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Record Store Owners Blame RIAA For Destroying Music Industry
techdirt writes "It's not like it hasn't been said many times before, but it's nice to see the NY Times running an opinion piece about the RIAA from a pair of record store owners which basically points out how at every opportunity, the RIAA has made the wrong move and made things worse: 'The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it's not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.' It's not every day that you see a NY Times piece use the word 'boneheadedness' to describe the strategy of an organization."
FTA:
"Meanwhile, the recording industry association continues to give the impression that it's doing something by occasionally threatening to sue college students who share their record collections online. But apart from scaring the dickens out of a few dozen kids, that's just an amusing sideshow."
Threatening to sue? Has the NY Times not noticed that they actually ARE suing a bunch of people? I think the amount of time and money that has been spent in courtrooms over actual lawsuits is a little more than "just an amusing sideshow."
I dislike the RIAA as much as the next guy, but I just couldn't help noticing that this article downplays the RIAA lawsuits quite a bit...it's not like they're not doing anything, they're just doing the WRONG things.
I don't know. Websites like last.fm which not only can expose you to unknown music but it can also tell you when they are coming to town, let you meet up with other people also attending the concert. Last.fm is what the record store used to be. Even though RIAA probably killed the industry, last.fm is showing how online music can be done and done correctly by keeping things open.
On that note, I hope they don't get bought out by some record label. I think it is important that they use their market power and grow themselves into a force for change in the record industry similar to what Apple has been doing with iTunes.
sri
Did they actually stock cds that weren't mainstream? Did they try to make that the thrust of their business? Myabe it's just me, but most record stores try to make the process of buying music(or hell, discovering new music) as bland as expensive as possible. If I want a bland environment with tons of mainstream music I can go to Best Buy and get better prices. If record store owners want to survive, they are going to have to move to where iTunes/Best Buy/WalMart doesn't tread because there is no WAY they can compete with them on price. They need to actively encourage local bands and make sure they have plenty of indie artists and staff who actually listen to the music and can talk enthusiastically about them. Otherwise, what is the point of paying the premium for the record store?
Monstar L
I understand why the people who owned the store near your campus were bitter, but I think TFA provides a good counterargument. The downloaders didn't drive them out of business; the sickness in the music industry did, and a good portion of that sickness can be traced directly to the RIAA. If it hadn't been for the RIAA's stupidity, downloaded music and music bought on CD could have found a way to peacefully coexist. Now, it's too late.
A whole hell of a lot of working people with families, throughout the music industry, are going to lose their jobs over the next decade or two until this shakes out. The Recording Industry Association of America could have prevented this. Instead, they've done -- and continue to do -- their best to make it inevitable. Yeah, the store owners' anger is understandable, but it's aimed at the wrong target.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Bullshit.
I do not own an iPod. I buy CD's. I rip the CD's and listen to them on my computer.
But I rarely buy any newer artists. And as was mentioned in the article, I don't buy ANOTHER "greatest hits" collection CD. If I buy something now, it is probably directly from the artist or at a used CD store.
There is too much crap and not enough substance coming from the RIAA now. They've done this to themselves. And it is the RIAA that is killing the smaller stores.
Here's the problem with your assessment of this anecdote.
Technology has increased the efficiency of distributing information. Music is information too. Because the old model based on physical media transfer is being overtaken, there's less overhead. Of course, this means that there's less pie to go around. People and organizations by necessity need to leave the industry or to accept the fact that they're going to get a smaller share if they remain in. Or, like the RIAA, they can try to maintain their share at the expense of everyone else.
This is the same issue that the Luddites could not come to terms with. Greater efficiency means less work to be done. Less work necessitates fewer employees and/or smaller wages. Instead of coming to terms with the reality and exploring other lines of work, they decided to resort to destruction of property to maintain the status quo.
