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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.'"
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.'"
The silly demonizing of the record companies is really getting counter productive. In a strict sense, of course, the recording companies don't "make" the music (of course the artists do, but under contract), just like software companies don't "make" the software (their programmers do, under contract), and just like home-building companies don't "make" the homes (the construction workers do also under employment contract).
But it is a useful shorthand to say all of the above. Without the record companies the vast majority of songs that get traded so happily on P2P networks would never have made it to 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).
And the poster's implied distinction between the record companies and the people who "made" the music suggests that the artists are uniformly against the record companies and their efforts in this area. P2P advocates are being flat-out chauvinistic if they think that all artists - or maybe even a majority - disagree with the RIAA's stands. It irks me when I see a few artists' views trotted out with the implicit assumption that their views are representative...what's the real big picture ?
To be sure, there is a vocal group, but I wonder whether they're getting disproportionate press precisely because they're arguing something more controversial - you never hear about Metallica complaining about P2P anymore, because it's just boring and it seems obvious.
Has anyone conducted polls of major artists to see where they stand and how they feel about the RIAA ? I'm not talking about disenfranchised had-their-day-in-the-sun-more-than-a-decade-ago artists (*cough*Janis Ian*cough*) and I'm not talking about little independent artists who probably secretly would *love* to get a big record deal if they could - what about a survey of artists in the Billboard 100, or artists with the best selling CDs in the last 10 years, or the top 100 artists traded on Kazaa/Gnutella...or some other reasonably objective criteria that defines a sample of artists under contract to record companies represented by theRIAA ?
What is needed here is hard, representative statistics, not agenda-laden anecdotes that fit whatever story happens to be convenient with the story-teller's philosophy.
The 25% decline in industry output, the economy, the specifics of the offerings, the collusively illegal prices, the wide variety of other available choices for purchase, the ubiquity of music available free on MTV, these are all bothersome and distracting. And "reporting" can tire one out.
I remember purchasing music from cdnow thinking i was getting an mp3 file i could later burn to a cd, only to find out (after the fact) the music was in this liquid audio format where the "recommended" player was liquid audio player (which i believe was the only player). It also claimed the song was only playable from 1 computer and was crippled in such a way that I had to do an analog rip of the song from one of my computers to the other. My point is that if they are going to be successful they have to be MORE convenient that file sharing programs. And not just by having easily downloadable mp3s, but an easier interface, more reliability, and faster downloads, etc...
The major American motion picture studios are doing better financially than the major American record labels partly because a movie often pays for its production at the box office alone, whereas a record has no box office at all, except for motion picture soundtracks.
Solution: Make music videos for all songs on an album. Interweave them with a cheap plot, and turn them into a movie. (I'm thinking like Moonwalker but hopefully better written.) Release the movie theatrically on the Friday before the album comes out. Then, after a few weeks in the box office, put the videos into MTV's heavy rotation.
This should be easy enough for Sony, Warner, and Universal, who own both a record label and a movie studio. It may not work for Bertelsmann and EMI, who don't have major U.S. movie holdings.
If I am talking out of my rear end, please explain to me in polite language why this wouldn't work.
Will I retire or break 10K?