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RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes?
An anonymous reader writes "George Ziemann has written the latest installment in his 'history repeats itself' series of articles regarding the record industry and the tactics utilized by their lobby, the RIAA. This time Ziemann focuses on the recent RIAA lawsuits against individuals who file-trade, and the search-and-seize missions against independent music stores. Slashdot posted his first two articles back in June."
A lot of people used Napster, before it was shut down. There was sentiment against file swapping for a short while, but then Kazaa, Morpheus, and others stepped in, and file swapping increased.
After the RIAA sues a few thousand people, and the tide turns against swapping, it will slow again.
But the fact of the matter is that the RIAA members need to come up with a new business model. File sharing will always be around in some fashion, and the technology will just get more and more complex - making it easier to do truely anonymous swapping.
It's been said a million times on here already - the RIAA is just like SCO - they need to adopt a new business model if they're going to survive. Litigation alone won't support them forever.
The linux hacker
Then they'll eventually go away and, unlike Edison, won't be remembered for actually inventing anything. After all, I look around the room, and much of what I see, Edison had a hand in shaping. What has the RIAA had a hand in? What is their redeeming quality? Britney Spears and boy bands? Edison invented modern invention, among other things; thus I can forgive his lack of business tact.
RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes?
A statement like that puts an unfair association on Edison. It's like comparing apples to dog crap.
I moderate "-1, Fool"
In the exact same time frame, Automobile manufacturers had an association based on the patent for a self propelled vehicle with an internal combustion engineering. The patent was owned by a lawyer who formed an association regulating who could make cars. If you weren't a member of of the association you got sued to oblivion for manufacturing automobiles.
Funny thing is a guy name Henry Ford came along wanted to make a car that was much cheaper than what the association thought was reasonable. The association reacted predicatbly, sued ford motor. When their lawsuit against Ford didn't progress as rapidly as they would have liked they started suing people buying or driving a ford. This was their mistake. While coniderably more legitimate than SCO's threat to sue users, it had much the same effect. A PR nightmare. The general public doesn't have patents, or get to play the IP game. They do however buy things, and suing people for buying things was not a great PR move back then
Needless to say most people know who Henry Ford was, not many can name the owner or members of the patent association.
The same thing also occured in Radio.
The RIAA screws the artists.
They steal their songs, they pay them a tiny fraction of what they make from them, and they exercise creative control through the use of unfair contracts.
The RIAA screws the retailers.
This is self evident, but in case you're not observant, the CD costs the record store around 85% as much as they sell it for. They dump products on the market in the forms of "deals" in order to bump up CD sales and manipulate music charts.
The RIAA screws the public.
We buy overpriced CDs for which we have no actual legal rights. Another industry would have been hit for price fixing, but since technically the RIAA isn't a company, they technically aren't a monopoly. We get treated like criminals for violating the monopoly they technically don't have.
And we're ripping THEM off? God forbid the world evolves and this 19th century shit they're trying to pull doesn't fly anymore. 110 years ago you'd have been trying to stop Ford from building his first car, so as not to put the horse people out of business.
What's happening right now is a direct result of their exploitive business practices. People are done whining about it, and they're making their displeasure felt in the only way that counts. Now the whiners are on the other side of the fence, and we're happy to tell you all the same thing you told us: Deal with it, because there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.
Just my opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I own an independent record store, my margins are in the vicinity of 100%, and I've been increasing my product line by nearly double every 2-3 weeks just by buying two CDs for every one I sell.
Of course, I don't sell Sting or Britney Spears or any of that garbage. I send those customers to Circuit City or Borders.
I move product that you can't find in stores, and you can't even get easily on the Internet. My two big Internet competitors are Interpunk and Angry, Young, and Poor. They sell the CDs for $12-$13. I sell them for $15. We both buy them for $6-$8.
I also sell T-shirts, punk pins, patches, and hats. About a 100% margin there. I move music the same way the big labels do: I play a new CD over and over and over again in my store. I carry peripheral items as well, to attract a crowd. I offer compensation for customers who bring in their friends.
