Would Free Music Sell Cars?

rhfrommn writes "An opinion piece on news.com says the old method of selling music CDs is doomed and suggests the best new method is to give away the content. No more 'piracy' or 'rights management' to worry about! The author discusses ad based models, giving music away as a promotion (buy a car, get 1000 hours of music free type stuff) and other methods. All based on cheap hardware like MP3 players as the new medium to replace CD."

Comments

Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get as many free hours of music as you want now. It'll be that way in the future.

But would it be good?

[BitwizeGHC]

I mean would it be normal music from acts I like, or would it be "See the USA in your Chevrolet" type stuff?

I remember getting free music with a McDonald's meal once. One of those cardboard punch-out disposable phonograph records with the catchy menu jingle recorded on it. And if the class sings it successfully through to the end, you win like a lot of money or something.

Catchy, but not exactly chart-topping stuff.

why?

[tiwason]

No more 'piracy' or 'rights management' to worry about!

Then why am I going to have to buy a $30k car to get my music..

This is nothing new... your still "selling" the music

I'm still paying or going through more hoops then kazaa or friends to get it.. then its not worth it.

I don't understand..

Maybe the dumbest thing I've ever heard

[Rombuu]

This is less logical than an Iraqi press conference. So if people could then freely copy this music, why would anyone want to pay to get it in the first place to gie away with their products?

Re:The opposite is much better

[aengblom]

Buy 1000 hours of music, get a free car!

1000 hours * $15 is $15,000. Amazingly, it probably is actually better the original way ;-)

Free music won't sell cars.

[grub]

I have gigs and gigsof MP3s but don't own a car.

The payment plan

[arvindn]

This article goes one step ahead of slashdotters clamoring "Digital restrictions are bad. IP is untenable" and actually gives a revenue model which sounds workable to me. The important parts are:

But how will artists and their agents and lawyers get paid? This time we can turn for answers not to coal distribution, but to an industry much closer to musicians' homes: the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP licenses, collects and redistributes music royalties from music performance venues (like radio stations, concert halls and so on) to the artists. It determines who gets paid what by polling these venues to see whose music gets played and how often.

To determine reimbursement in an MP3 player world, a small sample of users could be invited periodically to voluntarily, and anonymously share their listening history stored in the player. Then, just as in the ASCAP model, payments collected from the music player distributors (Kia, the BSO and the like) would be split among the copyright owners. No fuss, no complexity and no secret CD police.

Makes a lot of sense to me. To get this off the ground, it only takes one company to tie up with some mp3 player makers. If it succeeds, others will be quick to jump on the bandwagon and the RIAA will be left wondering what hit them.

For big acts only.

[Hayzeus]

This model really would appear to work only for the larger acts. You know, the ones that get airplay -- all 10 of them.

This wouldn't work at all for bands on smaller independent labels, other non-pop genres (jazz, blues, etc). Reads like another big step toward musical homogenization to me.

Sell convenience, not content

[defile]

The other day I found myself at CompUSA paying $40 for Red Hat. Why on earth would I pay money for that when I can get an ISO and burn it for free?

In my case, it was because I was at a datacenter and needed to reinstall the system (the vendor forgot to install it). I could've either taken a trip back home (30 minutes), downloaded and burned a CD (an hour), and taken a trip back (30 minutes), or I could drop by CompUSA and pay for a copy (20 minutes). Savings to my client by paying for software? 1.75 billable hours.

If there's any hope in selling data as a retail product, it'll be in models that completely ignore the actual data on it.

There's my case (needed it quickly), but there are many others.

Some people just want to rummage through piles of stuff, find a gem, claim a prize. That whole Hunter/Scavenger instinct is still with us, you know.

Shopping at a record store is a social activity for many people -- something that's harder to do with a real person by a computer.

There have been many times that we browsed Blockbuster Video (yes, they suck, but that's a different story) in search of a movie and ended up there an entire hour because we became so engrossed in searching (and ended up with 3 or 4 movies by the end of it). A web site can offer the content, but seldom can it recreate that experience.

The content cartel should capitalize on this, because their current business model's days are numbered.

Re:do it like the dead painters.

[Shalda]

And if you want your music to come from a Thomas Kincaid gallery, be my guest. I'd rather see the flaws in the music industry get fixed. Not that it's going to happen, but if you got the racketeering out of radio and put limits on how long artists can sign exclusive contracts with studios you'd fix nearly all the current complaints. Sure, there'd be new ones, but that's another story. :)

It's About The Cartels Profits, not the Artists

[FreeUser]

I'm sure I'm missing something, but why do artists need labels any more?