I used to be a music lover - I still am, in a way. But 10 years ago, one of my standard weekend occupations was a trip to Tower Records. There, I would buy 5-6 CDs of classical music. I would listen to them all, return a couple of them or so (I often bought the same piece played by different interpreters / orchestras, returning interpretations I found less interesting), and get 5-6 more CDs, and so on and so forth, a visit every other weekend on average.
Then came mp3's and copying. But I didn't do it. I liked having the albums - for some classical music, the booklet is interesting - and more than that, I didn't have the kind of time required to copy all the CDs I wanted to have. It was beautifully simple - buy, listen, return a few and buy many more. Money was not a problem, as I worked and I didn't have kids at the time. I didn't (and don't) have a TV - what harm there was in spending $40 / week for something I loved? It was below my threshold of attention.
But then Tower started to decline returns. That very day, I stopped buying CDs, and in the intervening years, I must have bought 10 of them in total - mostly folkloristic music I bought while traveling. I simply could not put up with the idea of plunging $18 to try a new interpretation of a Missa by Bach - and not being able to return it if I didn't like it.
So I stopped buying music altogether. I don't copy it either, because I still don't have a lot of time. Rather, other hobbies - digital photography, then kids, then other things still - gradually replaced the space music had in my life.
It is sad, but I am still young, and who knows, perhaps I will live again through an era where I can easily browse through all the interpretations of the Zauberflute, listen to them, and buy them at top quality.
So in my case, the music industry lost a customer, due purely to their fear of piracy.
Fair enough, but the point was that they couldn't get into this business, even if it existed, because piracy (and I doubt that their claim is substantively false) intervened. It doesn't matter what you have for sale - if somebody is giving it away for free and there are no consequences, you will lose. I see nothing wrong with the subway going out of business because somebody invents a faster and more comfortable bus. I do see a giant problem with the subway going out of business because massive numbers of people decide that using fake tokens or jumping the turnstile is morally ok because the subway pollutes, is occasionally late, and is a giant impersonal organization that pays its drivers only a relatively small percentage of its total revenue.
Radio stations were so bad for so long that people stopped
listening to the -primary- venue for new groups and songs and
just listened to the old stuff. People stopped getting excited
about new groups and new alblums and stopped buying.
And now Radio cant come back because the quality is so bad
compared with what they are used to listening to now.
A business who didn't know its market and felt they were entitled to a constant flow of profit went out of business. I have a hard time finding any more sympathy for a small business that doesn't understand its customer base than I do for the RIAA.
I occaisionally buy CD's, but I generally just cycle through the 300+ CD's my wife and I already have. If I find a new artist that I like, I want them to keep making good music, so I buy their stuff. There's any number of reasons for the declined in sales, but most of them come down to not catering to their audience. I don't buy music online because I don't like the idea of DRM. I can bypass the copy protection and make MP3's from the CDs I buy, so I have no problem putting stuff I want on my MP3 player. I haven't downloaded music as a mooch for many years. If I'm not willing to support an artist, why would I waste my time listening to their crap?
Better quality subscription based radio stations are probably also a notable contributor to this trend. If I cared enough about my commute noise to want something better than the 6 stations and 5 CD's in my car, I'd probably do the same as you.
"to all the people that download music, if you think you are only hurting big companies you are wrong. There are two working people with families who no longer have jobs because of music piracy."
It's not *just* music pirates responsible for the closure of stores such as this one.
People like me, who see no value in having a CD, but legally purchase their music from online sources contribute as well.
Why should I pay $13+ for a CD, when I can spend $10 and not have to waste gas going to the store, fight traffic and crowds, and risk the possibility that what I want may not be in stock anyway?
Almost all of the NY Times is an op-ed piece these days. They're just not all labeled as such.
That said, this particular piece was excellent. Although a bit sad, it makes me hopeful that the 12 or so great musicians/bands of the last 40 years that were actually pushed by the major labels will still find fans online, and that the thousands of artist who are just as good but I've never heard of will be able to make a living that way too.
