Six Giant Music Retailers Will Try Online Sales Together

PingXao writes "The New York Times is reporting that several music retailers are banding together to test online sales. Sad to see the article's author flat-out claim that '... a proliferation of free music-swapping services on the Internet has led to a decline in CD sales.' The retailers are starting to get a clue but still have a long way to go as evidenced by 'Recording companies make the music...' and 'We are in the customer relationship business.'"

Comments

Any bets..

[josh crawley]

Any bets that this will be crippleware music with heavy DRM locks?

And then it will fail? I surely could do without this crap.

I'll bite

[MaximumBob]

What's wrong with "recording companies make the music?"

They do - they bankroll their signed bands' albums. And most unsigned bands are crap. Granted, most signed bands are crap. But that's irrelevant - the recording companies did bring us Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Eminem, etc..

Saying the record companies don't make the music is like saying that Boeing doesn't make airplanes, their employees do.

Re:I'll bite

[twofidyKidd]

That sort of perception is the problem. The recording industry is a delivery medium, not a means to an end. The way things have evolved, yes they do produce the music, but its been my opinion and most likely, the opinion of others that the quality of said music has degraded to the point that it can be attributed to the decrease of record sales for the past 3 or so years.

Suits should stick to business, musicians will stick to music and as such, should be the music makers. If the music industry isn't very obviously a monopoly to you or anyone else at this point, then you haven't spent enough time realizing the impact they've had.

Re:I'll bite

[anon*127.0.0.1]

That depends... is "making" the music the creative process of arranging notes and lyrics, or the physical process of manufacturing the CD? If it's the former, then it's the artists that make the music. If it's the latter.. then hell, I've got a CD burner. *I* make the music.

Re:I'll bite

[junkgoof]

Boeing hires people to design, prototype and build planes. People do not design planes and go to Boeing to have them produced.

The music industry is starting to create bands (Britney, backstreet boys, Milli Vanilli...) with music made by unattractive artists and lip-synched by pretty artists, but they do not create music.

The music industry looks for people who are already producing music. They take what they find, pretty it up a little, package it and flog it to the masses.

Marketing has more value than content creation in America. Just ask the near-bankrupt contract company that manufactures hardware that M$ stamps a brand on. The brand stamping is a major cash cow for M$, the production company is in the red.

Re:I'll bite

[Anonymous Coward]

If and when the Major Labels go down, while you and the millions of others who are fans of the Corporate Product they call "music" are left with nothing, life will continue as usual for those of us involved in independent music.

This has been said again and again: MP3 downloads are a blessing to independent artists, and a curse to major label artists. It's a bell curve of success / downloads.

Maybe what will happen, if we're lucky, is the death of Corporate Music. An artist could only get so big without becoming unprofitable. It would do away with the artists (and managers, labels, etc) who have nothing on their minds but money. We'd be left with just the artists who truly love the music and the art. Isn't this what we had before the 80's? Beatles, Led Zep, etc? The perfect position on the bell curve?

Also can I say that your position that "most unsigned bands are crap" is truly disheartening. You'd think that Slashdot readers would understand independent music, what with all the Anti-Microsoft, Pro-Geek philosophy. The principle is totally the same: Bloated, useless, soul-less, well-marketed, poorly-produced crap vs. the true, powerful, under-budgeted, heartfelt independent. I'm excited to think that with just a little effort, you can make the discovery yourself.

Already paid for Pressplay

[laigle]

When the Pressplay 6 month, $30 subscription deal came up I thought I'd test the waters of legal music d/ling. And what it showed me is that anything the RIAA signs off on is going to be a complete fraud, a waste of money, and ultimately a failure. They can stop blaming Kazaa, their own suits have cost them more money than trading ever could.

This isn't a good analogy

[kahei]

If you took a whole bunch of airplane parts and all the Boeing engineers and put them in a room, the result would not be an airplane, because the Boeing company and the things it does in the way of managing/coordinating/research are indeed necessary for the production of airplanes.

If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music.

