slinging behavior some other hair metal rockstars have shown their fans.

ban jovi

[solferino]

why not pass on bon jovi and go for the much cooler 5 piece banjo ensemble ban jovi?

can't find a website for these guys, but here's a place where you can buy their cd

no real affiliation to th band in question - just heard them play once at an underground music festival in taiwan (they are american)

A little different from fighting piracy IMHO

[foqn1bo]

While I'm sure tactics like this are advertised as anti-piracy measures, I'm excited about this as a sales technique. The online community(slashdot especially) has been talking for quite some time about the relative value of copyright when it comes to music recordings. A very common response has been one which suggests that in order to assure sales, a retailer/merchant/distributor/manufacturer needs to give a prospective buyer a good reason to purchase.

The traditional extension to that idea I've come across here is that in most transactions the consumer is paying for a service rendered. For example, a new car was built by a factory and an ordinary consumer cannot make his own. Same goes for computer parts, TVs, and many types of clothes. The consumer has discovered, through the advent of consumer digital media devices(esp computers), that the act of taking an existing digital audio recording and duplicating it is trivial and practically mundane. The artist(who only has to record the album once) does a lot more work than the record company copying it, particularly within the boundries of the insane amount of elbow grease that goes into writing/recording/touring.

You may think Bon Jovi is the lamest crap on earth, but in my opinion this strategy not only sounds like an effective solution but a vote of confidence for consumers. For once a recording institution is admitting that it needs to work to keep it's customers loyal instead of the other way around.

It's Direct Marketing just for a "live chat"!

[mekkab]

Read the article (I thought of submitting this too!)
This isn't JUST to combat piracy, but they are collecting more detailed marketing information, such that in the future it will be easier for sales to hit their target without "wasting" money on promo's that don't work; be they airplay at the wrong time, or video exposure on VH1...

SO let me get thsi straight: I pay money, I sign up online, they get a WHOLE lot of personal data (I wonder if they ask for household income?), and I get a newsletter and maybe the chance to talk to the band and maybe a first crack at buying over-priced concert tickets at an arena where the pre-selected seats are all nose-bleeders?

SIGN ME UP!

Serial Number = Watermark?

[mini me]

Conspiracy Theory: Little do these people know, their serial number is embedded into the audio tracks on the CD. When distributed on the internet these wartermarks can be matched against the contact information used for signing up for the free merchendise. Therefore the person who distributed the audio on the internet will be known.

Well that probably isn't the plan here, but who knows what the future will hole.

Re:Amen to that

[fricto]

I managed an indipendant record label, and a friend of mine worked for Sony in A$R - live concerts HAVE ALWAYS BEEN the real money makers, this is the spin on the piracy debate they've tried to hide.

daft punk's "exclusives" was so poorly executed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Daft Punk put a credit card sized card inside their CD with a unique number were you could download MP3 singles of remixes and live versions of the song from a special website.

And it sucked. First off, it required installing a "wallet" like service in windows. I'm sure it was evil. It wasn't "normal" music, it was "secure" music, playable only in their player (so it wasn't mp3s). and you know what? it phoned home, about usage, and so forth. And it was a one shot deal. I still have the card lying around somewhere, but I couldn't register again, too bad I had to reinstall eh Daft Punk?

The perks _could_ have been nice, but they had to go and fuck them up. I want normal perks, give me cool wallpapers. normal mp3s. I'll still buy the cd, even if someone who bought the cd, begins to share the "exclusive" stuff. I'd rather pirate forever, then to feel bound to some app. and the whole security was just offending, "hey, I bought your stuff, dont treat me like shit"....

grrr...

Re:Counting Crows are doing the same thing

[anthony_dipierro]

Q: Do you think the RIAA and the government should be going after the Napsters of the world they way they are?

AD (as in Adam Duritz): Yeah, I do. I'll tell you why....well, I don't know. The fact is, it is illegal, so if you want to go after Napster, you can go after Napster. But there's always going to be another one. It's just too easy to make them. I mean, now there are nine Napsters, or 20 Napsters. What I didn't like about Napster was the way they took on that mob mentality. Because you know you're doing something wrong, right? Let's face it: Everybody loved it, but let's not lie about it. It was wrong. So don't pretend that you're the Great White Hope, or that you're this great rebel, because the only people you're ripping off are the artists you supposedly love.

And what I really hated about Shawn Fanning and those guys is that they really whipped up a mob mentality toward the artists who spoke out against them, as if they were these rich corporate types. You know, Lars Ulrich was this guy who had the decency and the guts to speak out, and they really jumped on him. I thought, "Man, that is so wrong." I mean, do what you want to do, be a fan, whatever. I'm cool with that. But where do you get off lecturing him when you know you're wrong. It's just too easy to shout somebody down when you have the majority with you. I always feel like that's wrong, no matter whether you're Napster and MTV, or whether you're Joe McCarthy at the Communist trials in the '50s. It's just too easy to shout someone down when everyone's on your side. It's always wrong. It's just never right to be in a mob. Never.

