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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."
You can get as many free hours of music as you want now. It'll be that way in the future.
Buy 1000 hours of music, get a free car!
:-)
I'm sure more people would fall for that
Daniel
Carpe Diem
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.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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..
I sure wouldn't base my decision on whether to buy a model of a car on if the dealer gave away "free" music. I prefer to make my choices based on my age old method
1. - Does it go fast?
2. - Can I afford it without having to sell an organ?
3. - What kind of stereo does it have?
or does it?!
The analogy to the coal story is very interesting, but its just like radio: the discs go to radio stations, who are paid to play certain songs. And while there may have been a cost savings for the central heating model, you know darn well that when the landlord controls the thermostat, you go cold. Its happened in countless apartments where we get a cold spell before "the heat is turned on" and all I could do was bundle up and shiver.
The same thing is happening with music. I get free music all the time in elevators and shopping malls and on radios. But it sucks, and leaves me cold.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
"Ripping" a copy of a friend's music CD, or grabbing a track from a Napster-like service on the Internet, is stealing, plain and simple.
Music fans, seeking to justify this casual act of larceny, claim they're really supporting an economic boycott of a usurious and uncreative music industry. "Cybershoplifting," reply the record companies, seizing the opportunity to impose their opaque and onerous copyright schemes on the listening public.
While the battle rages on, piling up legal fees and taking the joy out of music, a simpler solution is on the horizon. The best way to stem this tidal wave of thievery is to give the music away.
Free content, by itself, is not at all that unusual. Broadcast television is "free"--at least to the viewer--courtesy of ad-supported subsidies, as are radio, many concerts and sporting events. But even those services commanding a fee today should become free tomorrow as the economics of music distribution take radical new shape.
To understand how, we would do well to look at a very different industry, but one with surprising parallels to music: 19th-century fuel delivery. In the late 1800s, when a tenant sought to warm a cold apartment, she had to buy her own coal from passing coal wagons and then haul it in coal buckets up to her fourth-floor kitchen. This apparently straightforward transaction brought with it considerable challenges for wagon drivers.
Theft was endemic. Stories abound of coal wagons stripped of half their load by street urchins before a first delivery could be made. Various solutions to improve security were proposed, including various patented coal locks. The ultimate solution, however, proved to be something quite different: a new distribution model that made coal theft irrelevant. It was called central heating.
Coal distributors sold their product efficiently in one large delivery to apartment landlords, at the same time removing the incentive for individual tenants to steal. Landlords could pass a significant part of the savings on to tenants in their bill for monthly rent. Everyone benefited, even the families of the coal-stealing urchins.
Similarly, it is the power of low-cost distribution, combined with subsidized free services, that will save and transform the music business. Stealing will become equally irrelevant.
It is the power of low-cost distribution, combined with subsidized free services, that will save and transform the music business.
To understand how, consider these statistics: The U.S. music industry collects $12 billion per year from CD sales to about 50 million active fans. That means each person spends an average of $250 per year to purchase around 15 albums a year.
Now, $250 per year is a very interesting number. By next year $250 will buy an MP3 player with a 100GB disk. That disk will hold over 2,000 CDs. Even strapping on headphones 15 hours a day, a listener would still need over four months to cruise through every track. For many people, 2,000 CDs is all the classical, jazz or rock music they will ever care to collect. For others, it's just about enough to fill a summer vacation with tunes. But it's a lot more than 15 CDs.
With these economics, distributing music on flashy plastic disks one album at a time seems, well, like heating your kitchen with coal. And $250 is not too high a price for a marketer--even those outside the music business--to spend acquiring customers, especially those dedicated fans holding an ad-supported player in their hand 15 hours a day.
Imagine the possibilities. Buy a new Kia? Get 1,000 albums with every car. Purchase a lifetime subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra? Receive an MP3 player with a library of the world's 2,000 most important classical music selections. Sign up for a new cellular contract? Get unlimited access to music from over 30,000 indie bands.
The economics are such that it would take only one leading company to break the music distribution mold. Among MP3 player makers, Apple Computer, with its p
Who would buy a car based on the amount of music you get with it? Everyone buys cars based on the amount of chrome it has.
---
Vin Diesel
Best Windows Freeware
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?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I hear there's this great new wireless technology that actually sends out free music through the air. There appears to be a way of supporting it through advertising revenue, but who cares, it's live broadband music streaming.
