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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."
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.
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.
Bingo. Translation for the recordingeese-impaired:
I think that about sums it up.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.