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MTV Getting into Music Download Business
Pranjal writes "According to this article at Economic Times, MTV is getting into the music download business. MTV chief Tom Freston announced on Monday, the service would debut within the first half of next year. Looks like the online music download business is heating up."
MTV's getting into the music business? What's next, they'll start showing music videos or something?
bp
I don't think of MTV when I think of music. I think of MTV when I think of gothic rock stars with wannabe kids and their own reality show.
Honestly, I do not watch MTV. The quality of their "music" does not appeal to me. iTunes Music store and Napster are my 2 big bets in the music downloading biz.
"I really do feel bad for the RIAA members (not the RIAA itself). They are stuck having to eventually face the fact that they are 80% of the way to extinction. Can anyone realy imagine a future 50 years down the road where anyone is interested in buying a piece of plastic with music on it?"
The fallacy here is that a record company's sole purpose is to manufacture plastic. This is the job of a CD replication house, not a record company.
The recording industry has survived many media changes in the past century -- from wax cylinders, to 78's, to LPs and 45s, cassettes, 8-tracks, and most recently, to compact discs. I think they'll survive the move to online distribution. Perhaps CD replication plants may see reduced business going forward, but the CD replication is just a small part of the cycle.
Remember, a record company's primary function is to provide the resources necessary to produce, promote and distribute music into the sales channel. So what if the sales channel changes from brick-and-mortar retail stores selling hard goods to online purveyors like iTMS, Napster and (now) MTV? This might actually be a good thing for the record companies. As anybody who's run a business knows, inventory management is a huge issue. Returns, price protections, shipping costs -- it's all a tremendous pain in the ass and it costs money... and that cost are reflected in the retail price.
The far more important purpose that record companies serve is providing the resources to get the music produced in the first place, and promoting that music so that people actually know that it exists. The record companies make a tremendous cash investment in the course of doing so, and they recoup their investment off of sales of the music -- whether it's online or on a CD.
I can guess the argument here -- "with the wonderful power of the Internet, I can record music on my home studio, make my own deal with iTMS, borrow money from my rich uncle and go in deep on my credit cards to advertise and promote my music so people can find it, and I'll become rich! Who needs the record companies when I can do all my production, promotionm advertising and retailing myself!"
The problems with this, as somebody put it the other day, is that generally a CD recorded in your bedroom for $20,000 sounds like a CD recorded in your bedroom. And effectively promoting your own stuff is hard work and costs money. Many artists simply do not have the resources, skills or even desire to be businesspeople.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.