Slashdot Mirror
Time to Face the Music
Mortimer.CA writes "The Toronto Star has an article up about the ailing recording industry with some possible scenarios for solving the problem(s). Choice quotation: 'We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.'"
Okay, so according to the write up swapping some songs on the internet is better than breaking into a Baghdad museum and making off with priceless historical artifacts. Hrm...next you'll be telling me that murderers are getting lighter sentences than those violating the DMCA.
He was all about self-promotion. If the people love you and your music, they'll buy Elvis-brand lunchboxes, furniture, ground beef, forks, etc. They'll also go to your concerts, and many fans will STILL buy full CD's because they are fans. I doubt Elvis would be too concerned.
It's not the RECORDING industry that's ailing -- it's the MEDIA DISTRIBUTION industry. Artists will always need good studios, producers, technicians, and equipment. The RIAA is misnamed. Their weakening stranglehold on the distibution of the final product (bits) is the only reason they get a piece of the pie, and not a flat fee (like the tour bus driver).
All your troubles will be solved. I'm not just saying that to troll or anything, but then the people who boycott the RIAA won't boycott you(unless they hold a grudge on you), you don't have to follow the RIAA(Your not going to be forced to price fix). I hope that these companies can figure out that they are public enemy #1 on the minds of most technical people(they did help write the DMCA or the RIAA did for them). Sure you want to protect your copywrites well why do you think P2P exsisted because of the RIAA. They created it with their high prices and people got sick of it.
Perhaps this article (and many similar ones written this week) should be read first before taking the first article with a grain of "downloading is bad" salt.
h tm l
http://www.antimusic.com/news/03/april/item19.s
The way the indie promotion business works is record labels pay the indie promoters to work directly with radio stations to get songs on the air. It is estimated that this system can cost over a $1 million to land a song on Top 40 radio.
A million dollars a song? No, there's no way you can lose money doing THAT with homogenized bland "sounds like" radio, is there?
An open note to record companies: Downloading is not hurting you as much as you're hurting yourself (and your audience indirectly) with the payola and other fat inside the company.
Want to make money again? Stop paying for radio to sound homogenic. Stop paying everyone and their grandmother bribes to tell people that the music you paid too much to record (michael jackson's invincible is a good one) doesn't suck and it's worth getting 40 spins a day on the top 100 stations in the US. Make programming directors at radio stations do their job and discover new music again, and break the stuff that needs to be broken, and let the copycat mainstream music stay on MTV, where they're content to just use what they're paid to play.
Give Radio back to the people, and you'll see that people want your music again, and it won't always be just the stuff you force feed them. If the same 25 songs weren't put on a loop with commercials on most radio stations, you'd see more than the same 25 albums being sold, and you'd likely not need to pay a million bucks a song (and with the typical 5 single album, that's 5 mil in useless waste, multiplied by perhaps 100 albums a year, that's half a billion dollars in useless waste, isn't it?).
Amazing where you can find profits these days, isn't it?
"now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.'"
The most of the looters are are expressing their new found freedom after 30 years of suppression and thievery from the regime. I'm pretty sure thats why Iraqi's are doing it too.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
It's that simple. The music industry is pricing itself out of business. Why do I have to pay $15 for a CD with an hour of music when I can spend only a little more to get a DVD... 2 hour movie, often 2 or 3 hours of bonus material, feature commentaries (another 2 hours each). Start selling CDs at reasonable prices and sales will go up, piracy will go down.
LordBodak's journal.
We pay $16 for a CD that costs almost nothing to make. Most artists do not get a cent from CD sales.
The artist have to pay "expenses" first. These include a breakage fee to cover the cost of broken shellack 78 RPM disks!
Music would be better if the big 5 recording companies all went tits up.
We would have a better selection of Music. More artists would actually get paid.
The technology now exists for decentralised music distribution.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
"...Such high-priced stars as Mariah Carey are getting dumped..." And here the article implies that its the "pirates" who are at fault? oh, surely it couldnt be because of her declining sales because of the fact people dont like her music anymore, and therefore wasnt making enough millions for the record company? oh comeon, these are the sort of BS articles that joe public reads, and beleives that the RIAA and their ilk are only fair and just in removing peoples free rights? itl only be one day when joe sixpack wakes up and realises that he/she doesnt have any free rights left, and that it impacts nearly every facet of their daily life, that they will realise what they have let corporate interests rule their lives and wallets. i think itl only get worse before it gets better...something has to be done here....