But, I don't know, the government...See, I really think it's just a world. I mean, we've got countries, and they're not going anywhere. But they're just these things we made up. Really, it's just a world. We've made up these countries, and I'm not sure how much good they've done us. It's just because our nature is to become a mob and gang up on each other, so we make these boundaries to sort of scare ourselves into not doing it. Maybe it's the only way we keep ourselves from slaughtering each other daily. And we still do that, but the great thing about the Web is that it's sort of this untamed thing. It crosses all natural boundaries, it is lawless. It just doesn't belong to anybody. There are no rules, in a world that's so obsessed with rules, there aren't any. I kind of think that's cool. I really do appreciate that part of it. And regardless of what I think about things like Napster, I'd be really hesitant to involve our government, because I'm hard pressed to think of examples in which our government gets involved and does a particularly good job of it. They generally step in there and do it all wrong. Because who are they, really? Where are their interests? They're not with me and you. They just generally aren't. If the government had to choose between me and your and Universal/Vivendi - and I've got nothing against my record company, they've been great to me - but they're going to choose Universal/Vivendi.

The perfect example was when the record companies got that law passed that music was a work-for-hire a couple of years ago, and they did it effortlessly even though it was clearly unconstitutional and wrong. The fact is that all it takes is a vote of the government, and when you're the biggest company in the world, it's easy. It's not that hard to get it passed. We're an unorganized group of artists, you know? It couldn't be more unorganized. Thank God for people like Sheryl (Crow), Don Henley, and people that organized against it. But we're not the union types. It's not in our nature to be organized, and to be, like, a union. It's not the nature of anyone in this business to do it. As a result, the companies run roughshod over us at times. I'm very lucky, you know? I'm part of a very, very small percentage of people who do what I do who make a living at it. Generally, they've made it almost impossible to make a living doing what we do. Very hard. You get paid almost no money, percentage-wise. So if you're small, you just can't do it.

Toad the Wet Sprocket Did this 5 Years ago

[weston]

Toad the Wet Sprocket did this 5 years ago. May of 1997 was the release date for their album Coil. If you bought Coil, you got two special bonuses:

1. A free ticket to a promo tour they were doing for the album
   
2. When you visited their website with the CD in the drive, you could play a hidden track on the CD. There was a contest, too -- the first person to correctly identify all the lyrics from this song won a signed guitar.
   

The result: my brother and sister and I bought four copies for the three of us and a friend we would take to the concert. Ticket prices were usually well above the $12.99 promo price for the CD. Even though I had access to a burner and blank CDs cheaply, it simply didn't make sense NOT to buy the CDs with the ticket incentive. The multimedia was nice, too.

Re:so did others

[Zork the Almighty]

Actually it isn't. The CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective) has managed the enviable (for the RIAA) task of charging you for nothing. The copyright law in Canada was only recently ammended to allow copying "for personal use". Previously, this was appearently illegal. In ammending the act, the government placed a levy on all blank media to compensate the recording industry or "unauthorized copies", which includes EVERYTHING, not just actual music piracy.

Now, the CPCC is trying to extend this welfare project to flash memory (for MP3 players), DVD-R (HA!), and small removable and non-removable hard drives - by the megabyte (seriously!). It doesn't take a genius to see that they are pushing for a levy on all digital storage.

In a related issue, a different copyright welfare lobby is pushing for a levy on all internet access. Seriously. These crooks make the RIAA and MPAA look stupid by comparison. While the XXIA's are buying laws that nobody can enforce, the CPCC has been raking in the dough. Myself, I'd prefer the bullshit law (since I can ignore it).

It's not just about fighting piracy.

[Tsuzuki]

It's about getting people to buy the damn album - pure and simple sales. If that means less people pirate it, all the better.

Working in a promotional company has exposed me to a fair bit of how marketing and sales operate, and "new and innovative" is what every client always wants, no matter how much or how little they're willing to pay for the resulting premiums (ie. toys) or services.

Most of you would be physically sick if you saw some of the promotions that are being planned in the name of kids (and their parents) maintaining the market share of certain fast food and cereal companies. Sony Ericsson phones and POX were advertised in unique and innocuous ways that increased their "cool" factor.

These promotions are ways to add perceived value to a product, which are a big part of increasing sales. We all complain about the price of CDs, whether we choose to buy them or not. Don't you think it's about time we started to at least feel like we got more value out of them?

People who solely download music are being conceited if they think approaches like this have been generated in direct retaliation to piracy. It may be one of many reasons to carry out a promotion like this, but gathering valuable market research data and generating sales full stop are far more lucrative reasons to do it.

(Regarding market research: a large company will probably keep your under lock and key for themselves so they know how to target future promotions. A company that provides free services is far more likely to sell information about you to others without asking you.)

All that said, the first value-added CD I ever bought was a Pitch Shifter album. Not only did it have two small multimedia clips on it, the last two tracks of the album were made up of royalty-free samples they'd created of the album itself. They were full stereo, neatly separated, there to be ripped and used however the buyer pleased. The only "condition" of their use was that you sent the band what you'd done with it later. I think I bought it in about 1995...