Slashdot Mirror
Sony: Case of Right vs Left Hand
Masem writes "Wired has an interesting article that explains the problem facing several of the megacorporations that have both content and technology divisions, as specifically in the case of Sony. The tech divisons want to offer the consumer all the possible options, while the media divisions are very concerned on DRM. While the two groups are trying to meet somewhere in the middle, they are still at odds about it, and also finding that that middle is becoming rapidly populated by other competitors (including Microsoft) in just how to empower consumers without sacrificing their copyrighted materials. Both divisions are trying to adopt to just changes in the landscape and hoping to find something that will work."
...releasing quality products? If the new music rack is populated by the likes of Eminem, Missy Elliot, Dixie Chicks, etcetera, I think I'll try the good ol 'net for my music infusion.
OMG! Wau!
(1) You can preview music from almost any album on Amazon. (True, the quality's not great...)
(2) Music has a much broader appeal (to the non-geek public) than games, etc., so it no surprise that it's traded more.
(3) Napster was for music only, and Kazaa is mostly about music. (The UI is very music-centric.) Most people probably have no idea that you can upload or search for anything else.
(4) People go where the stuff is. There was an infrastructure for geeks trading warez long before Napster or Kazaa, so that's where people look.
(5) It doesn't matter if it's on Kazaa or a warez site, the fact that people share games etc. means that people like getting stuff for free that they normally have to pay for. I think it's delusional to think that people are mostly download music to preview it, and then they'll go and pay for the stuff they like.
The idea of splitting a company just isn't part of the current corporate thinking. Article after article in business magizines are devoted to merging companies, but nary a one devoted to intelligently unmerging.
Though we may see that very soon when Time Warner decides it has had enough of AOL losing money
The I heard something along the lines of "What are your plans in light of the undeniable success after Napster of peer to peer file trading software such as WinMX?" The person being queried was Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Corp. of America.
His reply was mostly the usual babble about legal means, being proactive in providing what customers want through services such as Pressplay, etc., but the he caught my attention when he qualified the foregoing with the statement: "even though we can chase people with viruses" (and that is a verbatim quote - I wrote it down).
I asked myself:
1) Does he just not have a clue what he's talking about?
2) Have recent legislative and minor legal successes given the recording industry a greater sense of omnipotence?
3) Is he aware of some gifts that US government about to bestow on his industry
4) Did he tip his hand?
5) Is he on crack?
My guess is mostly #1, a little #2 and some #3.
Sigs are bad for your health.
One casualty of this is battle is the Sony NetMD line of MiniDisc recorders. In fact, the entire MiniDisc media has been crippled by Sony just to satisfy their DRM needs.
The NetMD line of players/recorders allows you to record at 44kHz quality on the road. This is great for radio jounalists because you can buy a nice battery powered mic and record interviews wherever you go. The packing for the recorders fails to mention that while you can transfer 'songs' to and from your computer over the digital link, it explictly denies you the ability to import audio that you recorded from a microphone -- presumably to prevent digital bootlegging. So, to protect against the %1 of people that might use the NetMD illegally, the other 99% of us lose out.
There are allot of people pissed about this and there's a petition to Sony to get this featured turned on via a software update here. Over 2,600 people have already signed it. Go sign it too!
As for the MiniDisc media, if Sony would stop charging ludicrous licensing fees for players, we'd finally have a nice, caddy protected, alternative to CD-Rs.
Remember how 3Com split Palm into it's own company, I can't think of any other examples, but this one fits perfectly.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
" And who decides what's "fair". Because I sure as hell know that the customer's idea of fair is a lot less than what the company's idea is."
The market decides. Hes not saying go tell Sony, "youre going to charge this, and no more!" Hes saying that Sony should give thier customers what they want, while still getting what Sony wants. Theres a balance and its called market price. The problem here is only Sony is getting what they want, the customers are getting screwed.
