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South Korean Music Retailers Dying
terrymaster69 writes "According to this Reuters feature, 95% of South Korean music retail businesses have failed in the last year. 'While South Korea is not alone in seeing a downturn, the drop has been greatly accentuated and particularly deep because of the country's high-speed Internet access and a youth culture that uses some of the most sophisticated gadgets available.' Is this really a problem or just a natural progression?"
Did Netcraft confirm it?
*ducks*
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
They will start a fresh more intensive drive to put the falling sales on "piracy" and "file sharing"...
RIAA will portray musicians as starving somalis who have to sell their souls to lawyers to fight for them...
INDUCE act will be reintroduced by Orrin Hatch and will be passed by 284-0
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
...Kim Jong Il has gone way too far now. It was one thing when he was developing nuclear weapons (hell, the US didn't seem to care), but now he's killing the South Korean recording industry? For shame.
the industry chose litigation over innovation...
i think we know how this one ends...
All the torrents you could want.
Music retailers are middlemen. They add exactly no value to the merchandise they sell. So when you make distribution cheap and easy (like buying direct on Amazon, or Itunes, etc), OF COURSE the middlemen are going to suffer. Thus is the nature of structure unemployment.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I used to work for Personics.
n et .music.idg/
Late 1980s they worked out a way to allow people to have professionally made audio tapes made up out of whatever single tracks they wanted from a large catalog. It involved a CD jukebox with compression that allowed cutting audio tapes at 8x or so - a 60 minute tape would run out in 10 minutes or less and all the gear to do this was at the record shop.
Detailed auditing tracked per-song revenue and royalties.
The music business deliberately killed this off in order to max out full album sales.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9805/26/inter
http://www.betagroupllc.com/1st-personics.html
In this and a ton of other ways, they crippled innovation.
They're now paying the price.
Are "professional" song writers that make their primary living as artists a thing of the past? If South Korea is any indication, the answer is YES...
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Is this really a problem or just a natural progression?
Well, much depends on if you are a Korean music retailer or not.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
But I think the intriguing part is not the situation in Korea itself as much as the reaction to it in the US.
I just read in Business Week that the US slipped from number three --I'm pretty sure we're talking raw numbers rather than percentages-- to number ten in global broadband rankings. It's not altogether impossible that this decline is going to get worse rather than better in the near term.
And if it doesn't, if something like Wi-Max suddenly turns things around, then it could be even more interesting. Let's hope it's the latter rather than the former. But even then, there would be reprecussions for a rather large number of corporations beyond just music.
in my town, the old horse & cart transports have died out too. Is this because of high-speed road access and a youth culture that uses some of the most sophisticated automobiles available?
Or is it just because there is a better way of doing things?
Old industries die and new ones come along. Of course the dying industries aren't happy about it, but the only way is forward...
"About 95 percent of music retail businesses in the country have failed in the last five years."
"Since the launch of these sites, domestic CD sales have nose-dived by nearly 50 percent."
And they come from a credible unbiased source.
"It was two years ago when Seoul music store owner Jang Kyung-hee"
Personally, I'd like to see percentages of CD sales broken down by speciality music stores, big box stores (whatever is their equivalent of Walmart), local online shopping malls, and foreign shopping malls (such as iTunes). There are many factors that could be affecting these stats.
Let's see I can:
1. Get in my car, drive through traffic to get to the mall, find parking, and then go to my retail music store.
2. Once there, I can manually browse the racks for a while in hopes that the cd I want is there.
3. If there, I can now buy it for $14
4. If not there, I can ask the salesman to order it for me, or just come back next week.
5. Drive back home, through traffic, and put said CD in my player. Hopefully it will work also on my computer without any DRM scheme in the way.
OR....
I can
1. Not leave the house, and sit at my computer in my bathrobe.
2. Search for a song online, from as many bands as I want and know that they're there. And only get the songs I want, not being forced to buy the whole album.
3. Download said music, in a fraction of the time it would take to drive anywhere.
4. Listen to it on every one of my music devices
5. Pay or not pay for it as I see fit.
Hmmm... I'm thinking this new-fangled music download thing goes in the "trend" category.
"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The
sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into
account, the sooner people will start making money again."
-- Bruce Schneier
From TFA: "These days, cellphone handset sales are the biggest source of profit for us," Jang said.
So they have realized.
But then: ``the future of music retailers looks particularly bleak since they also face cut-throat competition from online shopping malls.''
Well, looks like their business model is too last century. That's how the cookie crumbles. Innovate or degrade.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If "95% of the music retailers have failed", it could be because of foreign concurrence or simply because there were 20 x too many of them.
anyway, the FUD part of this announcement should also be considered.