And that I'll be able to find them much more easily.
I think the end result will be that this is the best thing that could have happened to popular music. If you're not a 13 year old girl, or a 45 year old girl with the same taste in music that you had since you were 13, the RIAA companies produced very little of value to you anyway.
Good riddance.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
As another business owner, I think I know one big reason why your business is failing... You also forgot who your customer is... What right do you have to tell that kid what he can and cant do because of a major flaw your industries business model? This kid is only doing what makes sense to most logically minded individuals that just paid >= $15 for an album. If your industry charged $2 for that album, do you honestly think that anyone would bother the pain of burning it?
What your industry should have done is realised that the individual "value" of your product was going down and reduced your prices accordingly to compete. That is what the rest of us do. They didnt, because they (indluding you) forgot that you serve the customer music... You are not the gatekeeper of music.. Those days are over... The internet is not your competitor.
Also, do not pitty me with your "loose the house" crap. As another business owner, I completely understand this risk, and it is part of being a business owner. It is not societies responsability to prop up a failing industry that is committing suicide. It is dieing and either you change with it or go broke. Oh, and I have a little advice for you since you dont seem to have gotten it yet... Get the heck out of selling music CDs... Close the doors, lick your wounds, and move on. No move or lawsuit is going to save you...
Unfortunately it's not illegal downloads that killed that store. My reasons for not going to a music store:
- The prices are too high for what I want. Not much the store can do about that. But whatever the reasons are, whatever the store can or can't do about it, it simply isn't worth it to me to pay the price of a full CD when there's only 1 or 2 tracks on it that I actually like. I want to pay, but given the other demands on my wallet I can't justify paying that much per song.
- What I want isn't on the shelf. I want individual songs. All the store can get are albums. When again exactly was the customer expected to buy what they don't want just because the RIAA doesn't want to sell what the customer wants?
- What I want isn't available. I want my music in digital form, in a format where I can not have to worry about whether or not it'll play on all my equipment, where I won't have to worry about headaches moving it between places I've a legal right to use it.
- I can't take the risks legitimate stuff exposes me to. From incompatible DRM modules to Sony's flat-out rooting my machine and exposing it to every black-hat out there, too many legitimate CDs are an unacceptable risk to the stability and security of my computers for me to be able to risk putting them into my drive. And if I can't play the CD where I most often want to, why bother buying it?
That's more than enough reasons for me to not bother patronizing a music store anymore, and we haven't even gotten to the lack of variety in what many stores carry. Try finding KISS's original albums, let alone albums from the 40s and 50s.Oh, excuse me, I don't seem to have mentioned piracy anywhere. Maybe that ought to be a hint?
When I hear people talk about piracy, I think about one thing from long ago. When MP3s were brand spanking new, you could find tons of pirate FTP sites and Usenet newsgroups carrying illegal rips of music. And then there was one site, MyMP3.com, that had a different policy: you could download songs only if you could prove you physically had a copy of the CD at hand (by providing a hash of actual data off the CD). Now, if you're trying to drive out piracy, which do you target: the tons of completely-illegal sites, or the one site trying to insure it doesn't hand out illegal copies?
The RIAA threw all it's resources into driving MyMP3.com out of business, putting almost nothing into tracking down and eliminating the completely pirate sites.
They shut their doors a couple years ago.
What you're asking for sounds great -- on the web. The simple truth is it is no longer profitable.
Like it or not, those store owners were being truthful. Piracy is killing the music industry. Not that the RIAA labels don't need to be put down like the lampreys they are, but the days of the giants are waning fast.
The real problem is the industry was entirely constructed on what is no longer a valid premise; that recording and duplicating quality music was expensive. And the labels have tried to make their money in different ways, mostly at the expense of the stupid bands who sign their livelihoods away for half a million dollars up front (you try organizing a nationwide tour for half a million $$ and see what you have left at the end.) The recording industry will soon die, and eventually the only survivors will be the indie bands singing for the love of music. They'll end up as 21st century minstrels wandering from pub to pub, settling for a meager income and drinks on the house, regardless of their talent.