Has anyone else thought about the fact that maybe we would be better off without copyright? Seriously, one moment please, don't mod me down so fast. Sure, we've lived with copyright laws for a while now, but what would it be like without them? Have you ever REALLY thought about it? I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of reading (I do mean a lot). I know most people don't even question it, they just question one thing, the work put into it. Yet ask yourselves this, do the construction workers, road builders, etc. get payed royalties everytime you drive down the road or use your house? How come we treat information like this?
Question everything.
> If something's fairly priced,
It would be an improvement if the music industry gave better value. Lower prices may reflect that for current products, but the basic music CD has not changed for quite some time.
The production end needs to stop complaining that consumer technology has cought up and needs to move on to better products. Either put out smaller disks, or use much higher densities to give added values.
For example a multilayer CD that could be played on most current CD players but also contained video clips, session video or film of the concert. Perhaps just bundle a CD and a DVD for current CD prices and offer the CD only at a lower price.
Sure, they could copy the music for playing in the car or on a walkman, but you would need to buy the product to get the full value.
This would help both industries: new players required for multi-layer CDs or new markets for DVD players.
Cassette tape added value over vinyl by being portable and less destructable. Records were dubbed to tape but this lost quality compared to buying new tapes.
When CDs first came out they could be dubbed to cassette tape for walkmans and car players (and probably still are), but the CD added value by being better quality so people bought CDs rather than just copying borrowed ones to tape.
Now there is no difference between bought product and copied product the music industry needs to introduce that difference.
Of course DVD or mini-CD copiers will eventually catch up and the electronics industry will make much money selling these, so the next step by the music indutry should then be to some other way of adding even more value.
As I'm reading these Britney vs. U2 comparisons, I can't help but think how much I disagree with them.
U2 is the product of marketing hype, even moreso than Britney. How many Grammys does U2 have? Realize that U2 is marketed towards thirtysomethings, Britney to teeny-boppers.
Look, it's a matter of personal preference. Personally I'm not going to be downloading any U2 or Britney anytime soon, I'd rather listen to Skinny Puppy or Muslim Gauze. YMMV.
But comments like $30 a CD of people who fall for marketing bullshit remind me of why we need to all boycott the MP....OMG the new LOTR movie is out I'm gonna be first in line!!!
Okay, back to the topic:
Sony's biggest problem is that, on both sides of the house, their (consumer-oriented) products are disposable. Or maybe that's their strength. I don't understand a civilization whose raison d-etre is the quick-flip, the economy of which has relegated works of lasting value (be it CDs that you'll want to listen to in ten years, or CD players that will still work in ten years) to a cultish minority that remembers when things were made of metal and lasted forever. Sony used to "get it", my Betamax built in 1981 outlasted four latter-day VHS machies. Not anymore.
Perhaps, if we're lucky, Capitalism will eat itself. Certainly, the sea change brought on by lossless copying vs. crappy content has Sony et. al. burning the candle at both ends.
And when you are comparing the price of anything to a nearly-equivalent version of the product that is offered for free, almost any amount of money, no matter how small, will not be considered "fair" by most people.
/. readers might, but not most normal kazaa users.) Most people copy music, and let other people copy it, because it doesn't cost them anything, except a little bit of time. And most people don't properly value their time.
Most people don't copy music to spite the record companies. (Oh, a sizable percentage of
This is one of the problems that unlimited internet access causes. (Don't get me wrong, I love unlimited internet access and would be very upset if I were charged per-megabyte fees.) I don't mind giving a friend a lift across town in my car. It doesn't cost me much at all, maybe $0.25 in gas or so, and 10 minutes of my time. I will think seriously about driving a friend from one coast of the U.S. to the other, because that is a non-trivial expense, just in terms of gas and vehicle maintenance. Time expense also becomes unreasonable.
There should be a similar thought process with sharing music. Giving a friend a copy of a cd you bought, so they can listen to it and see if they want to get more stuff by that group, is a reasonable thing to do. Giving 2000 copies of it to people all over the world isn't.