I know which conclusions people want us to draw.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
People listen more and more music through small portable [mp3|ogg|wma|whatever]players, and not directly from a cd player anymore. Thus cds need to be converted to a format that can be listened to. With copy protected cds that is impossible, or at least harder than downloading. The cds aren't usable anymore, so they're not bought.
In high tech countries like Korea and Japan, this is felt first. In more countries this effect will be noticed soon, I expect.
the pun is mightier than the sword
Although the Korean retail business is miniture in comparison to Japan's (page 13 of this document), you've got to consider things like the ring-back, or caller-tune market (explained here and here) which have quickly grown into a $100 million market, showing that if you move in tune with technology you can make profits...
"...Check out, for example, the Asylum Street Spankers...."
This sounds disconcertingly like a product of the band name generator
T&K.
Political language
"CD sales at Jang's Mihwadang Records, once one of the 10 biggest music retail chains in the country, dropped by two-thirds in just two years. Jang now devotes more shelf space to digital appliances, including MP3 players or mobile phones."
I bet Jang isn't forcing his customers to buy the vinyl that they used to need to replace after scratching them, either. If only the record labels would stop fighting voluntary blanket licenses for song sharing, that they allow for lucrative radio royalties, they might survive to distribute content to Jang's new wares. But it looks like instead they're just roadkill on the Infobahn.
--
make install -not war
I mean that seriously too. Pretty much all the studies that have shown that downloaders don't buy more music were sponsored by the RIAA or the companies doing them had it in their best interest to get results that would make the RIAA member companies happy. Whether the results are accurate or not is irrelevant, when there's potential for bias you have to look at them as possibly incorrect. On the other side many of the folks who have found the opposite are sometimes motivated to want that result, or at least the RIAA will claim so. In some cases they're right, in others they're not but it's hard to always know which are which so you have to treat most of those as possibly incorrect.
What's that leave us? I bunch of wasted time to produce studies that we have to be skeptical of. Frankly we'll never really know the answer, we'd need alternate universes/timelines to experiment in to really come anywhere near proving it either way. Even then I wouldn't be surprised if we could prove both camps right, but it'd only apply in those alternate universes/timelines.
What IS definite is that music sales are down, downloading is at least steady if not growing and lawsuits flying right and left have had no real effect on those download numbers. Frankly it should be obvious to everyone that something is going to have to change to fix this. Perhaps compulsury licensing is the answer, perhaps something new we've not heard of is (DRM isn't going to stop it though), but whatever the answer is pointing fingers and trying to place blame (on both sides) will not help find it. Granted the RIAA seems to be the worst offender here, but /. alone has its share of "information wants to be free, no one should pay for music" supporters.
It'd be nice to see everyone to just sit down and find a solution, unfortunately the RIAA is probably the least likely to take part so a solution is likely still far away.
Good god, how awful of our loyal customers to abandon our stores for the same product sold cheaper and with less hassle elsewhere. Let's hope the government bails out our failing model of selling.
So the answer is simple, make it easier and cheaper for people to buy in your store than online...or face bankruptcy.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
- in a store, where they might not carry what I am looking for, or the CD I want is out of stock, where I have to ask the store clerk for every single CD I'd like to listen to, and where those same clerks often are distinctly un-knowledgable about music.
- or, on the Internet, where I can buy music legally by the song (and at a better price as well), where they pretty much carry everything on-line, and where I can browse to my heart's content without leaving my house?
It was bound to happen, and it's only natural that the first business to be affected is the one dealing in stuff that is essentially non-physical. I think other retailers must be beginning to feel the on-line competition as well... on line purchasing is way up for physical goods suchs as toys, clothes and electronics, and these are all purchases taken away from physical shops.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If thats natural progression, then outsourcing is a natural progression too...
Serious music won't. I don't know anyone who uses downloading/P2P for classical or jazz. There are a lot of smaller labels out there that do a very good, serious, professional job of packaging their CDs for a discerning audience; and a lot of discerning people who buy their stuff. That's why chains like Harmonia Mundi in France are doing fine. As Harmonia Mundi's founder Bernard Coutaz points out (scroll to bottom), the audience is there and growing, and concert goers regularly buy CDs: it's the big labels who are failing to reach out to such customers. Me, I'm happy if the generic Tower Records crashes and burns, give me the small guy who actually knows his stuff. As for South Korea, dunno -- maybe they don't have enough of a market for that kind of thing, they're dominated by the MTV crowd?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I don't know about you but I *LIKE* going around a music store and browsing. Whats the alternative , driving for an hour to the warehouse and climbing over the shelves? Not everyone likes mailorder and lets face it , online retail is nothing more than an electronic sears catalogue that my granny used to buy her knickers from 3 decades ago. I *LIKE* shops , and for some geek like you to say they add no value shows how out of touch you are with a large percentage of humanity.
