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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
...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.
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...
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.
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...
"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.
Mozart never sold a single record in his lifetime, nor did Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, etc. etc.
If you want to go back to the patronage model, please, feel free to stump up the money to do so yourself.
You might want to learn how classical musicians were paid. Although it sounds like you might be surprised to find out that yes, indeed, they were paid.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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?
Well, looks like their business model is too last century. That's how the cookie crumbles. Innovate or degrade.
When evolving marketplace dynamics make the RIAA business model unprofitable, that's just fine with slashdotters.
When evolcing marketplace dynamics make it unprofitable to hire programmers in the U.S., slashdotters are up in arms, demanding government intervention.
Hmm, I wonder why the discrepancy?
"[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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We can go back to the patronage model. In fact, unsigned bands already use it! Their patrons are the fans who pay to see their concerts, buy their T-shirts, and/or donate to them via their website. It's distributed patronage, but patronage nonetheless. Which makes sense, really, considering that back in the day there were no free distribution methods to get music to the masses like there are now.
Besides, there's also folk music and street performers -- it's not as if we'll somehow be deprived of culture, even if every professional musician on the planet never made another cent.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Why? There is nothing inherently wrong with patronage model, its merely different and more appropriate for arts then the "assembly line/distributor/widget sales" model. Unlike the latter, the former does not require treating information as it were physical property with all of the logic/legal nonsense that approach produces (all the way down to ownership of DNA sequences). Instead, artists/scientists get paid and the resulting art/science/information is for all to share. The only thing to work out is the mechanisms for patronage. Remember, art is not business or "industry" (a most annoying lie). It is a way for an artists to express himself/herself. The commercial side-effects are just that, and might not occur at all in many cases, it is no accident that many artists before this kitsch-mass-production nonsense were indeed working at other jobs. Ever heard of a "starving artiste"? I cant believe people have become so brainwashed by the media moguls to believe otherwise.
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
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
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?
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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.
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.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10