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Interesting Admissions From Record Industry
way2trivial writes "Many in the Slashdot community say the reason music sales are off is the content. It appears the industry and some music producers agree. In todays NYTimes magazine there is an article that says the quality of todays music is the problem. I have an issue with one part however, it reads "...and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple" and here I thought Apple made most of their money with their hardware sales and a pittance on each track, giving the majority to the producer."
Seems obvious that since Apple makes the hardware they should profit from it, and since the artists make the songs they should profit from them... but then, I have a question for you (or any other shareholder): Why do you think Applet should get a cut from *calls* made with an iPhone?
Profit margins, while still high particularly for data are comparatively speaking starting to thin just a bit as more carriers step into markets once dominated by a single carrier. This is principally because of market saturation, right? After all, how many people do you know who do not own a cell phone? So, any increase in profits are going to be made by selling services or by taking customers from other carriers. Apple was able to tell the traditional cell phone carriers that they could guarantee bringing X number of customers to the carrier in return for letting the carrier add the iPhone to their product line and in return for that, they could expect some degree of profit sharing.
That business model is completely different from the media business model...
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It seems like everytime my wife and I turn on the radio and hear rock or metal from the last few years, it's all either whiny, pussy emo shit or non-melodic, screaming heavy metal. We're only in our mid-20s and we already "feel like old people" when it comes to music sometimes. But then, we realize something. Most of us who were teenagers in the mid-to-late 90s remember when rock and metal were more than emo and frat boy headbanging crap.
I know there is more than those types of music, but it's like the music industry ain't even trying to promote anything decent anymore.
Why do you think Applet should get a cut from *calls* made with an iPhone?
I pose the question why do shops like Universal think they should get a cut of the sales of the Zune (which was paid by MS) and the iPod (which was not paid by apple). Perhaps we should that Universal has also implied that Apple should pay them for (by Universal's estimation) "the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material"
Not to mention that Universal-NBC wants consumer to pay significantly for downloads of shows that they could buy on dvd for less.
This all boils down to a the last throes of a failing business model.
Remember though that once the money leaves your pocket and becomes the carriers money, it is no longer yours. So, if you look at it in terms of not revenue out of your pocket, but revenue out of the carriers pocket then it is a different story. What Apple is guaranteeing the carriers is that even though it is money out of their pocket, the iPhone is sooo kick ass great that it will result in higher overall revenues for the carrier that result from more customers.
With respect to current customers, there is the issue of carriers maintaining customers and preventing them from leaving. Traditionally, they have done this through outrageous contracts that lock (Americans at least) into long term contracts. Alternatively, if they simply provided a better business experience with good tools, customers would be less willing to leave.
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Popular music is informed by youth culture, and thus reflects the hopes and fears of the youth of any particular era. The 60s was about Vietnam (not because of any real concern about the war, but because teenagers faced the possibility of being drafted). The 80s was about overt avarice and consumerism.
But what about the 90s and the 2000s? What were they about? I, and most people I've talked to about this, draw a blank. Some people think modern emo bands were influenced by the Columbine massacre and its aftermath, but that is at best a minor facet of popular music.
The thing that characterised our societies after 1989 was a sense of triumphalism. The cold war was over, the world had unanimously chosen the best way of running things (sic), and it was the end of history. Essentially, we were told all the battles had been won and there were no more challenges left for our generation to take up. People say 9/11 'changed everything' but in reality it changed very little, for the most part western society still smugly grinds away as it did before. The daily life of young people is largely unaffected.
So the prevailing feeling is apathy. You go to school, go to college, have kids and die. There's nothing else to do. The music reflects this.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
P2P is the entire candy store, not just a selection of tracks that somebody who knows nothing about me thinks I would like because several million other people bought it. Download a Gnutella client and you'll find stuff that hasn't been commercially available for decades, because someone somewhere dug out a disc (or digitized an LP or a 45) and put it online. Rare music that you can't buy because it's just not available. People with eclectic tastes (or who just prefer older or non-mainstream stuff) often have nowhere else to go, assuming they even know how.
... believe me, they will. Make it possible for a portable device with an Internet connection to buy music directly and download to itself: that could be a "killer app" in its own right.
... you won't be needing them. Then sit back and watch the money just roll in.
Here's ScrewMaster's Plan for Resurrecting the Music Industry. If the studios really want to substantially reduce illicit downloading and make money hand-over-fist, here's what they do. Create a download service comparable to iTunes but with every track ever published available, and I mean all of them. If they can't find an album in their archives, offer a reward to anyone who has a copy they can "borrow" to put online. NO DRM, but support every compression format known to Man (MP3, Ogg, you name it.) Maybe make the customer pay an extra nickel a track for archival quality. Most people won't care, but those that want the extra quality and can afford the storage can obtain it. Hell, make 16-bit PCM (raw CD format) available as well, in case we want to burn original-quality CDs.
Develop client platforms for Windows, Linux and the Mac that seamlessly handle purchase and transfer of music to portable devices, and not just the iPod. Design your desktop application with a plugin-based interface architecture, and release the specs to the hardware vendors. Let them support their product lines for you
Keep prices at no more than a buck a track for new stuff (seems like a good impulse-buy price point) and maybe half a buck for older songs. Put the ancient recordings that aren't even copyrighted up for free: it will bring in people and they might buy other stuff. Offer quantity discounts to individuals who purchase lots of your music. Offer monthly plans like Netflix and Blockbuster (100 songs for $25/month!) Oh, and fire your lawyers
People want music, and I believe the majority of us are more than willing to pay for it. We just want the studios to do what every other competitive business has to do: listen to us, their customers. That means giving us what we want (lower prices, better quality, and more variety) and in the process finding a way to turn a profit. Oh, and pay your suppliers: we'll respect you more (this "protecting the artists" thing is wearing a bit thin.) With the extra money you'll be making you can afford to. This is not rocket science folks, it's just a matter of good business. Something they know very little about, unfortunately.
Look, with their resources, this is something they could do very easily (hell, Apple already did it, so there's no innovation or vision required! They just need to improve upon Apple's model.) We have a bunch of old-guard corporate types unable to grasp that they are completely out of touch and not in the driver's seat anymore anyway. They could get it back. But they'll have to accommodate us to a much greater degree than they're willing to now.
Period.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I asked my students - 153 in a lecture class - "How many of you bought a new CD in the past 6 months? Raise you hands." About 20 raised their hands. I then asked "How many of you have downloaded a new song either through legitimate means with iTunes and other companies, or illegitimately, via P2P? Raise you hands." Almost everyone raised their hand.
The fact is: the CD is dead. It's dying because CDs are long format and inherited the interest in long playing music from the LP and 78rpm "Albums". People today have the attention span of gnats, and are too distracted by the gazillion different toys to just sit and listen to music. When I was young, we'd roll a fatty or three and put on some Yes or Genesis or Tangerine Dream and space for hours while we glotzed the gatefold cover art. We didn't have Xbox, playstations, etc, or cellphones or IM or texting or internet porn or whatever. Our options were comparatively limited - TV, records, radio. And these media have their own requirements as passive "sit back" media. Now, with active "sit forward" media of Xbox etc. and the jump up and down of Wii, and the focus of IM and texting, there is really no "pay off" to sitting around listening to music. Actually listening to music seems almost like a meditation practice to contemporary cultural "intake".
The CD's duration was determined by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - one can sit through the entire symphony uninterrupted. With LPs you had to get up every 18 - 20 minutes to flip the record. CDs removed that hassle, and a CD became a musical journey. Constructing such a journey and doing it convincingly is hard work, which is why so many CDs had "filler". Sustaining interest in a listener for 1.3 hours is tough work.
The advent of the MP3 removed the need for the "extended hypnosis" and brought back the spirit of the 78RPM and the 45RPM record - "singles". If you're a talentless hack, and so many musicians are - talentless hacks give a ground to judge how we know someone isn't a talentless hack - then you probably don't have the chops or the depth of a song list to fill a CD. So, it only makes sense to put what you've got going on an MP3 network, and when you hve enough of your crap for a CD, do that too. But the pressure to cook up a CD's worth of tunage FIRST is gone.
This doesn't help matters for the gangsters in the RIAA.
They had a chance to put a meter on P2P with the original Napster. We (at Napster) had developed a billing client, and suggested a very very low price for P2P'd songs - where a DL would be dinged off a client's account value. We tested it - and IT WORKED. It was kind of clunky at first, and we needed to work on optimisations, but it really worked, and it was pretty damn slick. The RIAA et al told us "No". And now those idiots are reaping the whirlwind for their greed and stupidity, and we are all the worse for it.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Want proof? Listen to what this guy's BOSS has to say!
Steve Barnett is nervous about the subscription model. "Smart people have told me if the subscription model is not done correctly," he said, "it will be the final nail in our coffin. I've heard both sides of the argument, and I'm not convinced it's the solution to our problems. Rick wants to be a hero immediately. In his mind, you flick a switch and it's done. It doesn't work like that."Uhm..HELLO???!!! You've had TEN YEARS to come up with a subscription model! That sure doesn't sound like "flicking a switch" to me!
Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue. This is unprecedented -- even successful artists like the Dixie Chicks make a large percentage of their income from concerts and T-shirts. "Artists should never give that money up," Natalie Maines told me. "The companies are all scrambling because of the Internet, and they will screw the artist to meet their bottom line. I can't imagine Rick will go along with that."YEAH! THAT'S IT! Screw the artists even more! That's a GREAT business model!!
This is just more of the same one crap thay've been doing all along...Bingo. Translation for the recordingeese-impaired:
I think that about sums it up.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I know, no one at slashdot RTFA. Yet, by not reading it, everyone skipped this little gem, which is the tell tale of what is in the mind of the recording industry execs and how they perceive the music business:
Rick Rubin, the "outsider", thinks like this:
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I think a number of people are missing the point on the Apple profits comment from the article. In a market where singles and single songs sell well but albums sell poorly, the music companies make less money but Apple continues to sell iPods, because their store sells singles and their singles play on the iPod. If people start gravitating back to the album, that is, if albums come with enough good songs on them that people want to buy more than 2 or 3 from the same album, fewer people will be buying the singles from the iTunes music store and they'll just be buying the CDs. And while people can rip songs from CDs to the iPod, it takes effort and a CD is easy to take with you and pop in and out of any old CD player.
The death of the music industry is, then, good for Apple so long as it doesn't go too far and kill off all the content.
Synopsis:
Scared failing business hires a mythic figure who has made big money for them in the past, to somehow bring miracles in a new world that they no longer understand.
Mythic figure has momentary crisis of conscience due to evil-doing by failing business, resolved in the usual way by a combination of seduction and graft.
Mythic figure has gone brain dead at age 44, now listening to the never-talented Rod Stewart, and Frank Sinatra in his talent-gone alcoholic later years. Retains impressive beard to remind people of his past successes.
Mythic figure somehow thinks that helping failing business to shop for Los Angeles real estate (whose most likely fate is seismic annihilation), will have anything to do with motivating people to buy more of their stale and overpriced product.
Proposed miraculous solution is to have people pay a monthly fee for a virtual boxload of industry-decided crap that they most likely don't want, which is essentially the same business model that record "clubs" operated on decades ago, except the boxloads arrived physically by mail rather than virtually by wire.
Conjecture:
Public have finally noticed, in the aftermath of an orgy of cheap credit, that they are deeply in the hole because they have fallen for a whole bunch of supposed essentials, each of which requires some sort of monthly fee: $1300 for rent, $300 for car payment, $150 for car insurance, $60 for cable TV, $40-80 for cell phone, $24 for landline phone to give to credit card companies to keep from getting dunning calls on cell phone, $700 for a shakedown shell game that calls itself "health insurance", and $60 for DSL or cable Internet. That's $31608 per year in after tax cash. Food, water/sewage, clothing, and energy not included.
Public have also finally noticed that they listen to only 1-2 songs on a typical CD, and that entire CDs often have nothing worthwhile on them.
Meanwhile, industry tries to sell CDs for upwards of $27. Because industry executives live in Los Angeles and eat in Beverly Hills, they believe that $27 is the cost of two hamburgers, and is therefore reasonable.
Compare and contrast to movie "The 11th Hour":
Expensive Hollywood actor relieves anxieties about trying to live in now-insufferable Los Angeles, by showing lots of pictures of it and reading from a script written by New York liberal arts majors with huge Rolodexes and a good understanding of fictional literature and of little else, who either are on meth or have very short attention spans, or who believe that their audience is or does.
Surely this audience will be motivated and inspired to deeply understand and solve difficult problems, by being bombarded by seemingly hundreds of talking head clips pasted together with lots of stock footage of disasters, wars, and poverty, plus some whales and penguins (exactly why were these penguins being released from mass confinement in cardboard cartons?), in a vast wallow of nightmarish scattershot incoherence.
Our salvation lies in a locomotive with the conventional large diesel-electric system, replaced by a CAD cartoon of a system with 1/10 the prime mover power, and some mysterious purple boxes. What may or may not be the realization of this design, is shown hauling exactly zero payload above its own mass, across level ground.
The music's pretty good though.
There is still good innovative music it just isn't on the radio or tee vee, go listen to Mr. Bungle, Andrew Bird, Calexico, Neko Case, The Arcade Fire, DJ Spooky, Howe Gelb, Spoon, Sufjan Stevens, and then get back to me about how "terrible" today's music is, and BTW I am 41 years old and by no means a stuck up hipster, there is just no excuse for being stuck in a rut and bitching about today's music with a whole internet out there to learn what sounds good.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?