People want music to be free as in speech. I don't think that there are many people who are opposed to paying people the cost of developing some form of information + reasonable profits. The problem is that it is forced upon them. The cost, hassle, and risk of paying, and of restricting freedom afterwards, exceeds the value the creator gets.
Unlike material assets, which have value by themselves, copyright is a government imposed monopoly, created to ensure that creators of works get an incentive to create above those who merely distribute. However, now there are also too many greedy middlemen(RIAA et. al. members), and the total cost paid by the users of the information is far in excess of the costs of production, plus reasonable profit. Governments should therefore be stepping in to ensure most of the money goes to the creators, and that copyright monopoly only lasts until the creator receives the cost of production plus reasonable profit.
X-Has-Sig: yes
Yes, it sucks for them. However, the problem with all this "sympathy" that's going around is that people start believing that they somehow deserve to be saved from their failure and start supporting the kind of laws (e.g. INDUCE) that turn a free society into a police state. The reality is that market forces (i.e. supply and demand) will prevail, regardless of regulation to prevent it, but that it's very possible to destroy society in the process.
In other words, sympathy is dangerous.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and not just gloating? The RIAA what this guy's saying loud and clear. They know what they are (middleman) and they know they're largely unecesary now. But so what? It's 2004 and us here in the US still have an Electoral College, right? Those of us in the US know those middlemen are busy figuring out how to screw us, and so far they're doing a damn fine job. They bought up mp3.com, and shut down successful bands that weren't in a hurry to sign nasty contracts (way too lazy to look that up right now, and I'm sure it's all 'alleged' and crap, but there where several band that got taken off mp3.com w/o reason around the time of the buyout).
Oh, and they do nasty stuff like witholding support from Rob Halford's solo career so he'll team back up with Priest (and make them lots more money). Then there's King Diamond, who's got a successful album but can't get money to tour. He's blaming mp3s, meanwhile not notice who's really fscking him over.
So you'll forgive me if I don't cry a river for these guys. Maybe I'm mistaken, and the South Korean industry are all music loving saints (dountful, but stranger things have happended). Meanwhile, I'd say good riddence, but I'm a pessimist and I don't think they're going anywhere.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Something a lot of the rich techno geeks on this forum forget is that not everyone has a PC (I'm speaking generally , not just about Korea), never mind broadband. Just because YOU can download a whole album in 5 minutes onto your top of range PC then download it into the iPod mummy and daddy bought for your birthday doesn't mean everyone has that option. For some people a cheap CD ghetto blaster is as good as it gets and I know some people who still listen to tapes.
So how about some people move out of this bleedin edge mindset and realise that not everyone on this planet is part of the wired generation.
... and although that is admittedly a long time ago, at least 95% of the music I saw on sale was in the form of copied cassettes with shoddilly photocopied covers.
In fact I still have two of these tapes going strong now (and before anyone whines about me being a pirate, I also own legitimate copies thereof).
Now, I don't know whether it was just the shops I was going to, but it seemed there was a cultural predilection for fake stuff - which is just being amplified heavily by the ease of broadband access.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
While this may be true, are you seriously suggesting that a digital copy of music recording (a string of zeros and ones) is a thing ?
I don't know. Are you serously suggesting that anything which can be represented digitally is NOT a thing?
I'm not sure what's more frightening: DRM and copy controls, or the public attitudes that make them necessary.
Governments should therefore be stepping in to ensure most of the money goes to the creators, and that copyright monopoly only lasts until the creator receives the cost of production plus reasonable profit.
Just wondering... what do you earn?
Whatever figure you reply with, I'm willing to bet that it's not "reasonable" profit. I'm, in fact, sure that you're overpaid. The government should step in and make sure that you're paid less - after all, I certainly don't consider what you get paid to be reasonable.
The "they're making more money than I want them to" argument is really really stupidly lame.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
You must be living in a dream world. South Korea is widely known to be the world's leader in p2p filesharing. It only makes sense that the content middleman industries would suffer as a result of that, copy protection or not. Why pay for what you can get for free, especially when the practice is so commonplace that it's not considered "bad"?
Unless you can show that a higher percentage of South Korean CDs are copy protected compared with North America or Europe, you've got no argument.
501 Not Implemented
People want music to be free as in speech. I don't think that there are many people who are opposed to paying people the cost of developing some form of information + reasonable profits.
Hell no.
None of the guys who I know who are downloading music from internet is doing it as an expression of the desire for the free speech.
They do it because they don't want to pay for it.