At one point, perhaps the record corps were necessary for distribution, but now that physical media are not necessary, it's harder to make that case. They certainly aren't necessary in the way that Boeing are necessary for airplanes, anyway.

Re:This isn't a good analogy

[CleverNickedName]

If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music

True, but I doubt it would be a top selling album. The record companies are not in the business of making music, they are in the business of selling CDs.

Re:This isn't a good analogy

[halftrack]

"If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music."

But then no music would reach the consumer. How do you figure that "... marketing/distribution/hyping ..." isn't essential for music to be sold but for a airplane to be sold. You could put all those Boeing engineers, with all the parts and the managers, and get a plane. But which customers know it's there and for sale if not for Boeing's "... marketing/distribution/hyping ..."?

"At one point, perhaps the record corps were necessary for distribution, ... So you get my point, but do you think that all the record corps do is print CD's, nothing else? It might not be very hard - given todays technology - to distribute music, but face the fact; PR and promotion - which one of the record corp's main field of interest - is important to get out the popular music (although much is crap.) In addition record corporations send artists on tours (you don't get real "live" performance no matter how sofisticated technology is,) make sure they're properly supported. Most important is that to distribute massive amounts of music you need a massive amount of servers, sysadmins, and a huge pipe to the net. This isn't cheap and someone needs to do the job.

Granted, the current state of the music industry is to much money and conservatism. Their biggest flaw is the unability to embrace new technology in a way that would benefit them and the artists. It seems they're to focused on preserving the current market instead of creating new ones. By doing so they hurt consumers. They don't realise that DRM is technologically impossible and that the DMCA is consumer unfriendly.

To say the recording industry is bloat however only shows that you have a view that's just as narrow as theirs.

Re:This isn't a good analogy

[sporty]

"If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music."

But then no music would reach the consumer. How do you figure that "... marketing/distribution/hyping ..." isn't essential for music to be sold but for a airplane to be sold. You could put all those Boeing engineers, with all the parts and the managers, and get a plane. But which customers know it's there and for sale if not for Boeing's "... marketing/distribution/hyping ..."?

Ah, but think of how much music in the 60's and 70's moved around due to word of mouth. A time when artists did more in concerts. A time where bootlegging wasn't such a crime.

There's another thing. Now is a time of pretty girls and nice looking guys getting contracts 'cause they can dance a little, sing a little and be technologically enhanced to look like a super star. Think anyone particularly thought Led Zepplin could dance the same cookie cutter coriographed way, much less professionally? I highly doubt it.

Get a bunch of programmers in a room, would you have bsd and linux? :)

Re:This isn't a good analogy

[liquidsin]

I played in a band. We booked all of our own shows at bars and small venues, did all of our own setup / breakdown / sound, made all of our flyers to stick up at bars so people knew we were playing. We kept the money we made. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough that even though we weren't working "day jobs" we could still pay our rent and other bills. We made our own music with no help from a record company. We made promo tapes to give to the owners of venues who wanted to hear us before they signed us to play a show. So how again does the record company make the music?

Re:This isn't a good analogy

[Stonehand]

Perhaps a fellow named Ed Sullivan also had something to do with it, no? Publicity matters.

Sad to say?

[fobbman]

"Sad to see the article's author flat-out claim that '... a proliferation of free music-swapping services on the Internet has led to a decline in CD sales.'"

Sure it's sad, but as the business sections of the main media rags are little more than Corporate PR publications, is it at all surprising? The company says it, and then the newspaper quit attributing it to the source, thereby trying to pass it off as Fact. As most of the readers don't question what they read, it quickly becomes public opinion.

Cry me a river

[Anonymous Coward]

"According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks album sales, 681 million were sold in 2002, down from 785 million in 2000."

Well gee, it's not exactly like everyone else had a record year in 2002. I own a deli, and sales were down almost 30% last year over 2001. I'm likely going to have to sell the place or close it down within the next few months, but you don't see me whining to everyone in sight that things aren't going my way.

People can't "pirate" subs, gyros, or muffulettas. There is one thing and one thing only to blame for the fact that I'm almost out of business: the economy. People aren't spending the money to eat out every day, and companies are cutting back on their catered staff meetings/conferences/parties.

When nobody has any money, sales are going to decline! Get over it, Record Industry! The "piracy" argument is overplayed at best - just like everything else the RIAA pumps out - and at worst it's a red herring.

I also think the comparison of 2002 sales vs 2000 sales is a bit misleading. Things have changed a lot in this country since 2000.

Re:Cry me a river

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to buy at least 10 times as much music as the average person, according to the industry's own revenue figures. ($14 billion per year divided by 275 million Americans is about $1.00 per man, woman, child, or infant per week. In 1998 - 1999, I was buying a CD every week.)

The major labels have lost half of my business already because of insults like SDMI, and if they keep on the current path (the quest for the uncopyable pseudo-CD), several of them will lose the other half.

I don't download illegal MP3s from any of the P2P services, but I do expect the ability to fully make use of the music I purchase. What the record companies have to blame for the loss of my business is nothing more than their treatment of their customers.

Sherman Act

[cenonce]

Any bets, this won't get past the Sherman Anti-Trust Act?

At the very least, I'm sure there will be consumers proteection issues for price-fixing out the wazoo for DRM challenge music files!

That will make me run out and buy! Unforunately, the media companies just don't get it. I will NOT spend 18 dollars on a CD, and neither will most (all!) of my mid-20 to mid 30s friends. So there aren't not "losing" music sales to music file sharing. They just aren't getting any sales anymore because I am fed up of them feeding me schlock and expecting me to pay for it. As far as I'm concerned the ball is in their court to offer non-DRM challenge MP3 (Ogg, whatever!) files to me at a reasonable per song rate (reasonable to me seems to be a buck fifty to 2 bucks a song (average 12 songs over an 18 dollar CD)). Then frankly, I will pay for music.

Until then, I'm buying up as much cheap casettes as I can so I can "time-shift" my music to MP3 format -- That is Fair Use!

But will they have a clue?

[DrXym]

If a professional music site sold high quality mp3's for a fifty cents to a dollar a pop from a fast, dedicated site then people would flock to it. Better yet if it had band news, discussion forums, reviews, ratings, live streaming etc. then people would live on it.

Naturally you'd still have lamers on p2p, but then these people would never use a pay site anyway, even if meant wasting ten hours to find and download the same songs that the pay site sold for seven dollars.

Re:The record companies DON'T make the music!

[barryfandango]

Not true - unfortunately recording companies do have a say in the music their artists create. They hire a producer to manage the recording of your album, the re-recording, re-writes etc until you have a product the company is happy with. Just one of the many things that sucks about the industry...

Downward spiral...

[mattis_f]

I used to feel at least a small pang of guilt when listening to downloaded music - if I like it, I feel like I should give the musician something back somehow.

Nowadays, with the recording companies trying to force me into buying worse products at higher prices (now there's a way of competing you won't learn in school!) I'm getting so annoyed that I *really* don't want to buy anything. If I do, some of my money will go into things like crappy CD's and lawsuits, which I don't want to support.

It's becoming a political statement for me not to buy CD's or copy protected music. At least not at full price.

And that will of course make the record companies think there's even more DL'ing going on, with more efforts on their part to stop me ... and if I buy they will conclude that their strategies worked...

Strangely, it seems like we'll both loose. They won't get my money and I won't get the music that I want. Oh bummer. What's needed is a new business idea, where the middleman is either gone or doing something else.

Music middlemen still irrelevant

[Sydney Weidman]

It doesn't matter what the middlemen offer. They are still irrelevant. Long live live music.

Re:No Reg Required

[eingram]

Actually, the link in the article doesn't require registration (thank Google for that).

Click and see for yourself. ;P

old music

[British]

Hey, how about this to sell CDs? START OFFERING BACK CATALOGS.