What you are missing are a few very important points that the media cartels, in their extraordinarilly disingenuous rhetoric regarding non-commerical copyright infringement by individuals, would very much like you not to notice:

• The cartels in general, and the recording industry in particular, are not interested in their artists financial well being (just read their standard recording contracts sometime, or the excellent analysis done by Courtney Love and Janis Ian). They are interested in their own profits, and while most artists make most of their money from live shows and would benefit from free music, the recording industry makes most of their profits from selling recording (in large part because they pocket the lion's share of the proceeds).
  
• There are some extraordinarilly rich artists, such as Metallica and the Zombie, excuse me, I mean Michael Jackson, that have managed to finagle contracts that, contrary to most, give them a portion of that pot. They benefit from the system enormously, and serve the aforementioned cartels by giving other artists an unreasonable dream to shoot for, a dream with which they very successfully ensnare new talent which they then milk dry and forget.
  
• It is about control, even more than money remarkably enough. This happened in the early 80's prior to MTV, where their control was so solid, and the music they released so tepid, that sales had fallen dramatically until MTV introduced an entirely new genre of music imported from Europe. Their desire to control their market absolutely stems from their cartel mindset, a mindset made possible by the monopoly entitlements their copyright priveleges extend to them and one that is difficult to overcome, even when it is working against their own bottom line. Free music would undermine that cartel, the control they wield, and fear of this sort of change will leave the cartels entrenched even if they see the possibility of a better bottom line without it. The risk simply won't be worth the benefits, to their minds, at least not until an outside group has made them all but irrelevant and decimated their business anyway, something which may not even be possible with new legislation emerging from congress and various state governments.
  

In short, if it were about the artists well being, free(dom) music and media would be a slam dunk. It benefits everyone ... except the ever-less-necessary publishers and middlemen, who run a powerful cartel and will see our every freedom destroyed before they give up or change their business model.

It is interesting that those with such entitlement mindsets feel they should be able to earn money indefinitely (at least life+70 years) for one bit of work performed sometime in the past, while the rest of us accept that, if we wish to earn money, we must continue to work each day of our lives (weekends and vacation sometimes excepted). Given the profitability of, and real value offered by, live shows one must truly wonder why an artist, much less a publisher. would think they are entitled to proceeds from anything other than their live work. Four centuries of monopoly entitlements will, alas, do that to an industry and even a culture, to the detriment of nearly everyone (a few moghuls and poster children excepted)

There's one problem - audiophiles

[Nix0n]

You can't replace the CD.

Well you can, but not with a lossy encoding scheme such as MP3. There are plenty of people out there, myself included, who simply do not like( or cannot even abide )the warbly sound of lossy compression, and would resist phasing out of high-resolution audio formats.

If anything will replace the CD, it will be SACD or DVD-A, not mp3.

The music industry won't die

[eXtro]

I don't think the recording industry itself is doomed. Their real business is marketing. They market an image or sound to the public. Some of the public buys into it and so they buy albums, posters, concert tickets and so on. Popular artists have devoted followers who will buy anything they put out. They'll buy every CD, even their "greatest hits". They'll buy any magazine their favourite artists appear in. They'll watch any TV show that they appear on. There is even a good chance that they'll buy a products not even related to their artist based on his or her endorsement. The loyal fans buy stuff regardless of whether or not it's available for free.

I have no doubt that on paper there will eventually be a point where the RIAA, or some other agency, will say that they've lost more money to piracy than they've taken in. Maybe they already say that, I don't really pay much attention to them. They will still be profitable though because losses due to piracy don't actually cost them any money from the balance sheet that matters.

There are some tangible costs associated with being the music industry, and the way they maximize their profits is by minimizing investments where they don't get a large return on their investment. This means that unless you happen to look and sound a lot like what's already selling in a given demographic you won't get signed. Bad for consumers who don't fit into whatever the music industry is currently pushing (and slowly evolving) but that's business.

So what do you do if you're an artist who can't get signed? Go independant. There's room for the independant music industry. There's probably a lot of money to be made for the first company that gets it: Give people what they want. So sell music on mp3 with optional CDs or vinyl. Don't worry about piracy, you don't lose money from that and maybe you'll make an additional sale. The artists won't get rich as the most popular RIAA artists but guess what? There's no gaurantee anywhere that you'll get rich regardless of your ambition, talent or luck.