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I've long been torn between whether or not p2p is ethical to me or not, its a very hard debate. but , after reading a post here, i'm really interested in what music would be like if gigantic labels lost alot of money and eventually become non-existant...is it possible that p2p would lead to only true music where the artist loved his craft, or is p2p just something that has spawned off people's desire to want everything for free (because hell, we pay enough for other things in life)
i believe that if p2p leads to the complete destruction of the music industry and all its corporations, that only true artists who really love their craft and care nothing about fame will be dominant and music and life (because my life mirrors the music I listen to) will be wonderful.
Obviously, everyone likes to get things free. It's obvious that if given the choice between paying $0 and paying ANY amount over that, people will choose $0 more likely than not.
I think it's time everyone woke up, including content creators such as musicians and movie makers, and took a long and realistic look at the way information is shared, today. They will realize that people sharing their intellectual "property" for free is truly inevitable.
All the efforts and money put into tracking pirates and creating new protection schemes, should be used into figuring out a way to still be able to sell people something they cannot get online. Sharing information will not stop. I think the question of whether it is immoral, illegal, or unethical is moot at this point. It will not be stopped and if you look closely, the new generations have even less and less inhibitions when it comes to "piracy".
Now, I wonder this: How will an artist born in a generation where he knows all his works can be traded for free, at any time, feel about it? Right now, most artists and publishers are complaining because they have seen the golden days, but what about the new kind of artist that is born knowing that he will most likely not be compensated monetarily for simply making a song?
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That's a great succinct response to "information wants to be free". I'm gonna remember that one.
Its a stupid answer to a stupid statement. Information cannot want anything because it is an abstract, inanimate concept. By responding that people want "things" for free to this nonsensical statement you add additional layer of stupidity by assuming that information is a "thing" (implying an object that can be bought/sold).
This is more insightful than it is funny. As long as I'm not directly hurt by X, X is an innovation and A Good Thing(tm). When X becomes harmful it quickly becomes a problem.
/awaits to be modded troll/flamebait
A fun exercise left to the reader:
1. Substitute X = filesharing
2. Substitute X = outsourcing
The business model is only failing currently because moral standards are failing. Show me when copyright infringement is near zero AND sales are still falling, THEN I will agree that the business model is failing because of its own merits.
What are you defining as "free?" Convenience? Quality? immediacy?
That damn Victoria's Secret commercial with the first few notes of "Monkey Man" got that song stuck in my head and last night I had to clear it out. Now, I lost virtually my entire MP3 collection about a month ago and have been able to restore only a tiny part of it, so it's not like I could just "click on the mp3." And while I have an LP of that album somewhere in my collection, I haven't had a turntable in years.
So I headed for easynews (not free: ten bucks a month). Believe it or not no one has posted that song in the last 22 days or so, so I had to pay for it. Now, did I go to one of the RIAA backed sites? No - I went to allofmp3.com. Why? Because the RIAA is fighting to lobby away my rights AND force me to subsidize their arrogance, so there's no way in hell they're US member is gonna get a penny. I settled for the lower quality (allofmp3's rip quality kinda sucks although the end product is still likely higher than the 128kbps crap from most US sites) and paid the Russians (who are NOT lobbying Washington to erode my rights) a dime for the track. Don't know how the BOM works but it's still likely whoever owns that album got paid - just a LOT less than if I bought from a US vendor.
Bottom line: it's not always about free, but it is now universally about freedom. In this case, the free market deprived the US industry of a buck while getting the Russians a dime. This happened for no other reason than the US entertainment industry has pissed me off to the point I refuse to support it.
God I love free trade...
I have a feeling that my feelings are likely felt by many Koreans and people just about everywhere. That feeling is that I just ain't paying $18 for a CD. It isn't WORTH $18 to me to listen to the VAST majority of music out there. It's simply overpriced. Instead I'll listen to the digital music channel I get as part of my cable subscription, the radio, or I may even soon get Sirius or XM radio as well.
I love music, I listen to lots of it, but I just can't bring myself to believe that $15 - $18 is a fair price for a CD of music, by ANYONE, I can count on one hand, maybe both, the number of CDs or cassettes (or records) that I own that I would listen to and think "hell yeah this is WORTH $18" and the rest are simply worth less and most if I had to buy them AGAIN for the retail price (that I paid for OH so many of them) I wouldn't repurchase them, no way.
I can go buy "most" new movies for $14.99 a few go $19.99 but as a rule of thumb I can pick up a movie for about $15 or I can rent it for $2 (actually I use Netflix religiously). This, to me, is a good enough deal that I buy quite a few movies, and rent quite a few more (via Netflix). Pirating movies to me is an absurd thought, why spend hours and hours downloading a crappy copy when I can just Netflix it? The same for music, if I could pick up a CD for $7-$9 I wouldn't bother pirating it it'd be WORTH it to me to get the pretty insert and a "real copy" of it. Alternatively I feel like 99 cents per track of music is a bit high too, your average CD is around 10-15 tracks and that makes some CDs more expensive to buy online than in the store, I've yet to buy a single song of online music, and probably won't unless it gets cheaper. When it hits about a quarter per song, maybe 50 cents, then I'll probably buy into it. Hey it probably never will, and I won't buy any music online, life goes on I suppose.