That doesn't solve the record companies' problem of controlling their intellectual property. It also doesn't prevent digital sharing beyond the subscriber base, which would have the same effect on digital sales as on CD sales.
A subscription system I think is practical would involve a special sound card with an RSA-type decryption and DSP on one chip. Your RSA public key would be your subscription ID; just present it to the server to get music that you and only you can listen to. The private key would be protected on the chip, and since the DSP takes place on board, the unencrypted digital music would be very difficult to access. Like cell phones, the card could be handed out for free, and maybe for a few bucks you could get an extra card or two to install in other computers in your house. To be extra nice, the record companies could distribute degraded music files, which you could freely share, but if you want the real version you have to pay to get the special version for your sound card (e.g., the right channel could be free but the left channel is encrypted, so to hear it in stereo you would have to pay).
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
copying is not theft.
The recording industry has never made as much as the figures they are citing for "stolen" music.
Imagine Torvalds charging $100/license for the Linux kernel. Would he be filthy rich, or would we all migrate to *BSD?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Elvis probably would have sided with the RIAA once Hilary and Jack convinced him (in a barbituate-induced mental stupor) that by fighting mp3s he was fighting communism. But for him to be invoked as a fighter against "piracy" is ludicrous, since he built his career on the open theft of black music. His work is a perfect case study in how copyright law benefits the real pirates over the real artists. I won't say Elvis wasn't great - he was an incredible performer and artistically he made many of the songs his own - but his greatness was built on the kind of theft and piracy that copyright law should be designed to prevent, yet instead was used to encourage.
I really like the comment on the radio part. My local radio station claims to be playing hit after hit. Which is true, to bad they play the same hit over and over again. If you don't like the music which has been defined as hits this week, well to bad, you're going to hate what their playing on the radio then. I would agree with what they claim in the article, the radios doesn't play enough different music.
Another problem which they don't cover is the fact that the music industry doesn't give its customers what they want. If they don't know what we want, it's because they don't listen. We keep telling them what we want and they keep ignoring us. We want cheap downloadable music. The music should be available in the formats we like, not some weirdo proprietary file format. It must be available in high quality, 128kbps is not nearly enough. Most importantly, the selection needs to be huge, just like we see on the p2p networks. Also the website where we buy the music should remember what we bought, just in case we lose the file and needs to re-download it. No other industry can survive ingoring the wishes of their customer, I don't see what make the music indutry so unique.
Why don't they try to make music something you buy on impulse, just like chewing gum in the supermarket. If I hear a song in the radio or on tv, my only shoot at getting this song, while I remember it, is via some p2p network. Why the music indutry doesn't see profit in this is beyond me.
How exactly would this solve the problem? What would happen is people would subscribe, download the files, and then put them in their Kazaa shared folder. Most people would still use Kazaa, since you now have high quality MP3s from the "official" service on Kazaa for free. Why should they pay when someone else will and share it for free?
The real problem is most people want something for nothing. They want to be able to get the songs for free instead of having to pay for them. If they offer non-DRM caopies of the songs for download, these will just be made available for free, so most people still won;t pay.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Without enacting a lot of laws, police actions, whining, and their other garbage, all the RIAA has to do is lower their prices. If they can price CDs marginally above their cost, the piracy would be crippled. There are other ways to make money- a lot of bands I'd like to see play maybe 12 dates across the country each year, and not always in my neighborhood. If they toured more frequently, yes, I would pay $20-$30 for a show and probably buy food and a t-shirt, too. They just need to change their business model. Make CDs cheap and affordable (the way 45s used to be) and make up the rest with promotions. This used to work, and there's no reason why it won't again.
IAAL
Well, indie guys like me are booming! I sell CDs for 5 bucks a pop (my latest was a compilation album of my first 3 albums plus new stuff, 19 tracks), and tell EVERYBODY to rip their favorite tracks to their HD for P2P users. And that is how I get known with minimal cost.
He should come back and haunt some of these RIAA assholes into understanding that copy protection and DRM are useless. If you can hear the music, you can copy it. It just takes one and it's out there. But it's no big deal if there is a reasonably priced, legal option. Most people aren't total assholes. Elvis' corpse would get that in it's current decayed state. It's just that simple.
I agree with you. It is true that the MP3 revolution have hurt some poor millionaire that now need to cut on their budget for drugs, big cars and prostitutes. Nevertheless, many engineers and technicians have a job now has hardware developer in the new mp3 and digital multimedia industrie. Downloading mp3's is illegal only because there is a law that say it so. Just change the law and the problem is solved; there will be no more stealing and the money will go to a group of more deserving people. I play music myself and I have some stuff that people download. But I do it for the love of the music and when people download my songs for free I feel honored and appreciated.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
And like an oppressive government, The RIAA doesn't want their distribution and king-maker monopoly to crumble. It would be one thing it it were artist's interests that they were truly protecting, but it's obviously not. This 1999 Salon article is about who owns the digital rights (such as the website, customer database and merchandising). Guess who wants to get their hands on it?
