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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?"
the industry chose litigation over innovation...
i think we know how this one ends...
All the torrents you could want.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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