I put a "personal price point" on music at about $8 per cd. I hop on Amazon.com and pick up used CDs for $2-$7 all the time, I've bought dozens and dozens. I'll PAY that for a CD rather than pirate it, gladly. I support the artists by going to their concerts, and by listening to their music and by telling others "hey check out..." but I'm growing increasingly pissed off at the price of CDs and I haven't bought a CD off the shelf in... hmm 2 years now? Maybe more.
I for one will shed nary a tear to hear that the RIAA and the "big music" companies are hurting, evolution happens to us all. Better things come along, new ways of doing things, faster, cheaper, ways of doing things, and you adapt or die. Hello RIAA, meet the Dodo.
--- www.f-theocean.com
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I don't get paid due to a government imposed monopoly. Anyone else can apply for a job doing the same type of work as I do(if they have the correct skillset). If, due to government regulation, I was the only person in the country allowed to write software, you might have a point. But my employment is controlled by market economics.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't get paid, I am saying that the ability to repress someone else's freedom to distribute should not last after you have been paid reasonably for your creation. After that, you should still be allowed to distribute the work, but on the same terms as everybody else. The creator has been rewarded, and the price to end users of the information is controlled by market economics and will tend to the marginal cost of distribution(or less, if people are willing to distribute at a loss).
X-Has-Sig: yes
In Other News, the Horse Trough Industry Association moved today to criminalize the use of the automobile.
"Automobiles are infernal machines that stink, make noise and are cutting into our bottom line," Christopher Fisk, barrister for HTIA, said earlier this afternoon.
HTIA is pressing legislation to impose tough penalties on non-horsetrough users.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
This statement is not only irrelevant (information is not a "thing" and thus cannot be private property and thus being "owned" and thus gotten for "free") but also quite revealing of your attitude towards the universe: everything in yours has its price. Libertarian, are you?
Lets face it, we are in the information age. An age, where information doesn't need any resellers. Perhaps the resellers need to refocus on providing information themselves, instead of simply reselling information which can be found cheaper somewhere else. This 'problem' is going to spread around the world as internet access gets more widely spread, and gets cheaper and cheaper.
Listening to a studio album is very different thing from watching a live gig. I love live gigs, but they are not way interchangable with listening to an album, which is vastly more convenient.
Watching artists perfom and listening to their albums are complementary things (for the vast majority of people), not somehow in opposition. People don't get an album instead of seeing a gig, or vice versa.
What is more, if I'm listening to music at home/work/car/walking around I'll take the studio album almost every time over a live recording. I'm hardly unique, the music industry is right in this sense, people in general want studio albums much more than they want to see live gigs.
From the artists perspective you a largely right about the value. For many bands, they make bugger all from the albums as the record companies take their costs from the band's cut. From their point of view they are more to get people to come to the live shows where they make the money.
But the problem lies elsewhere.
There is a fundamental problem with copyright law applied to digital media. Copyright law is supposed to promote the arts, and in doing so, increase value for everybody -- artists and the public alike. It does this by granting a limited monopoly to the right of replication of the art. This encourages people to be creative.
(Note - IANAL, but I believe it should not allow artists or labels to "own" the music, just the right to copy and distribute the music. This is an important distinction; in the former case, the "owner" has many rights in addition to distribution.)
The problem is this: with modern technology distribution and replication are essentially free, but copyright law requires compensation for every copy, and publishers have kept that per-copy compensation relatively high. This generic problem applies to all kinds of information -- books, music, software, etc. It artificially restricts the amount of wealth produced.
In pre-internet days, there was substantial value in the physical product of books and CDs. The physical manifestation of the information is no longer necessary. That should have made prices decline, but mostly they haven't. Sure, buying an album through iTunes is cheaper than buying the CD, but the price difference is relatively small. And a lot of things (books, especially) simply are not available, or are only available in crippled DRM-encumbered formats.
Since media duplication and distribution is now cheap, it is easy to "create" a huge amount of wealth by giving everyone cheap (i.e. free) digital copies of any book or album they want. The drawback is that the artists and authors not compensated for these copies.
But really, should they be paid for every copy? If copyright is meant to benefit the public by promoting the arts, there must be a balance between compensating the artist and promoting dissemination of the art. In the past, the cost of physical media was at least comparable to the compensation, so this wasn't an issue. Now, the compensation is the only cost, and the balance is gone.