No more tinny-sounding RealPlayer broadcasts, this is high-quality stuff we're talking about. Free content for all! And the best thing is, the end-user hardware requirements are very inexpensive. I hear it's called 'radio' or something. Apparently people are working on actually sending video images in the same way. Imagine the possibilities!
I have gigs and gigsof MP3s but don't own a car.
Trolling is a art,
I'm sure I'm missing something, but why do artists need labels any more?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"Nothing in life is FREE." That goes for the music too. I'm sorry, but the price of a car is a lot to pay to get "free" music. Does anyone remember when mp3.com was sending out free CDs of 100 songs apiece of this same type of free music? The music was only halfway decent... nothing to sneeze at. I don't see this type of marketing going over very well with the public. I think the American public is smarter than that.
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.
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.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Unless and until you become a monopoly, you can give away whatever you damn well like.
First go read about the Sherman Anti-Trust act, and then familiarize yourself with the concept of a "loss-leader".
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
will it get me laid?
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.
Rip. Burn. Walk.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
that's exactly what i want. i have been waiting for someone to sell me ford-approved music. or do you think they would actually let you choose which songs they would sell you. no, this would be one ten-hour disk for everyone. i'm sure they'll be enough songs for everyone to hate.
i like choosing my own music.
Furthermore, his payment model is pretty much based on ratings. In a system like that, good content won't win out any more (maybe less) than it does now. (Which does bring up the question: is the stuff on TV crappier than the music being sold in stores? On the one hand we have Joe Millionaire. On the other we have Christina Aquilera. But you can still find some pretty good CDs if you look for them.) Lots of promotion will still make artists more money than good songs.
So... I don't think I like the "future of music" any better than the present.
blah blah blah
This is one of the stupidest ideas I have read in a long time.
When I buy a car, I care about the features of the car. Adding in stupid junk like 1000 hours of music is an annoyance, not something I would be happy about.
The key to selling music is selling it at a low enough price that people prefer the reliability and quality of purcahsed music to the hassle, unreliability, etc. of pirated music. It is truly as simple as that.
-Michael
Threshold RPG
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. :)
bance.net
I think this would be a terrible idea, look at what I would have to listen too:
BMW - 1,000 Free hours of Kraftwork
Honda - 1,000 Free hours of SES
Cadillac - 1,000 Free hours of Elvis
NO NO NO....
Ave Molech Setting
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:
In short, if it were about the artists well being, free(dom) music and media would be a slam dunk. It benefits everyone
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)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
I'll just have to steal cars now.
Besides the nice packaging, universal portability, and feeling of having a tangible product, there's the all-important issue of sound quality. I'm sorry, but 192kbps MP3s are just unacceptable if you really want to appreciate Dark Side of the Moon. There's also something about the cohesiveness of an entire album as opposed to individual songs. Again, Pink Floyd is the most obvious example, but you can find many "concept albums" by many artists that have to be listened to in full, in order to fully appreciate the music.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Hamburgers in your face
French fries between your toes
Dill pickles up your nose
and don't forget those chocolate shakes
Made from polluted lakes
McDonalds is your..... kind of place
There are other versions as well.
Perhaps I should have been more clear in my initial post. I understand and agree with everything you've said. But my point was that from the perspective of view of the artist, why would you want to sign on with a label, since everyone knows that the labels screw artists?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Huh? You mean they won't let us listen to the radio? Or maybe you mean they won't let us change the channel.. because you know if we don't listen to the commercials on the radio, that's stealing.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Sorry, the coal-stealing analogy is a little off.
In my opinion, being a recording artist is going to be closer to being a visual artist. There are tons of similarities - you usually have a single talented 'artist' that creates for the joy of creating, and little if any support structure to get the 'art' out there. Most people have very selective tastes in what they like, and collect a little bit to decorate their life with.
Fine artists have a hell of a time supporting themselves making gallery art, and they typically have to get a 'commercial' style job to pay the bills - graphic design, web design or equivalent. I see this happening with recording artists soon too - the bottom is dropping out, and recording artists will have a very difficult time supporting themselves, and will have to find other means to pay the bills (tunes for commercials maybe - I hear Moby sold every track on his last album to corporations before it went gold), and make their own music on their own time.
In the future you'll have very few Picassos and Monets, and very few rock stars. The content these people create will be viewable (listenable) for free, and you'll have to find other means to pay the bills.
D
Sad, pathetic, losers unite - www.zerosexlife.com
Does if matter if you change the channel on the radio? What are you going to change it to? ClearChannel 95.1, ClearChannel 95.5, ClearChannel, 95.7......
