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."

Comments

RIAA forced to squeeze indie stores by the gov't

[leviramsey]

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.

Re:Edison's "Mistakes"?

[CaptainCarrot]

Edison had a lot more going for him than just the movie industry. Remember the light bulb? Commercial electric power distribution? The phonograph? His stock ticker? Multiplex telegraph? And a couple of dozen others?

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.