Most of the stuff I download I can't even get on CD in the first damn place. Had they re-released older Devo albums(not greatest hit compilations), I would buy it in an instant. If they released CDs of (insert obscure 80s synthpop band here), I'd buy it. Is it availble? No. Forget it then.

Probably it woudln't be commercially feasiable to release CD versions of old vinyl from bands that never got popular, but it would be cheaper than new music from new bands.

Re:old music

[grahamm]

By a change in distribution/sales mechanism it could be commercially viable. If the retail outlets had the popular CDs on the shelf but also had a CD burner and on-line access to the complete back catalogue they could supply any album on-demand at very little cost (to them).

WRONG again

[zaren]

The article says "a proliferation of free music-swapping services on the Internet has led to a decline in CD sales.'"...

I haven't bought many cds lately, and it's not because of the Internet (since I don't use p2p). My decline in purchases is for two reasons:

1) CDs are too bloody expensive
2) Current music selections SUCK.

Get a better variety of music out there, and don't charge so fcsking much for a CD (weren't the prices supposed to come DOWN over the years?), and you'll get more customers. It really is that simple.

Reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Shitty music is the reason I do not purchase CD's. Major label garbage is all it is, one good song out of 16? Fuck that noise. I will sing in the shower before these bastards get ANY of my money. I stopped listening to the FM radio back in 1976! Commercial crap rhymes with Rap.

more banding together??

[spazoid12]

hmmm, "banding together" sounds familiar...

Wouldn't all this "banding together" get them into more (small) trouble?

It HAS led to reduced CD sales

[RealBeanDip]

Let's sidestep the "there are only 2 good songs on the CD argument for a moment" ...

My experience (albeit limited) indicates to me that less people are buying CD's. I've talked with adults who have NO IDEA that downloading music and burning it to a CD is wrong -- they think they're getting free music. Numerous high school kids I've talked to seem to think that music is free, only an idiot would actualy BUY a CD.

Now the question is; would these people actually buy CD's if free downloadable music wasn't available? Again, my experience has shown that they would. In the past, before the online piracy of music became a way of life, these same people I knew were in fact buying CD's. And now? They aren't.

The problem is (IMO), is that most people don't know they're stealing. They don't see someone getting hurt, therefore it's OK.

I don't blame the music industry for trying to prevent this wholesale ripoff of their product.

Re:I kind of like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's so cool to watch millions of dollars and thousands of programmer hours being wasted on an ultimately fruitless pursuit. All this effort to prove what we've known all along, that copy restrictions can never be good enough to stop pirates and they treat honest consumers like criminals.

I havent bought a CD in about 5 years

[stratjakt]

And I havent downloaded any mp3s either.

And I probably never will. All the artists I listen to are dead or in drug-induced comas or something.

It became clear to me long before the whole P2P-vs-DRM issues that the music industry has nothing left to offer me. I already own all the music I'll ever want to listen to.

Likewise, I've never purchased a movie, and probably never will. I'm just not the type to watch a movie again after I've seen it, so I dont see the point in owning one.

That said, I don't give a rats ass what happens to the entertainment industry or P2P.

They can lock it all up with DRM so noone can hear it, they can make it all public domain and print the sheet music on toilet paper. They can charge $300 per minute of audio, or give it away for free. They can mandate that Yoko Ono is to do backup vocals for every song until the end of time just so people wont want to hear it.

They can go bankrupt, go to jail, go to hell.

I just dont give a shit.

And I'd wager that every day another handful of people like me come to the exact same realization. RIAA members sell images. Few people truly love music enough to pay to listen to it.

Dont like the article....

[Anonymous Coward]

send a letter here NYTimes Corrections

Bitching about it on /. does not help, my mom doesn't read slashdot. To really start to make change you have to participate in public discussion. One way is to let the authors of articles that spread mis-information that they are doing a disservice to their readers. Given enough complaints over time we might see some change in the way these issues get reported. I think the nytimes is one of the last credible news sources and has not been proven to be a shill for the pigopolists, maybe they will listen. But we will never know till enough people let them know what news they are publishing is incorrect.

btw... journalists require facts. so don't email them that **pa blows chuncks. if you have an opinion about something try the op-ed

Short version of the article

[muffen]

Interesting article.