But merely masking/hiding the actual cost.
The car dealer/builder who bundles a DVD chock full o' crap still has to pay something to the record company so that they can then distribute the scraps to the artist. They dealer prob gets a much reduced price, but not 'free'.
The dealer damn sure isn't going to eat that cost. It WILL be passed back to the consumer.
The $15,000 car now costs $16,5000. You just won't see it on the sticker.
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.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
My car already has a device that plays free music: the radio. In case you were wondering, it did not in any way affect my choice of which car to buy.
Ok, people. The guy gave the example of buy a car, get free music. Come up with your own example of what product you might buy that getting some free music along with it might motivate you to buy (And no, saying a CD is not a viable answer) - for example, what if one company started giving away free music with their MP3 player to make it more attractive than an iPod? Someone like a Big 3 automanufacturer could certainly negotiate a deal with the content companies that would allow you to pick your own music. That would probably be valuable marketing data for both the car manufacturer and the record company. (The car manufacturer would have an inside track on what music to use to advertise which cars to specific demographics, for example.)
/.ers are a creative bunch - what other business models could we propose that would keep the media companies from trying to pass new laws that limit piracy, keep artists alive and fed, and allow us to use entertainment data in the ways that we want?
The point is to come up with a vaild scenario where entertainment companies continue to make money, artists continue to be compensated for making art, and people get to use it whatever way they want.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the current model (as the RIAA sees it) is that record company supports artist, record company distributes music, one person buys CD, rips it and sends it to everyone on the web so no one else has to buy the CD. That's a financially unviable proposition for both the record company AND the artist. While this is not reality, this is the way the RIAA sees it, and, importantly, this is the way they are convincing your government to see it - which is why we get things like the DMCA. (On a side note, how many of those of you who say, "Music should be free!" ever send money to the artist to make up for the fact that they didn't get _anything_ for making the track that you downloaded? Artists may get screwed by the content companies, but at least they get something.)
The important aspect of the article is that in the coal scenario, the coal providers were subject to theft, so they came up with a way to sell in bulk to someone who provided the associated service to consumers. They changed their business model. So,
What if, for example, a building had a central entertainment server that stored music and video, which would be accessible from an entertainment station in your apartment? Rather than pay-per-view, the data was just there for you to use as part of your monthly rent. Watch movies or listen to music all day - download it to your MP3 player to take with you, whatever. It's included just like your utils.
Or, if you're not a heavy entertainment consumer, perhaps some buildings might treat entertainment data more like telephone service, rather than heat. You get charged on a per-use basis.
Some buildings might go one way, some might go another way, or those might just be alternatives that you could select.
In both of those scenarios, the building could track data for ASCAP so that artists were appropriately compensated. Artists might even try negotiating with certain buildings/realty companies directly. Larger buildings might be able to provide anonymous demographic data back to the media companies which would enable the media companies to track what is popular - you might even get a discount off your rent if you agreed to that.
There are probably lots of reasons why what I'm suggesting won't work. It may even be a bad idea. But, don't just be critics - if you don't like my idea, tell me why you don't like it or you think it won't work and come up with your own.
John
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
The biggest flaw in this idea is that it is yet another attempt to solve the wrong problem: how to build a life support system for record companies. I wish these pundits would read and understand what musicians are saying increasingly in their writings : that the whole music piracy brouhaha is not about musicians, it's only about record companies, and that we really don't need record companies.
Most musicians by far make a living with paying gigs, not CD sales. Recording contracts are carefully structured so that all expenses come out of the artist's share, which ends up being zero. CD sales benefit musicians by giving them exposure which translates into gigs. A musician gets this same exposure whether someone buys a CD, listens to a song on the radio or downloads it from Kazaa.
Replacing the entire record industry with free distribution wouldn't deprive musicians of anything except the opportunity to let the record companies control their careers. And as an added bonus, it would mean one less source of big-money whispering into the ears of lawmakers.
I think that insurance/finance companies will bundle cars with their services. Basically like a lease, the insurance company dolls out the car to you and you pay them a monthly fee with covers the insurance for the vehicle.
The companies would buy at large fleet discounts and offer safer vehicles.
Potentially they could use their lobby to get government to give them insentive credits on using certain better energy resources/methods that are currently stalled.
Oh yeah and they could offer free music too.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
I have to ask myself - do I really want 1000 hours of Koreana?
(No, I don't drive a Hyundai)