This quote from the article:
...
"Traditionally, record labels have brought in the lion's share of their revenues by selling records, often using Draconian contracts to minimize the artists' take of the profits. Record labels took ownership of the music, its marketing and sales, reserving only a tiny percentage of the take for the artists. So, the artists made their money by merchandising ancillary products, like concert tickets or T-shirts."
But most record labels salivate over the idea of a mailing list of 100,000 fans, for multiple reasons. A list of fans of the Backstreet Boys, for example, could easily be used to promote another upcoming pop boy band -- this is what is known as data mining, and is a hot topic within the record industry. As Marc Schiller, CEO of Electric Artists, puts it, "The label wants the data not necessarily for the artist -- they are looking for that data for their artists who are similar to that artist. Should you use one artist's leverage to create a database of consumers that is used for other artists? That is going to become more controversial."
One question: Isn't Canada also one country that charges a tax on CD-Rs allegedly to pay back record companies for MP3 trading? Which leads to independent artists are being taxed for doing their own records instead of playing the record contract game.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
(pretend the following is in italics)
Some 17-year-olds I know have vast music collections but have yet to purchase their first CD.
(okay, you can stop pretending now)
Fair enough, but I know of a 42-year-old who has bought hundreds of pieces of music over his lifetime, but only has about 20 in his possession right now.
Lets see... there were 120+ albums that became nostalgia pieces when CD's hit the mainstream. Various CD's that got scratched or broken. Cassettes that met a sad demise in a hot car in the Texas sun. 8-Tracks... hell, we won't even talk about them.
Point being, the music industry keeps insisting that I'm not buying the actual music, just a limited license to listen to said music. Fine, but in that case I'm going to insist that I own that license forever, regardless of whether or not I still own the physical medium the music was recorded on. As long as I didn't give it away or resell it, it's still mine.
Until the music industry offers to replace all this stuff for free when it breaks or wears out, I'm going to keep hitting the P2P networks to get copies of the stuff I've already paid for.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
- legality!
- ease of use - already Kazaa, especially, is already extremely easy to use; but it can be (and is being) improved by getting rid of ads, spyware
- better quality (high bitrate or lossless) music
- fast speed, no waiting time downloads
- added value such as song texts or band info integrated into the client
- and so on, I think most people who pirate music now could come up with any number of improvements, many of which remain infeasible because of the underground nature of the scene.
That's where the room for improvement is, do stuff P2P can't do. If there was a service offering something tangible over P2P, people would use it. What won't work is offering considerably less and then charging for it, with the only added benefit is legalily. Well people like doing stuff legally, but they don't like it that much.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
You must not have seen LP sleeves with a little [cassette-shaped] Skull and Crossbones, bearing the legend,
"Home taping is killing the Music Industry."
"Album and song sharing is not a new, 'net age problem. It happened all the time pre-Internet. Anyone who says they haven't copied a tape or recorded from the chart show on the radio is either very young or a liar. The only reason this is gaining public airtime is simply because the 'net, being free speech epitomised, is an easy target for any group of totalitarians, the RIAA included."
The internet is the enemy of the RIAA.
Home taping was limited, because although you could copy something quite well (albeit with analogue's inherent restrictions) there was no large scale distribution network for these copies.
The PC, and the ripping of CDs to MP3, is the digital equivalent to home taping, but the internet is a whole new addition to the situation.
It liberates to the people, what was previously only in the hands of the RIAA; namely distribution.
Digital copying plus user distribution (via the internet,) removes the RIAA's stranglehold over music moving about.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
The reason the industry is having such a damn fit isn't because we've all lost our morals and now think theivery is ok - it is because they see the writing on the wall and know they have no reason for existence. There was a whole industry based on there being one way to get music to people who will buy it - now that middleman isn't needed and they know it.
IMHO this is capatalism at work. Another, more efficient, system of distribution has evolved and will eventually kill off the less efficient one. The parts that are necessary will be preserved because they have worth - those that aren't will be discarded.
Lucky for me we have a store called cd warehouse nearby that buys the crap I don't listen to anymore, and sells me used CD's for $5-$9.