But with unlimited internet access... Giving 2000 copies away to total strangers costs you the same as giving one copy to a good friend. The only "cost" to you is your time to set up the client and music files on your system.
It's hard to compete with free.
Competing with quality or convenience? Quality won't work. It will be too easy for P2P networks to add the equivalent of karma. Add a crc value to the information transmitted in a file search. After a verified good transfer, compare the crc value. That lets you verify the other client isn't lying about contents. Then you can listen to the music, and "moderate" on quality of the rip. Not if you like the song, but if the rip is good quality. Enough "nothing but skips and cracks" votes and that client drops to the bottom of the search results. You just solved the quality problem on p2p networks. Convenience can be handled also.
It's hard to compete with free.
We love this when talking about Microsoft, and any other propreitary vendor competing with an open source product. But the recording industry (and the artists that want to distribute their own stuff without dealing with the Major 5 Labels) has this problem also.
I admire the problem... and I wish I could offer a good solution. I really think it will just end up being a version of Apple's solution. An advertising campaign "Don't steal music" and almost no real limitations enforced. Because nothing else will let the industry keep the honest customers, which I like to think are the majority.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Now, if the companies that loved DRM would stop deliberately screwing people, they'd probably let most ordinary people come to accept DRM. Then in the future, when they clamped down, people would be more used to DRM. Sure, people like me would still worry about how DRM could be used, but if it were not being used in objectionable ways, we'd be stuck with theoretical arguments. A lot of these people will look at me like I'm a wild eyed fanatic if I start up with doomsday scenarios based on theoretical abuses of DRM. However, if I can tell my sister that her favorite old TV series won't play on her DVD player because of it, she immediately starts to care.
Personally, it makes me happy when DRM loving companies turn the screws in a way that ordinary consumers get screwed. It is music to my ears when a large number of CD players can't play DRM "enabled" (i.e. disabled) CDs. Because it irritates people, and if enough people are irritated, you might get enough public support to take on the plutocrats (who still depend on consumer good will at the end of the day, no matter how much they may hate them.) and get rid of DRM. It won't happen if they manage to keep the vast majority happy, though.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
"A more successful paradigm would be to see every thief as a potential customer."
I was telling a friend of mine at lunch today that the SonicBlue court case is retarded. There are shows he likes, there are shows I like, there are very few shows we both like. It occured to me that if I had a VCR setup, I could tape one of my favorite episodes of my favorite show and convince him to watch it, perhaps give that show a chance it never had with him before. Either he'll like it and keep watching on his own (I aint supplying the episodes for him...) or he'll hate it and move on.
P2P offers a kick ass opportunity to give people better accesss to shows they never liked before. I *hated* Austin Powers until I watched it with my cousin. He was able to show me what the appeal was of that show. The internet with P2P provides a really nice solution to that problem. They could be using it to increase exposure! Why don't they do it? If they reward me by letting me keep the content if I convince other people to watch it, then they've got a virtually free advertising systme.
Oh well. Aint gonna happen because they think everybody who downloads it would normally have bought it.
thats the problem the music industry now faces- how will they continue to make gobs of money off very bad 'artists' who put out a bland product, and often only have one good song per album?
I will admit that the downside to being able to buy per-track will be that, in many cases, certain artist's songs needed to grow on me (which generally happened because I was too lazy to turn off the CD player and replace it with something else).
Back to the point, however, is that MOST of the music that comes out now is very bad and/or very derivative. How many from-the-grave best sellers did Biggie Smalls and Tupac have? I think they do more work dead than they did alive.
But when you are selling to a discriminating customer, who actually wants to hear something good, it makes the whole process a lot more difficult; you have to actually hire people with talent! Gone will be the days when Billy Idol or Puff Daddy can make money, because instead of paying ~$15 for the album, you will pay $1 for the digital single, which is the only good song ON that album. Net loss to the record industy= $14.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.