There will be no more profit in the music industry. It will die, and soon. The EMI anti-DRM move is a great attempt to capitalize on the huge anti-industry sentiment, but it's not going to change the behavior of people willing to climb over DRM to copy music anyway. And EMI won't have anything special once the other RIAA members see how profitable it is to not piss off their customer base.
The only question mark remaining is: how far away is the MPAA from this scenario? Movie theaters and HDTV may be their only saviors, in that it takes enormous (by current measure) amounts of bandwidth and storage to copy a quality movie. Music is quite compressible, and too many tin-eared fans are willing to settle for crappy-but-tiny MP3 recordings. But as long as people want to share the experience of a movie on the big screen, and as long as HDTV requires a relative firehose of a network connection for high quality, AND as long as they can convince people that quality matters, they'll be able to keep making money on TV and movies.
John
well, if there is no artificial scarcity, does that not, in effect, make us all 'richer'?
for instance, if you could create food out of thin air, sure, you'd put farmers and grocery stores out of business. But, we could all eat, including those people who lost their farming jobs. so are we as a society richer or poorer then?
Perhaps the only people making the designs would be people who care enough to do it whether they are paid or not. but if they can still eat and be sheltered and enjoy what they do... so what?
If it hadn't been for the RIAA's stupidity, downloaded music and music bought on CD could have found a way to peacefully coexist.
I must disagree. Downloaded music is free. It is easily copyable without loss of quality between copys.
There is no way that the RIAA can or could compete with this new model. It has driven them insane and they are just thrashing away dangerously in their madness. Woe to the people arbitraily caught in one of sweeps. The RIAA is acting like a mad grizzly bear trying to claw every salmon fish passing by it on a stream in Alaska. But eventually the RIAA's madness will cause it to run out of energy and then just roll over and die.
However, this pattern of behavior will manifest itself as industry by industry fails to adjust to the new conditions of the modern age. One by one they will go insane and try to take out as many people at random that they can as long as they have the resources to do so. Smart people will recognize the signs of an industry in the grips of a 'death dance' and avoid being sucked into the malestrom of its fury while it dies. More on this way of thought can be found at www.kunstler.com and other sites like this.
That's what this whole situation is. It's all about greed.
You have the RIAA releasing TERRIBLE full length albums while abandoning the single. You have radio operators like Clear Channel only providing space for 2 or 3 new songs on their national playlists, and demanding that those 2 or 3 new songs be songs that appeal to the target advertiser's say are the most important (13-25 year olds.) 13-25 year olds, not having a lot of money, opt to pirate the ONE song they like rather than pay $20 for a CD full of terrible music. And the circle is complete!
And let's not even get to how the music, radio, and retailers are failing people over the age of 25. When the hell is the RIAA going to realize that if 13-25 year olds aren't going to BUY the music, they should start making music for the people who will shell out the money (ie, people over 25.)????
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
This is an unsupported statement. What about online sales of CDs? What about sales of other types of media? What about the fact that the majority of the RIAA crap is just that, crap, and the majority of non-RIAA music is underadvertised? Etc etc.
A lot of retail businesses are closing their doors, not just record stores and other media purveyors, due to the influence of internet retail.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Someone up there made a point about "the guys with 3000 files on their iPod are the librarians of the early 21st century", and he's right.
The people with 3000 files on their iPods viewed music as a valuable resource. Get that $18 LP or CD this year, because it won't be on the shelves in 5 years. Get that limited release LP or CD wherever you can, because only 500 were ever pressed. Play it once, record it to DAT, and because you'll never find another copy, put the original in a safe place, and listen to it from first-generation analog copy (or high-bitrate MP3, or lossless compression :) forever.