One possibility is to make digital copies "fair use." People will still buy CDs and books, and the authors can be compensated from sales of physical media. It obviously isn't a perfect solution, and I'm sure better schemes can be devised, but I think that the general idea has merit.
Copyright should benefit the public. Its purpose is to do so by granting limited compensation to artists and authors. However, the public can also benefit from cheap, free information flow. That was not technically possible before the internet, but it is possible now. Current copyright prevents that free flow and reproduction of data, and that does not benefit the public.
Copying information doesn't interfere with anybody, it doesn't destroy anything, it doesn't take anything away from anything.
That's why [ /me puts asbestos suit on ] capitalism is the best system for most "normal" goods and communism is the best system for most types of information.
Yeah, I said it, the "c"-word.
BTW, there are many things that are public or "communistic" in almost any country. Take the road net for instance - those goddamn communists allow just anybody to use them and they use taxes to build and maintain them. Wouldn't it be much better to have private road owners collect fees for using roads?
Or take police or military. Also public or "communistic".
There is no one-size-fits-all economic system. For most entities, the capitalistic system fits best, but there are a couple of entities where puplic just works better than private.
The Soviet Union failed because they tried to force the communistic system on everything. The USA better watch out that they don't make the same mistake in reverse.
Ideologists are morons. No matter if they are blind communists or blind capitalists.
Pedantry is the only modus operendi in dealing with legal scams like that of "Intellectual Property" or music "industry". Their entire base is a maze of skillfully crafted mis-directions, false definitions and lies.
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basically every company out there that involves itself in electronics is trying to incorporate music into their devices. Case in point: cellphones.
The Samsung SPH-S2300 comes with a built-in MP3 player, along with a mini-SD card, and its adapter for use as a regular SD card. Same goes with the Samsung SCH-V420, only with a Memory Stick Duo.
There is an on-demand cellphone-only portal called June by SK Telecom, the biggest carrier in Korea. June is host to numerous music files that subscribers can download to their cellphons for X number of days, and then watch it vanish. Hence, you see a lot of people with headphones that sprout from the phone as opposed to a different player.
In the end, it's all about the comfort level, having something when, where and how you want it. Some like to hold it in an iPod or some other capacity music player while others just want to listen to what the want, only for the time being.
The P2P distribution method is so compelling that it will win out -- even if it's illegal right now.
For Americans this might not be case. Let's keep in mind the way drug research is supported. Americans subsidize medicines for the entire world through high drug prices as well as the NIH grants that go to researchers in American universities. In the rest of the world the same medicines are available at much lower cost. In a parallel way, MPAA may keep US citizens from using P2P, but the rest of us will get it for free.
Even though Amazon will ship old Bogart films practically anywhere in the world, the fact is that any Bogart film ever made can be easily downloaded on eMule by anyone on the Internet. As someone in Eastern Europe right now, I am certain the P2P global availability will break the back of MPAA/RIAA.
Either you agree with the notion of property rights or you don't, but it's ridiculous to think that there's any difference between "intellectual" property and "physical" property. Programmers think that the latter is harder to steal, but most street criminals (who don't know who to use a computer) would think the former...
Bjork has a new CD out. Now, I dearly love bjork. You could quite honestly say I am a "fan" - you could even say I am somewhat obsessed with her work. And I have multiple usenet accounts which I frequently employ so as to keep up with my favorite tv shows (bad reception and rural living means tivo is useless to me). It would be trivial to add a pretty high quality rip of bjork's latest CD to my download folder. However:
I don't have a jacket to fondle - with that cool picture of her nearly topless and wearing what looks almost like S&M gear. Is there more inside? I don't know.
Her latest release is actually a DVD with 5.1 sound, two channel PCM sound, and video interviews. While I might be able to download all this stuff as a high quality ISO of the DVD (which would cost me a large percentage of the bandwidth I pay ten bucks a month for), if I do so I still...
I don't have the liner notes to read as I listen, nor do I have the satisfaction of knowing I gave Bjork my further support in the only way I can (at least until she realizes I'm alive and comes to live with me forever in my modest country home) - by giving her some money.
And so my download experience becomes significantly less fulfilling than were I to order the meatspace stuff and wait for its delivery. While there's a small chance I might not like the release at all, the fact is I "just want it because it's Bjork." And, as they say, it's never like the first time again.
So, I go to bjork.com, fill out a form, and wait...
When will the horror end?
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If, due to government regulation, I was the only person in the country allowed to write software, you might have a point. But my employment is controlled by market economics.