This is what I read:

Bla bla bla bla... we are, again, going to attempt to sell music online that you can only play in our players for a limited amount of time or for as long as you keep paying us. You mp3 player will be useless, and don't even think about burning CD's

Sell non-encrypted mp3's online, or any other format I can convert to MP3. I want to play MY music in MY mp3 player and MY CD player!

I know the article didn't say what format they were going to use, but I am open for anyone that wants to bet against me when I say that the music will be encrypted in one way on another.

I wonder if they will ever understand... :-/

Re:Sigh...

[Kaa]

...rippable CDs in the first place (as an aside, I always found the usage of the term "rip" in this context to be somewhat revealing)

May I point out that in order to rip a CD, you need to have a CD in the first place, which probably means that you have bought it.

Ripping a CD is perfectly legal under the current law, DMCA included. It's also perfectly moral, though YMMV -- Your Morals May Vary, of course.

RIAA tries to tell people that it's illegal to make copies of music, but it's a big fat lie. Anyone can make as many copies of his music as he wants. What's illegal is distributing. As long as I don't distribute it, I can rip all my CDs, convert the music to .mp3 or .ogg and do pretty much I want with it.

So I am not sure what exactly do you find revealing about the term "rip".

Re:here we go again...

[Khazunga]

It would take several hands to count the number of artists that I've discovered (and purchased music from) due to finding the MP3s on my friends/family's computers.

And here lies the danger of P2P to record companies. They are the middle-men. They are the ones who control *who* is the next big-hit, who gets airtime, who goes on display. If people stop needing them to filter good bands out of all the garage teens playing today, their business will be no more (since artists won't see a benefit in signing for a label).

Re:Prepare for prosecution

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell modded this down? Unless this law was repealed, a discussion of it here is extremely on-topic! I thought I was reasonably well-informed, but I hadn't heard of this law until I saw this post.

Given that RIAA members have been found guilty of price-fixing and are clearly continuing to price-gouge, the idea that you need only rip off $1000 worth of songs puts a lot of people in danger, even if they haven't done much of this.

My best recent example of this is the Beatles 1962-1966 double LP. I went to buy this at the store (an event that would've marked my first new RIAA purchase in months), but found it was priced at an insane $36. $36!!! For an album that is 30 years old and has already sold millions of copies. Well, I balked at that. Had it been $20 or less they would have had my money. But nevertheless, if I'm found with a copy of this album, I am going to be held to the inflated price, and not anything reasonable.

Re:here we go again...

[Anonvmous Coward]

" As far as "previewing" music via illegal MP3 downloads, consider that there are people who really do work that way. I want to be legit, but P2P is the best preview service available."

I've noticed that few of the bands I've typed in have produced entire albums served by the same user. This suggests to me that people aren't running around trading albums, but rather they search for a band they've heard of and download the songs that are the most popular. This strikes me as the behaviour of curiosity, NOT the behaviour of somebody trying to save a few bucks.

If what I've seen is indicative of a significant population of the P2P networks, then the RIAA has absolutely no case. If one does not download the whole album, then they have not stolen. There's still plenty of value in the rest of the CD.

Is the value diminished? Some would say yes, I would say not really. The truth of the matter is that somebody searching for new music to try isn't likely to invest much time into checking the band out, thus the sale's never made. Now, the band has exposure that it never had before. One of two things are likely to happen: 1.) the user is first in line to buy the next CD produced by that group 2.) the user can recommend this music to somebody with similar tastes. Even if the CD isn't purchased to legitimize the claim, there is absolutely no basis for claiming money is lost in the situation I described.

The truth of the matter, though, is that everybody's got their own way of working. Most of the demand there is either directly or indirectly leading into revenue. If that's not enough for them, then they should consider identifying why people are downloading music and figure out how to make money with it.

My Letter to the Editors of the NYTimes

[BrianWCarver]

In today's NY Times article "6 Retailers Plan Venture to Sell Music on the Web" Laura M. Holson writes, "a proliferation of free music-swapping services on the Internet has led to a decline in CD sales."

Ms. Holmes has either succumbed to the incessant propaganda of the big music labels or has an insight into global economic causal relations that would make even Chairman Greenspan envious.

During the same time period that peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have been active, several other factors have existed that seem as likely or more likely to explain the recent decline in CD sales.

1. The music industry has consolidated to such an extent that many radio stations sound exactly alike, reducing consumer choice and interest.

2. The music industry focuses almost all its promotional efforts on a few super-artists who have a chance to sell millions of records (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Boy Bands, etc.) and so non-mainstream or non-teen-pop artists that would interest people over age 25 (with purchasing power) do not get the exposure necessary to attract new fans.

3. Consumers have more products competing for their limited dollars than ever before. DVDs, wireless phones, digital cable, broadband internet, PDAs and a host of other things soak up time and money that used to be spent listening to music and buying CDs.

4. The music labels over-charge for their products (and were even recently convicted of illegal price-fixing and they have not offered a reasonably priced alternative to file-sharing networks that does not cripple the downloads in some way (limited playbacks, unable to burn to CD, expires after a set time, etc.) It's not surprising then that when consumers don't get what they want, they don't shell out their hard-earned cash.

5. There is an overall slowdown in the economy, if no one has noticed.

In response, consider instead that:

1. Jupiter Communications did a study in 2000 at the height of Napster usage that showed Napster users bought MORE not FEWER CDs.

2. Actual artists claim that file-sharing increases their sales.

I would have hoped that a reporter for The New York Times would be more careful about so casually asigning a single cause to such a complex effect.

[snip personal info]

If published, please print name and city/state only.

They'll always be clueless!

[Newer Guy]

"we are in the customer relationship business.' If that's so much the case, then how come the only "customers" you mainly market to are under 25 years of age? In case you haven't noticed, the largers demographic group in the world is now the 25-54 group. You know, the one you barely give lip service to, and when you do call us crooks and thieves! Your industry is dying because you're still trying to market the equilavent of the buggy whip in the age of the Spece Shuttle. Plus, you have the arrogance to actually believe that YOU make the music??!! Let me clue you in: artists and musicians make music, and all the blow you do every day doesn't give any of you one shread of musical talent! Q: How many A&R (artist and repertoire, the ones who find and sign bands) persons does it take to change a light bulb? A: I don't know, what do you think?

Yeah, but the reason CD sales have slipped...

[sterno]

Kazaa is out there, and sure, a lot of people aren't buying some CD's because they use Kazaa to either:

a) discover that the CD's suck
b) get the one song that's actually good and save the money they would have spent

Kazaa isn't what's cutting into CD sales though. If you look at the stats, the amount of new music being produced by the big record labels is down. Thus, less people are feeling compelled to buy new CD's. Furthermore, any market that existed for people upgrading from tapes, etc, has been thoroughly exploited by now.

Also, the record industry is undergoing a significant fragmentation because the mass marketing of radio is driving people to find more obscure alternatives amongst local bands and on the Internet. Since the record labels offer no significant alternative on the Internet, they lose a lot of their power to control the market. Instead of having to listen to the 40 most popular songs get played to death I can go find whatever I want and play it as much or little as I want.

Basically when you get down to it, these record companies are aging dinosaurs who have a business models engineered for an environment that has ceased to exist. Evolve or die.

Re:What would you pay? But wait, don't answer yet!

[hackstraw]

What? Would you really pay 15$ for Abbey Road and not be able to look at the fab 4 walking from left to right on the album cover?

So your saying that I need to now either buy a broadband connection or pay another 10 bucks (or download the stuff at work). Why can't I just go to the damned store on the way home and buy the thing with the mp3s, the audio cd, the album art, liner notes, etc? Is there some fundamental problem here? Discuss.