Today's generation - raised under the RIAA-sponsored business models of "listen for 5 times then forget about it", or "listen to it until you upgrade to a new cellphone in 6 months", or "listen to it until you're tired of spending $15/month" - views music as an ephemeral good, a disposable commodity.
RIAA's business model of music as an ephemeral commodity is good in the short term - keep 'em paying $0.99 for whatever's coming out of the sausage factory, or $15/month for listening to radio.
But it's a disaster in the making for the long term. RIAA has made fortunes selling "Greatest Hits Of The Beatles" with every format change (LP, cassette, CD) and every discovery of a lost tape in some recording studio manager's attic. But you can only make those kinds of repeat sales to people who still want to listen to the Beatles 40 years later. How many of today's kids - raised on a diet of music as a disposable "listen-once-throw-in-trash-can" commodity - are going to be interested in "Britney: The Lost Tracks" from a bunch of .WAV files on a hard drive found in a surplus store in 2028, let alone "Titney's Pears, 2031 Edition" when he uses a sector editor to piece together a sixth track out of a FAT full of lost file chains?
This is a lot more true than a lot of people who want to blame piracy realize.
Every time I go into the local record store, there's some really crappy music playing. The CDs cost $18-19, sometimes $21 or so if it's a double CD.
The selection sucks. The RIAA is putting out a ton of the same. I'm sure this is a hit with certain people, but I don't need five different CDs by five different dyed-blond pop starlets, or five CDs from the newest country hit guy with a mullet, or the black guy with a ten pound gold chain, or the Aryan looking guy who wants to be that black guy and hates his wife, or all the clones of all of these people. Sometimes some of them have a good song or three, but usually, not so much. The goth/punk/emo clone bands are the same.
I can go to a store like Walmart, or Target, or Best buy, and get these same CDs for $14-16. Or I can get them at Amazon.com for a similar price (and if I get two, it's over $25, and I can get free shipping). Or there's iTunes. Which now offers some tracks without DRM.
And the local record store? It isn't local. It's a chain of overpriced music. This isn't a family owned business, and I'm sure there are tons of places where the record store isn't the "two working people with families..."
The RIAA pisses people off. DRM and Sony's rootkit actually did get the attention of non-techie people, at least some that I know. The atmosphere kind of sucks, and the prices definitely suck.
Further: Book stores that aren't chains are also taking a beating because there are cheaper offerings elsewhere. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a huge problem with book piracy.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
As another poster pointed out, the availability of free alternatives hasn't been a problem for the bottled water industry. In fact, it could be argued that the water industry has it tougher: they have to pay for the distribution of a physical good. The RIAA just has to distribute information. The distribution costs of digital data are nearly zero. At worst, they have to pay for a server farm or two.
I place the blame squarely on the heads of the record companies for failing to recognize the revolutionary nature of digital distribution and sticking to their old (physical) distribution model even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was obsolete. Right after the shutdown of Napster, the record companies could have co-opted the pirates by offering high-quality digital downloads. By refusing to do so, they allowed other music piracy sites to become an acceptable place to get music.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
That is, the model under which a designer spends a year coming up with a new model of Ferrari, and later hopes to get paid for it by taking a cut of every Ferrari sold, will be superseded by one in which the designer advertises his services to Ferrari enthusiasts, collects a few bucks each (held in escrow) from thousands of individuals, and then releases his new design once he's collected enough money.
A business model like that one cannot be undercut by new technology. Information can be copied, but labor and talent cannot. The artists' human effort is where the value in music ultimately comes from, and as long as there's demand for new music, there will be demand for musical talent. All they have to do is break themselves of the habit of thinking their job is to sell plastic discs, and realize that if they have talent, people will be willing to pay them directly for the time they spend writing and recording.
