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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.'"
Record companies should start flooding the Internet with bogus MP3 files that look like songs, but that explode on contact inside the hard drives of Internet thieves. Anyone who illegally downloads an MP3 file via KaZaA or any of the myriad peer-to-peer (i.e. thief-to-thief) services would at best get a corrupted file, and at worst a ruined hard drive.
The companies should band together and enlist a dark force of special-ops hackers to make this happen. Once Net users discover that all they're downloading is a World Wide Web of pain, only the most determined and technologically savvy of them will continue to steal music.
Explode on contact? Hey great, while we're at it why don't we get those 1337o hackers make loads of nasty pixies flood out of the downloader's coffee cup holder... er I mean CD ROM drive (you know, that nasty thing used for ripping CD's)
So this is the sort of utter crap that Slashdot is linking to these days? Word to the editors: This is still in Mysterious Future, I'd recommend you dump it posthaste ;) (Yes I'm a subscription whore. $5 or so is fair game for an extended post history. Morbid curiosity)
Were simply making copies of the original items and leaving them intact, I think I'd be fine with it.
Elvis would just order another burger and shoot the TV?!
Give me a service which has nearly all the songs p2p networks has (ie the big 4 labels and all the smaller ones) for betwen £5 and £10 per month for nonDRM's downloads (ie in mp3 or ogg format) either in unlimited ammount of downloads or limited - 50 songs per month??? and i will pay now
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
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).
One would almost think market economies would tend to lower the price of items as distribution costs fall. Last time I looked, the cost of CDs were rising. (That was a while ago...because I never even bother looking at CDs any more.)
The pirating is just a side show. The real problem is that distribution and production costs have fallen through the floor and the industry has not responded to the market dynamics. Instead they cling to copyright laws and monopolistic tactics to maintain artificially inflated costs of their goods.
If you really asked the musicians...most would love the idea of a dollar CD. A dime a song.
The CRIA's complaint is that someone is robbing the plunder house.
BTW What's this noise about antiquities? Try pumping an antiquity in your Surburban and see where it gets you.
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.
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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.
You can argue that its morally and legally wrong, but that doesn't make it theft, anymore than arson is theft because it is morally and legally wrong. The quote about Bagdad looters is rich, and incredibly stupid as it makes my point perfectly. These people are theives; all these thousands of year old artifacts might be gone forever. But if the looters were copying all the anchient scrolls as opposed to running off with them, they'd still be in the museum.
Any reasonably intelligent person should be able differentiate between infringment and theft, but even here on Slashdot there are numerous people who just can't seem to wrap their minds around it. Try imagining someone who insists that apples are oranges because they both come from trees and start out as flowers, thats what these guys are like.
To those people, before you respond, read these two things over and over until they sink in, and try not to let your minds be thrown into an infinite loop:
Why is there so much discussion over this so-called "theft" we're experiencing on a massive scale? Regardless of what you think, sales aren't declining because "music sucks" or because the RIAA is recieving some karmic death-blow.
The music industry is starting to have problems because their method of distribution is outdated. The problem: digital music has become a huge online phenomenon, people want "formless" content that they can transfer to any media they see fit (hard drive, cd, memory stick) and the RIAA has so far been unable to provide consumers with that product.
The solution: consumers take matters into their own hands, downloading mp3's and then burning, ripping, copying, etc. The reason this has become such a huge deal is that the RIAA as a sort of oligopoly is having trouble coming to grips with the notion that the public will dictate the distribution methods and prices on its own terms. Like the "black market" writeup on K5 a month or two ago, we're seeing a system completely devoid of that which the public wants - on-line distribution at a signifigantly cheaper price than that of a CD (keep in mind blank media already benefits the RIAA).
Until the RIAA stops thrashing about in this all-out effort to dictate to the public exactly how, when, and for how much (no matter how inflated the price) they can get content, they're going to continue to have problems.
No morality, no ethics, just the facts. 'Nuff said.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume