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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.'"
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.