It sounds like a big change, but really it's just bringing the music industry up to parity with, well, pretty much every other industry in the world, where if you want to make twice as much money, you either find someone to agree to pay you twice as much (before you do the work), or you do twice as much work. People in the music industry have gotten used to the idea that they can perform a finite amount of work, but keep extracting more and more money from it indefinitely - which is cushy, but not sustainable. There is no argument for it being a "human right" except in the most perverse, materialistic, greedy sort of way. Well, I suppose that's one way to look at it. But if you're looking at it that way, there's also no argument for any "human right" to use calculus, or the speed of light, or to include the word "perverse" in your post. You didn't invent that word, did you? Someone else did, and doesn't he deserve to get paid if you're deriving benefit from it? Quick, go find the heirs of the guy who first uttered that word, and cut him a fat royalty check!
Get real. We as sentient beings do have the right to share information with each other, to use our minds, and to use technology to do what our minds cannot do alone. If you sing a song for me, I have the right to remember it, write it down, and sing it for someone else. You don't own those sound waves once they leave your mouth and enter my ears. You can't own a song any more than you can own a number. If you don't like the fact that people can share your songs once you sing them, then don't go around singing songs for free before anyone has agreed to pay you.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I disagree. The market changed. There's no guarantee that says people with middleman jobs (persons who try to add value by standing between the producer of a good or service and the consumer of that good or service) will have a job forever and a day, even if it seems likely to them. Markets change. People change. For many reasons, some of them you may be in sympathy with, some of them not.
I used to run a web store, "The Martial Arts Bookstore." Very specialized. I added value by carefully categorizing the books, inventing a "virtual shelves" mechanism that fit the needs of the shoppers. I also did capsule reviews of each book (I'm a martial artist with dan ranking across several disciplines and a scholarly interest in all of them.) I wouldn't even carry the low quality books that plague martial arts; there are plenty that were very high quality indeed. Initially, it did very well. Then Amazon opened; they not only had oodles more purchasing power than I did, they were able to run at a loss for years; I couldn't possibly do that. So I ran a last fire sale (which didn't sell much either) and then closed the site. I wasn't angry, I didn't write a whiny letter to anyone, and in fact, I became a very good customer of Amazon. I moved on to something else that was more appropriate to the times, and I have no complaints at all. It was fun, it was interesting, and it wasn't permanent. I see nothing to bitch about in any of that.
Things change. Accept it, move on, STFU.
Music isn't dead, and it isn't going to die. Let's face it - as musicians, as listeners - the producers and consumers - we're going to be fine. As musicians, maybe we'll have to move to a different distribution model, and maybe it'll be different as to how one becomes top of the heap. It'll still depend on your music to some degree, though; maybe moreso. As consumers, maybe we'll have to use different skills to find stuff we like. Surely the radio hasn't been a good source for anything but the crassest pop and bottomfeeder "repeat it until it sucks" marketing mechanisms for years - personally, I look forward to changes in the landscape. As for the middlemen, things change. Maybe I'll have to close my music studio. No sign of that yet in terms of my customers, but OTOH, you can buy mixing and recording equipment for a fraction of what it used to cost, a rack-mount mastering unit that can really do a very good job... there are no guarantees, anywhere for middle people. Not in music, not in written material, and not in video. If you find a niche and you can make it work, my hat is off to you. If it stops working, though, it is you that needs to change - sniveling about how you thought you'd be able to "spend your life" doing something is just despicable.
So that's why I'm not very impressed with the article.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Let's be clear about this. We keep talking about the RIAA like they are the baddies. They aren't. They are a smoke screen. They are nothing more than a trade group that represent the record labels, who are the real guilty parties here. EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner hide behind this RIAA label so that they distance themselves from the lawsuits, dumb-ass decisions, etc. Up-and-coming bands still sign every day to these labels because they don't realise that they are the puppeteers pulling the strings of the RIAA. The RIAA itself has not one single artist on its roster. It's classic misdirection. Let this RIAA 'persona' take the flack while the record companies themselves don't get tarred with the same brush. Until people stop talking about the RIAA and its deeds, and starting laying the blame at the record companies themselves, nothing will change.
