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.'"

Comments

The "Recording" Industry is Fine

[dgenr8]

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).

The REAL solution?

[DMaster0]

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.

http://www.antimusic.com/news/03/april/item19.sh tm l

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?

Reasonable Prices

[LordBodak]

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.