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And so is the music industry. Prices go all over the place. The government protection that you're complaining about isn't the same as saying that no one else can compete with you. It's the equivilant of saying that your boss can't take your work and then say, "I only feel that you're worth half of what you're supposed to get paid." You're free to buy music from people who sell it cheaply (if you live anywhere near an urban area, there's plenty of talented local musicians who'll sell you their CD for $5) or even give it away for free via mp3 or what-have-you. But if you want someone specific's music, pay what they ask for it. It's that simple.
Which is why radio stations do so well.
People get that music as a 128kbps quality mp3 for free over the radio waves from their favorite radio station. Another reason why sattelite radio is failing miserably. (Yes, it is, both providers are hurting bad right now.) And why P2P music is thriving.
I love mp3's but I PAY to get them as high quality by buying the CD used and ripping it with lame with a -q0 setting at 192 fixed bitrate and normalized or even higher VBR if I will not be using it in my portable.(I did not jump on the ipod bandwagon)
if I could download high quality mp3's and pay for them I certianly would. (magnatune!) but what is availabe from itunes and the others is low quality compared to what I am making myself from the CD recording.
All the kids at my daughter's junior high all laugh and make fun of the RIAA piracy is E-V-I-L posters and talks they get with the remark, "If it
's on the radio for free why do they care?". So their attemts to brainwash the kids in the schools is failing as well as are the software people. I see kids borrowing each other's "sims" modules every day.
Until the companies start educating people and telling them in PLAIN LANGUAGE that the CD's they "own" they do not own, or print on the package and in advertising "SIGN A LEASE CONTRACT TODAY" instead of "OWN IT TODAY" people will continue to feel they "OWN" that music, game, or movie.
It is their fault by telling people to go out and buy it so they can OWN their copy right away.
I personally wish they would start pressing that non-ownership concept on the public. It would DEVISTATE sales overnight and wake up the public to the reality that they un-aware of.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Which h is at its core false. The question is framed by those who wish you to make assumptions such as: information can be "free", thus conversly it can also have a "price" and then before you can blink the entire mountain of "Intellectual Property" rubbish is balanced on this assumption.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the first entry, notice in particular:
Also see the idiomatic usage found after that entry.
Do you believe in contract law?
If you and I agree to do something, and write that down and sign it, should that - assuming some larger overriding principles are true - be enforceable?
This no longer applies if you do record your performance and attempt to get machinery (owned by someone else) perform (based on a plastic disk owned by someone else) your performance (using energy, delivery of which someone else paid for) for you and you get paid anyways. Often expecting to get paid orders of magnitude compared to actually performing the labour. There is a name for this: a scam.
So you're saying the creative effort in composing and mastering music is absolutely worthless and can't be sold? Well, in that case, writers are scammers as well -- attempting to get machinery (printers, owned by the publisher) perform (based on bound leaves of paper owned by someone else) your performance (requiring a source of ambient light, which often costs energy to deliver) for you and you get paid anyways. You're right, bookwriters should only get paid for telling their stories live...because that's *such* an economical way to provide the service.
Get real, the only way you could be arguing this point is if you were playing devil's advocate (which is fine by me, but considered trolling in some circles), because if you honestly believe in it, you're just not putting enough thought into it.
You know you've lost it when you begin signing physical documents with =^_^=
And herein lies the rub: they are not. Information does not have the required physical properties to be "private property" nor "labour" (or action) and thus is entirely outside traditional economic considerations. The only type of contract that could be drawn is one obligating one party to maintain information in one of its fundamental states: known or unknown. One could swear secrecy for example. Unfortunately this is entirely impossible to apply to enterntainment because the objective of a broadcaster/distributor is to disseminate information and thus break the secrecy. The consumer cannot be required to work for the music company in guarding the secrecy, even if one ignores the fact that the very medium on which the information is disseminated (air vibrations) is not conducive to secrecy.
If they thought there was value in it, they'd be extracting that value right now. Yes, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk will survive, but lots of lesser artists won't. Last I checked, I couldn't even find Don Pullen's "Ode to life" or his last, posthumous album, "Sacred common ground", both released by Blue Note in the 1990s to excellent reviews.
I listen to my music on a non-linear device that doesn't get bigger when my music collection does.
I store my music on my computer and/or iPod.
I'm supposed to buy my music on a linear medium, find physical storage space for all of the albums I own, and manually transfer every CD I own or will want to own to my computer?
Something about this model seems fundamentally wrong. The RIAA needs to make a paradigm shift that acknowledges that you can sell non physical goods and make a profit.
If I'm going to rip my CD to MP3 anyway, why should they bother selling me the CD, it's no less copyable than an MP3, and after a lifetime of collecting music, I won't have to worry about replacing my old CD's with whatever the next generation medium is, like we did with LP's in the mid 80's.