It's not piracy that is killing the record store. It's downloading that is killing the record store. It's iTunes that is killing the record store. The record store is dying because people would rather pay $0.99 for a song than $12.99 for an album.
If piracy were the problem, then you wouldn't seen iTunes music store sales doubling every year.
The cake is a pie
Lemme tell you why I started downloading music.
A few years back, I still used to buy CDs. Then suddenly I noticed that I buying a whole album to get a single music. So I was paying (in USA prices) US$ 16,00 for a single track.
I really don't mind paying $16 for a whole album is I want every single song on that album. I do mind, however, paying $16 for a single track, or even 2 or 3. (And Albums around here cost, taking in consideration both currency exchange and general cost of living, about $40).
Would you, how are saying they are right that piracy is killing the business, pay US$ 40 for a single song ?
I'm not even mentioning the fact that you would have to carry 100 or more CDs in your car to have the music you want, in the moment you want (instead of 1 or 2 MP3 CDs). And you can't even rip the CDs you legally own these days to listen in your car.
The only full albums I've got in the last 5 years are oldies (Eagles, Bettles etc). Those are still worth it, since you can get a album where you are willing to pay, if not for all, for most of the tracks.
Now, tell me again, how is killing the music business ?
morcego
Or it could be that the people who say "adapt or die" and those who say "outsourcing is wrong!" could be different people. And that the Slashdot community is not a hive-mind. Just a thought, you know.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
And much much more. Industrialization has given us longer healthier and richer lives. It has made us, in real terms far wealthier than the kings of only a couple centuries past. Don't be blinded by a false nostalgia for the past. The lives of our ancestors were nasty, brutish and short.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There is a big difference between a big company serving its educated customers better, and skilled engineers working for peanuts.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
The RIAA is really off base about piracy, when a major part of their decline is due to the demographic shift of the US population. The baby boomers are older, and have a disproportionate share of disposable income for entertainment. They tend to be less interested in video games, and not as interested in the fare which tends to dominate the movie theatres. In short, a wealthy group of people who grew up listening to music on the radio when there were fewer choices for their entertainment doller and inclined to choose it over most other forms of entertainment.
So, what does the music industry offer this huge group of potential consumers?
1) Music acts who have been marketed and chosen based on their appearance on videos rather than musical talent.
2) Music acts consisting of people who are 18 to 24 years old. 30 year old musicians? Hell, they don't even play those on VH-1 any more. Oddly enough, musicians like Joan Baez, Ry Cooder, and others who were big in the 60s, when these baby boomers first started listening to the radio, can't even get arrested in the music industry.
3) Music acts who are rehashing the same music baby boomers bought 30 years ago. Music trends are cyclical, and I've already got music from 3 discrete generations of bands that sound like the Stones.
4) An opportunity to re-buy our record collections yet again. It's bad enough that the RIAA complained when we wanted to tape our vinyl LPs so we could listen on portable devices and our cars. No, they wanted to sell us cassettes. Then CDs.
5) Reduced choice in an ever-expanding universe of choices. Catalogs are clogged with mediocre music, and the labels are simultaneously taking lots of things out of print. In the meantime, the digital world and business models like Amazon.com are trending towards the infinitely deep catalog, and the RIAA just doesn't get it. I understand that there isn't enough potential business to justify a CD re-pressing of the Fabulous Poodles record from 1980, that's probably at least $2000 in costs, plus the distribution, etc. However, encoding that record from the CD and distributing it digitally is probably less than $2 of labor. I guarantee they'd get a much higher return on investment than they get from letting it die.
One of the quiet successes of iTunes is its deep catalog of jazz, classical and baby-boomer-friendly acts. For someone like me who is technically quite capable of encoding music from my old collection, but far too busy to bother, 99 cents is a very fair deal for the one song I recall from an old album. I buy new music, too, but so much of what is pushed by the major labels is just not even aimed at me.