See, that's what I don't get about the labels. $15 is an iffy purchase price for a CD, as far as I'm concerned, but won't likely stop me. If it's above that price, there's a good chance I won't touch it except on sale, at places that sell below normal (like Best Buy), or used.
If a CD is $10, then my waffling ends and I'll almost certainly buy it.
If CDs were $5 a pop, I'd go f#@$in' broke buying CDs.
Certainly I can't be the only one like this - there's got to be enough people like me that the volume of sales would go up high enough to justify the reduced margins. Food for thought, although the RIAA et al don't seem to be hungry.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
I just had a thought about this. The complaint about the CD charge in canada hurting the indie recording artist. Um, why don't they just give recording artists a refund at the end of the year that adds up to the cd-r tax that they'd paid throughout the year? Is that a tough concept?
Course if that doesn't work we could always just burn down the halls of legislation until someone gets the point that laws are meant to protect the people, not punish them.
-
I'm glad I'm not the only one offended (or at least surprised) by this tasteless comparison. The RIAA can fall of the earth without any real loss of music , history, or works of human creativity. Heck, we might even find a way to recover works that RIAA publishers don't publish anymore.
That is, the RIAA just is *NOT* that important in the whole scheme of things. We had music before the RIAA, we'll have music after. And we can hope the music will get better without so much corporate "assistance".
On the other hand, burning ancient manuscripts and destruction of some of the oldest known examples of writing in Western civilization cannot be undone. I suppose we won't see the stolen artifacts for some time, either.
The comparison of music piracy (by which I mean large scale copying and redistribution in exchange for money) is a trivial, meaningless problem compared to the looting happening in Baghdad. Furthermore, informal and not-for-profit copying of songs though the interent is on an even lower tier of importance.
Grrr.
-Paul Komarek
Wow, what a great analogy! ...Oh wait, the Bagdad museum wasn't making money by selling copies of items they had. Guess we can't attach this one to the copyright-violater debate after all.
That said, I am amused that so many do not see that regardless of the ethical or even legal issues of music thieves, there still exists the more important issue of reality. There really is no way to police this so they should really try to take advantage of it if they are smart and want to make money. Eventually I think the Internet will indeed provide an easier and cheaper way to legally distribute music. By cutting out the corrupt and manipulative recording industry middlemen then it will also become easier to get a hold of GOOD music. It will be easier for newbies to get going and less stress will be on established bands to pump out crap with one or two good songs on board. Novelists understand this frustration and often will set aside a notebook of "crap filler" ideas for the times when they must fill some unrealistic obligation by their publisher. Thus less time or energy is devoted to the crap and more devoted to the good works. Taken another way it is the idea of not spreading yourself too thin. Now if only the electronic entertainment could do this and not pump out endless cookie cutter crap
Download a whole album worth of songs from your favourite P2P network. When you're done, send a money order (it should be anonymous.. are money orders anonymous?) of, say, $2 US to the artist/band that created said album. They end up getting around 2x-4x as much money as they would've gotten if you'd bought the CD, and you save yourself from spending $15.
Everybody wins! Oh, except the greedy record company.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
I think laws like this shouldn't be too much of a restriction. There is no lack of talent in Canada. Local artists in Kitchener/Waterloo alone could fill up the regular play lists, if their discs were actually played! The trouble is that most people only want to listen to the mindless stuff they're used to hearing on the radio, and not listen to the wealth of talent that exists in a diverse range of other styles. I think that was, in part, the spirit of that regulation, to encourage a more diverse playlist. Unfortunately, it just means we hear more of the same mindless stuff more often instead of being exposed to some really innovative new artists. Blame the stations, not the regulations. And I suppose ultimately, we have to blame ourselves - if we REALLY wanted to expand our horizons, we would do it.. Most people just never want to take the effort to do so.
The dot-coms are gone. Airlines are going into bankruptcy. Major telecoms are in bankruptcy. The energy-trading industry blacked out California by market manipulation, took major utilities into bankruptcy, and then went bankrupt itself. The music industry isn't up there on the national priority list.
The music industry is panicking because their sales are down 9%. NINE PERCENT. Car sales are down more than that. Hell, all retail is down more than that.
The music industry needs to shut up and soldier. They have a retail sales problem - let them solve it. Work on the product mix, find some new products that sell, come up with an online distribution system that's usable, cut costs and retail prices. None of that has happened. That's an indication of top-management incompetence.
"makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters."
Yeah, those mp3's you downloaded are more valuable than the priceless treasures and ancient artifacts from the dawn of human civilization. Someone needs to cut the RIAA down in half.