The movie industry will face this same challenge in another 10 years when technology makes DVD's obsolete, and I can download an HD quality movie in minutes and burn it to whatever medium is popular, or upload it to my media center in seconds.
You know, waaay back in 1787 Thomas Jefferson was against copyright (and "intellectual property" in general) entirely. He only reluctantly agreed to put copyright privilages in after Madison convinced him that there was little possibility for abuse, beacuse there was no "powerful few" back then:With today's corporatism and powerful cartels (e.g. RIAA, MPAA, BSA), it seems that Madison's premise is no longer valid. Therefore, copyright itself is no longer morally justified, and should be abolished!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Even without any P2P or illeagal copying, retailers of music will be the first to go.
People will buy mp3's or CD's though the net.
And when they start to really get fed up with the price of it all, they will start buying music from cheaper unsigned artists or will look for artist who are just giving it away.
This industry will crash.
When I look at the current litagation by RIAA, I see a man trapped in a swamp. Stuggeling makes it worse.
The only type of contract that could be drawn is one obligating one party to maintain information in one of its fundamental states: known or unknown.
That's untrue.
You and I can draw a legal contract based only on common law that says you shall not replay to an audience greater than one my works.
Unfortunately this is entirely impossible to apply to enterntainment because the objective of a broadcaster/distributor is to disseminate information and thus break the secrecy.
Wrong. Exclusivity contracts are rampant, everyday, regular old things. You may share this information with X and ONLY X people. All kinds of online databases use this premise.
The consumer cannot be required to work for the music company in guarding the secrecy, even if one ignores the fact that the very medium on which the information is disseminated (air vibrations) is not conducive to secrecy.
That's absurd, and you just made that up.
If you believe that two people can make a legal agreement that is not in-itself illegal on the face, then you must by extension believe that fundamentally individuals ought to have dominion over thier creative works. That's the bottom line. They are linked, permanently.
The quote in the submission contains a statement that directly blame it on high-speed internet and gadgets... where is the evidence here? where's the primary data of the research that would prove that those with high-speed internet access and gadgets would buy less music than those without, in a way that would explain this drop?
Your comparison would only hold some sway if all the music stores in South Korea had opened within the last five years.
To put it in slightly different terms, if the country of Fictionalistan had an 80% infant mortality rate, then it's still really big news if 95% of the people named Pete died in a five year period. Same thing as with the South Korean music stores.
Piracy isn't theft, as you aren't taking anything. It is, however, akin to fare dodging (off peak). If you dont buy a train ticket, the train will still run. It doesn't cost anyone anything extra (the added fuel needed because of your addedmass is negligable).
Trouble is, if everyone does it, the train doesnt make any money and then it wont run. Everyone loses.
Of course, some trains will still run out peaoples love of driving trains, but theres no guarentee it wil go when and where you need it.
Keep in mind S. Korea is a relatively new democracy. I can point out Kwangju Diary as a flashpoint in its evolution, and you can see how things have pretty much progressed from there. What does this have to do with music retailers dying out? Well, look at the S Korean release of The Cult's "Love", and you'll note the song "Revolution" is missing. It was banned by the government. However, the song is freely available online. As well as a bunch of other songs, news, and info. You can't keep people in the dark if they don't want to be. If you want that song, what is your source? Congratulations, you just broke the copyright by working your way around an artificial control. The situation with the RIAA/copyright isn't much different. Putting aside the whole copyright issue, it becomes a simple case of supply and demand. You have an infinite supply on P2P networks, and a worldwide demand of internet users. How is this so fucking hard to understand? You either integrate with the standing technology or you die. You can't stand on your molehill and demand all the technology be revised to suit your specific demands (well, unless you got one damn good lobbying group). Put the onus on the content providers. Let them come up with their uncrackable format. Let them come up with their proprietary players. Hell, let them come up with there own internet. See how long they last. You want music on the web? You want music in a digital format? Well, you're gonna have to compromise. Just don't expect everyone else to be stupid enough to buy in to your outrage over file sharing compared to their outrage of paying $18 a pop. And try getting a copy of Ratticus past US customs. Information does indeed want to be free.
I think there's a proportion of downloaders who would pay, but just not to the RIAA. I'd certainly want to pay the artist directly.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
South Korean Music Retailers Dying
I've got to admit - I thought this was going to be a story about hitmen wacking small business owners in some new untraceable way that made it look like natural causes.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
i understand that the actual product "value"(in economic terms) doesn't change, but i think that where a product is has something to do with it's value to the consumer. A product that sits in large warehouses is of little benifit to the consumer. Therefore, a store owner does add some apparent value to the product, by placing it in a location that the average consumer is able to locate and purchase. just my two cents. And yes, the last time i took economics was 10 years ago, so it's a little fuzzy, but i always thought economics was fuzzy math anyways.