If the RIAA was actually courting customers rather than suing them, they would be much healthier. As it is, their pursuit of the shallow teen dollar is biting them in the ass as their audience continues to skew older. Meanwhile, the teens they are actively pursuing have a completely different outlook about their entertainment choices. Hell, who ever thought that a whole genre of music would ever appear based on cheesy videogame soundtracks from the 80s?
The RIAA's killer is twofold. First, they failed utterly to fathom what was important to their customer. In an era where their customers were happily using lossy compression and cheap earbuds, the RIAA was spending huge wads to get just exactly "the sound" which was lost on their market. Let's face it, Britney's audience WILL NOT NOTICE that you used the nifty ribbon mikes from 1956 or that you spent $10,000 in studio time just to perfect the accoustics. If you just want to record like that, save it for a band that's more popular with audiophiles. All that expensive studio equipment and time (plus generous quantities of coke) costs money, so they raised prices.
The second killer was the RIAA itself. They thought they could dictate preferences to their customers rather than the other way around. They didn't like the idea that they might actually have to give the talent a fair deal if/when they hit it big, so they pushed the interchangable pop-tarts instead. Not exactly the genre that calls for the ultimate in recording technology.
Demand for music didn't go away, it just didn't exist at that pricepoint. Since supply of music at the appropriate pricepoint didn't exist, like any other underserved market, a black market sprung up. The RIAA now claims p2p is what's killing them. However, I'll bet that if they waved a magic wand and made it all go away, they wouldn't gain much. On the other hand if they would re-taylor their product to meet demand (scale back the big production costs for disposable albums and cut the retail price for example) the p2p would be largely irrelevant to their profits.
Of course that analogy is wrong because you can't play that movie over and over again unless you buy it for home use.
Secondly, the argument "you've just gotten a great album you're going to be listening to for the rest of your life." is also not valid. Most albums I buy, I listen to 4-5 songs from for awhile, then they drift off, replaced by new songs. And who knows how long I will be able to play those songs from CD. At some point CDs will go the way of 8-track tapes.
Insert obligatory comment about the RIAA being a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first with their backs against the wall when the revolution comes...
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
They spend all that money on equipment for exactly one reason: to manufacture talent. The record companies are no longer scouting for good bands who will make music people want to hear; that's been relegated to the indy labels. Instead, the RIAA chooses some jailbait pretty face who knows how to shake their hips and expose just the right bits of skin on camera, and then feeds them through all that fancy equipment to sample, clip, modulate, adjust, downmix, blur, airbrush, and edit them into a product. Then they mass market this product to the segment of the population that, while having the most disposable income and highest impulsive purchase rate, also is the most likely to pirate music: teenagers.
The member companies of the RIAA are not distributors; they are factories. Of course, there are always a few artists who emerge unscathed and with their artistic integrity intact, but they are the special ones.
The irony of all this is that if the RIAA companies simply did what we all expected them to do, i.e., scout and discover actual, honest-to-goodness good bands and help them sell records the market wants to buy in a way the market wants to buy them, they would be making more money than they know what to do with. But that's not "the way we've always done it," so first they are going to fight inevitability.
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What has industrialization brought you?
Britney?
Re-read my post.
Industrialisation can be successfully applied to some areas of human endeavor (eg production of consumer goods), in other areas it is *obviously* mis-applied.
Industrialisation may be good for some things but it is not a cure-all nor is it the best way to do *anything*.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The RIAA has conviently ignored the impact of DVDs. People spend a lot of money on DVDs, money that in many cases would have been spent on music if DVDs didn't exist. I suspect this is the most significant factor in the music industries declining fortunes, not piracy. People have X dollars to spend on entertainment and that money is being spent on different things than it was 10 years ago. DVDs and games are up, music is down.