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Music DRM in Critical Condition?
ianare writes "Universal Music Group, the largest music company on the planet, has announced that the company is going to sell DRM-free music. The test will see UMG offering a portion of its catalog — primarily its most popular content — sold without DRM between August 21 and January 31 of next year. The format will be MP3, and songs will sell for 99 each, with the bitrate to be determined by the stores in question. RealNetwork's Rhapsody service will offer 256kbps tracks, the company said in a separate statement. January 31 is likely more of a fire escape than an end date. If UMG doesn't like what they're seeing, they'll pull the plug. UMG says that it wants to watch how DRM-free music affects piracy rates."
256kbps is good enough for me, though I'd really only buy if the price point was closer to 10 cents. Lots of reasons for this, though the main one is simply that I live in Asia, piracy is common. Like it or not, that's what they have to compete with. 10 cents per song is about double the profit margin over pirated CD's, though if I can reliably go to an online store from the comfort of my home, then that's where I'd rather be.
The recording industry themselves are entrepreneurs, and now they realise that the software companies are not just another mechanism to enforce their intermediation, but an attempt to introduce a new, and harder to evade, middleman.
All entrepreneurs seek to enforce their control, either legally or through other means (such as owning the channels of distribution, or by monopoly patents.)
Entrepreneurs have a part to play when a resource does not have a market, but they find it very hard to lie down and die when the market is established. We don't yet know who will win this battle for control over the electronic music market, but improved search engines and technology availability could disintermediate the market in a different way - e.g. by sites aggregating direct sales by many small bands, cooperatively owned.
Pining for the fjords
If I was the music company I'd place some kind of signature in my files and keep a watch on how many of them later appeared on common piracy sites. It would be interesting to see how many, or few, of them leaked out.
You buy if you want. As far as I'm concerned Universal can fuck off.
They're one of the worst. It is they who persuaded Microsoft to let them charge Zune users a Zune-tax. Let them lift that tax first.
They're still playing games. This time round, they are refusing to sell through the iTunes Store. This is an act of revenge. It's because Apple won't open their DRM to other distributors, because Apple doesn't want the hassle of maintaining this DRM (that it doesn't want in the first place and only has to use because companies like Universal insist on it) for every other distributor. IOW, Universal do want the DRM and are blaming Apple for not making it work for them across the whole industry - as if Apple, or anyone else, could.
YOU buy. YOU rush out and buy from these parasites. I shan't.
If I want to buy a download rather than a CD, I'll buy EMI at the iTunes Store or go to Magnatune or Linn records. Universal can go boil its head.
6 months back, he himself spoke against the negative effects of DRM and how Apple was implementing DRM only to comply with the wishes of the recording industry. Now fear of an Apple monopoly on DRM has finally forced Universal (for starters) to think about selling unencumbered music. So we have him to thank for scaring the recording companies into removing DRM! (hoping that they eventually will)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Someone needs to tag this 'Itsatrap'.
Am I the only one who sees this as an opportunity for them to inject peoples names, IP addresses and other identifying information into the headers of the music? What they'll do with this information is troll Kazaa/Limewire looking for the songs from 'Joe Average' and then sue him because he gave a copy to a friend who gave it to a friend who gave it to a friend who put it on Kazaa/Limewire with the persons Name/IP junk on it only this time the RIAA will actually have hard evidence since they'll have injected the information onto the song before it was released so they'll know who's copy it was originally and go after them even if it was completely innocent sharing between common friends.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Does the current trend towards less DRM means the end of motherboards with built-in TPM chips in the future?
You just got troll'd!
$.99 is just wrong. I have mp3 music on a dvd. At 5MB/song, I can fit 9.6GB/5MB ~=2000 songs. I would be happy to pay $25 for disks like this, but no way I pay alomst $2k for a disk.
I notice also that in markets that sells pirated music they come as MP3 on CD's and contain over 100 songs for $1. The lagal CDs next to them costs $10, and contains 10 songs.
The legal product is certainly inferior. Unless the music industry can deliver a superior product, they can not win this.
"Fix it"
I don't remember, but I know they've bribed radio stations to broadcast crap music.
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/tvstations/artic
Wikipedia also summarize it well:
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Consider that the majors have been trying to push bloody business models where one or more of those restriction apply to you:
1) Pay for each nail you hit with the hammer
2) Rent the hammer and pay monthly for ulimited strikes on nails - when the rent expires all your nails disappear
3) Be limited to use your hammer just in your room
4) Be limited to use only a specific brand of nails - In case this is overturned by a clever hacker all the nails can cease to work (see playsforsure against old MS DRM)
5) whatever else limiting to you but more profitable to them
6) Get sued if you lent/use a hammer from another person
7) Pay for a hammer that can be used to build 10 houses - Ops, sorry, after the sale terms are changes: only 7 houses (Apple FairPlay Cd burning)
From my humble point of view as noone would use such a tool . Conclusions: those corporations have been looking actively for extincion and fully deserve it.
And we also know that the only thing that anybody could ever get on a cassette tape was copyrighted music...
Your analogy falls down on numerous grounds, but I'll add just one more to the replies you've already received here.
The extremely rapid evolution of music-making technology over the last decade has brought top-end studio technology to even the lowliest musician in his/her bedsit studio. I know because I'm well acquainted with the subject, and I've set up a cheap yet very capable home studio myself. Equipment that could only have been found in a million-dollar professional studio just a decade ago now can be bought for the sort of money spent by normal hobbiests.