I sponsor events at local shows with local bands, and sell my merch there. I give a percentage to the local band, usually more than what the venue offers them for playing. I sell the bands' music directly on consignment, and keep just 15-20%.
And guess what? I make a profit. A pretty good one. Sure, you never heard of 99% of the bands, but does it matter when I am turning over my inventory every 45-90 days? I don't sit on a CD for more than 90 days, and if I do, I move it at cost and replace it with a different one.
Let the big guys control the big bands -- there's no profit in those guys for an independent store like me. I don't have any MP3s in the store. I don't have any CD-Rs. I don't even have a CD-Recorder in my PC at the store. I block Kazaa and other apps so my employees can't get me trapped.
This is a huge conspiracy that the RIAA is walking all over guys like me -- they're not. I find a market and I dominate it and I make money.
Would I make more if I sold Sting and Bush and Avril Lavigne? Maybe. But then I'd have to work by their rules, and I won't. So I accept the fact that I can't make 7 figures a year, but I'm on track to make 6. And if I open a few more stores (with great customer service, an awesome ability to promote new bands, and a friendly atmosphere that never feels like the mall) I'll only multiply my take.
Face it -- if you think you're in a bind, controlled by a monopoly, you don't realize the big issue: you have choice on what you carry.
I can make a buck. Go try it. You can, too.
Tesla, on the one hand, sucked seriously, but on the other hand, still get tonnes of play on "Classic Rock" stations with "Signs". So they have to still be clocking some pretty good royalty payments, and it'd be irresponsible to call them "poor". Also, 40-something skid radio station programmers still appreciate them, although I fail to see the relevance of their standing with the scientific community.
I saw Tesla open up for Skynard once, and I can confidently that they aren't at all geeks.
"The other died poor and in poor standing with the scientific community and is generally regarded as a kook."
Yeah, that's why the SI unit of magnetic flux density is called the edison. Oh, wait...
Remember how the RIAA was found guilty of price-fixing on CDs and settled?
This is a direct consequence of the settlement.
The RIAA maintained the effective price-fix by instituting a minimum advertised price rule. Stores could sell CDs for whatever price they wanted, but if the price they were advertising was above a certain threshold, the RIAA would pay for the advertising. This had the effect of keeping Wal-Mart and Best Buy from achieving a near-monopoly position in retailing (and thus being able to dictate to the RIAA in matters of content and pricing). Wal-Mart and Best Buy were planning to sell CDs at cost to lead to increased sales per square foot of the store (and generate foot traffic) and their plans would depend on being able to advertise $9 CDs (from a very limited selection; only the stuff that was new and exceptionally popular would be carried).
In order to prevent the big box retailers from taking over the retail market, the RIAA cut their legs out by giving stores that were willing to charge full price (and take a guaranteed profit) free advertising. This in turn kept the small stores and music specific chains in business.
Then Wal-Mart and Best Buy sued for price-fixing and won. The result since then has been even more more blandness in the recording business; with Wal-Mart and Best Buy accounting for greater and greater shares of the retail market, they will only carry CDs that will sell a lot of copies very quickly. Artists who only go consistently gold are getting pushed out because the retailers aren't interested.
That's what made him obscenely rich. The movie industry was only a small part of his enterprise. That it became an even smaller part of it was, yes, because of the mistakes he made in trying to assure himself of a monopoly.
And the brethren went away edified.
Actually, if I were in their shoes, I would not do the same. I would make my product more attractive to my most profitable demographic: the teenager. The average teenager wants to listen to "kewl" music, to instant message, and to talk to their friends on their new mobile phone.
So make the music CD computer compatible. Embrace the new technology, rather than stifle it. Make the kids want to spend the $15 or whatever it is on a new CD, rather than download the CD from kazaa - make it worth their while to do so. Add value to the tracks.
How do they do this, you ask? Here's a few suggestions:
Rather than trying to "protect our artists' IP", the record companies should be trying to attract the buyers back that they are losing to p2p.
Rather than shipping deliberately broken CDs, they should be shipping CDs that are enhanced not just in name, but in content, so downloading mp3s and a CD cover is not enough to have the whole experience.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think you can sell more product by alienating your customers. You sell more by having a good product at the right price.