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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.'"
Any bets that this will be crippleware music with heavy DRM locks?
And then it will fail? I surely could do without this crap.
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.
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.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
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.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
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.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
"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.
"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.
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!
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.
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...
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
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.
... and if I buy they will conclude that their strategies worked...
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
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.
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.
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.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
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.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
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.
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.
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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.
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