What's more, the new technology even deals well with the part of the process for which the studios have typically charged most money and supplied their top audio engineers, namely mixing and mastering. In summary, music production costs can be as close to zero as you want now, except for those musicians who refuse to get involved with technology, which is quite rare. And while CDs still cost a few pennies to press, it's not a lot (which is why we get them as marketting coasters), and they can be avoided totally by musicians with an online presence.
So, your analogy breaks down almost totally because the cost of production is not unavoidably high anymore. The only part of the "cost" that is high is the expectation of earnings by labels, studios, and musicians. And that's not actually a cost, and should come out of profit instead, if the business model is viable.
So, the "make it $0.01 and then maybe I'll buy it" by the other AC wasn't so far off the mark --- the actual cost of an album (not a track) ought to be $0.50 or less, given the volume sales over which to amortize the small costs. The reason it's not so is because the labels (especially) have an extremely greedy expectation of earnings, nothing more.
The labels aren't complaining that music sharing doesn't let them recoup costs, because costs were recouped ages ago after just a handful of sales. They're complaining that their pure profit is dropping. Well frankly, it's hard to find much sympathy for that.
They had a good selection, no DRM, and reasonable (bitrate-proportional) pricing. They did enough business and presented enough of a threat that they got shut down. That should be a lesson to UMG:
- charge a reasonable price (sliding scale, by bitrate, so people can choose to pay more for better quality)
- make it easier to buy from you than to find and download on the P2P networks
- low overhead, means you don't take a huge cut, and remember to *pay the artists*
- attract customers by offering a quality product at a competitive price (iTunes is 0.99/trk? - sell yours for less!)
Seriously. AoMP3.com didn't fail because people downloaded their entire catalog and put it on the P2P networks. They succeeded in spite of the P2P networks, because they got the selection/convenience/price equation right. I've always wondered why a legal version of AoMP3.com, one that paid the artists most of the income, and worked on high volume, low margins wouldn't be a huge success.
>Maybe there are just a few people who think that it's fair to pay for the delivery of goods and services. Ever think of that?
You must have missed the part in my post where I said:
>>Sure, there will be a few crusaders who want to "support the artists".
>Just because it's easy to (illegally) get things free doesn't mean you should.
My point is that most people will do it anyway.
>You might be happy to live with robbing people. I'm not, so I pay for my music.
Again, my point is that you are probably in a minority.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year? Why is it reasonable to pay executives so much?
I mean the average person earns $41k a year. The answer is- it's not reasonable. We got tons of music (and movies) in the 30's... 40's... and 50's... (and most of the 60's...) when everyone on the food chain made a lot less.
We got more of them because the artists had to produce more to make a living. And the idea of getting filthy rich didn't really start until the 70's.
There is no reason in today's world that we need 15 to 20 people feeding 200k+ per year incomes off of each song. This is why songs (and movies) cost so much. Because a parasitic industry has grown up around them due to their unique government protected monopoly.
Is there any reasonable way you can justify an author getting richer than the queen of england- becoming worth over a billion dollars in such a short period of time? Is there any other kind of work which pays that kind of compensation?
Clearly copyright is currently broken. It forces society to pay grossly inflated prices compared to most of the rest of history.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Except for the lucky few, musicians or "artists" are rather on the poor side. I play in a local band, so many a time after a show we hang out with the headlining act. I see behind the scenes, behind the image... Signed musicians, and they sleep in their van, taking shifts driving to the next show. If they're lucky, someone in town offers them a place to crash for the night. That doesn't really sound like a bunch of people making >= $200k/year to me.
Yeah the stadium filling acts have tour buses and roadies and groupies and all that, but the vast majority of performing musicians make enough money to stay alive and on the road, if they're lucky.
Also, don't compare music and movies. Making music involves a band, a couple of engineers, and possibly a studio musician or two for the "extras". Next time you go see a movie in theaters, sit through all the credits... Try to count the names. Music involves a couple of handfuls of people to create, a movie requires hundreds. Now, to clarify, I'm not in any way for the high prices and I'm not defending current copyright laws (I believe the system is broken personally). I'm just pointing out that movies and music are on different levels.
The underlying question is why is it reasonable to pay the artists over $200 grand a year?
Talent, ability, training, execution, performance, and a touch of luck.
The artists and the executives make so much money because they can do what they do better than most anyone else, and their audience is willing to compensate them for it. You might not appreciate their "talents", but it is something rare and very, very hard to do successfully. Pop radio spins a playlist on average of about 12 songs. There are hundreds of thousands of artists putting our records every year. I can guarantee you that not all of them are rich; some might not even eat tonight, or are working a day job to support that dream of being one of those 12, someday.
In your post, you complain about the Artists making so much money. You complain about executives who manage multinational corporations making so much money. If there's so much money to be had, why don't you do it and cash in? Why doesn't everyone?
This is the whole purpose of capitalism. It's got built-in meritocracy to reward those who can do things that people appreciate and as an incentive for them to keep doing it. I appreciate listening to my favorite musicians, so I reward them so they keep doing it. I also enjoy having hot, precooked, and tasty pizza delivered to my house. I reward the store and the delivery guy for that service. If that restaraunt could service a couple hundred million homes, then the pizza flippers and delivery guys would be millionaires, too.
The bottom line is that these "artists" get rewarded because their market scales. Sell a hundred records, make a hundred dollars. Sell a million, make a million. Good incentive to make a record that a million people will want to buy, eh?