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Music Industry Set To Introduce the "Ringle"
mrneutron2003 writes "The RIAA has officially backed a move by the recording industry to reintroduce the CD single. Populated with three songs and a ringtone, this brilliantly clueless idea is to be marketed as a 'ringle,' complete with an even more clueless retail price of $6-7 per CD. Apart from the fact the industry hasn't agreed on how the ringtone is to be redeemed (Sony BMG, the initial proponent of the idea, is the exception here), the pricing puts it way out of line with legitimate digital music downloads." At $7, retailers would enjoy a profit margin they haven't seen since the days of cassette tapes and vinyl.
That's what's wrong with that.
One thing hanging over the 'maybe new, maybe not' idea that didn't factor in twenty years ago, is the 'green' factor.
What is the carbon footprint of three songs on a packaged CD versus three songs purchased over the internet? And to bring it into even sharper focus, the CD packaged songs will end up on a player just like the downloads.
Game over, man...
"Ringle, ringle, coins how they jingle," Scrooge's lustful song of money and greed.
Quite appropriate name considering...
Do people really only tend to like a handful of songs from an album? This ball gets kicked around quite a bit here, but I have to say I honestly have no idea what people are referring to. I can only think of cases where I've liked most or all of an album, or disliked everything from beginning to end.
If you don't want it, don't buy it. Same with full-length CDs. No, only wanting one song from a CD does not justify illicit downloads anymore than it justifies stealing a physical CD.
With all the options available--CD singles, CD albums, greatest hits collections, "That's What I Call Crap for Your Ears" mixes, online shops with single song downloads, etc.--it is not reasonable to complain that there is no way for you to purchase the music you want.
(FWIW, I have little empathy on the issue perhaps due to out of the many 100s of CDs, cassette tapes, LPs, and 78s I've purchased over the years, in only 1 case did it turn out that the 1 song that prompted the purchase was the only song on the album I liked. Maybe it means I like a better class of musician who is able to come up with more than 1 catchy tune at a time. Maybe it means I have lower standards. Whatever.)
People who balk at paying 99 cents for a song someone how end up paying many times that for just a piece of that same song as a ring tone, so using ring tones to move songs makes sense. The only issue I have is with the name. The thought of someone talking about 'ringles' on their 'blog' makes me want to hit someone in the 'face' with a 'shovel'.
I'm in that camp, sort of.
... but if I was going to buy the music a la carte, I'd just pick out the handful of songs I want and discard the rest.
There are lots of CDs where I liked most or all of the songs on the disc, but I wouldn't have purchased them individually if I'd had a choice. That is, they're acceptable, but they're obviously filler. At $6-10 for the whole disc, I'll buy it, because the value of the songs I like makes up for the somewhat lower value of the filler songs, and I don't find them so offensive that I need to skip over them when I'm listening to a disc or anything
It's a question of alternatives. If I like three songs on a disc a lot, and the rest not quite so much, I'm only going to buy the three songs. It's not because I hate the other songs on the disc, but because I know I can save the money, and then turn around and spend it on the best few songs from three or four other albums. By doing that, the net quality of my music collection (in my own, totally subjective, estimation) is higher.
I know there's a virtually limitless quantity of music out there to discover; the limiting factor is going to be my money and time, not the available music. So therefore, it makes sense to only buy the best tracks from each disc, if that option is available.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My teenage daughter likes to have cool ringtones, and with a freeware utility and a basic audio editor, I can make dozens of custom ringtones from her favorite tunes in just a few minutes. I get points as a cool dad, and I don't have to suffer the indignity of giving Sony or Warners or whichever evil empire an additional dollar. To my great surprise, the homemade element seems to please my daughter rather unlike the ugly sweaters her mom used to knit for her. I don't know if the RIAA deems my handiwork a violation of their property rights, but I sincerely hope so. I've even made myself a ring tone from an old recording of Super Freak by Rick James that I use only for when my wife calls me. It gets a chuckle from the kids in my class.
Years from now, business schools will teach the behavior of the music labels and the RIAA at the turn of the millenium as a case study in the way to kill off an entire industry sector. Musicians will swap stories about how their predecessors had to deal with a business relationship to the labels that was not so different from the ones the coal miners had to suffer under half a century earlier. One difference being that when the coal miners died, at least the company couldn't abuse them any more.
I've gone almost two years without buying a single music recording from anyone but the artist, and my collection is richer than ever. For the classical music and opera that I sometimes enjoy, I simply rip the CDs I can borrow from the excellent collections at the Chicago Public Library and then I use the savings to pay for a pair of season tickets to the Lyric Opera (which is doing La Boheme, La Traviata AND Atomic City by John Adams/Peter Sellars this season).
You are welcome on my lawn.
It wasn't you who said it first. It was the European GSM provider who said it first. So they bundled the SMS-Service often for free or for very little money with their calling plans, because they just thought it a nice feature with not much practical use.
After all, SMS was never really thought for the broad public, it was more or less thought to replace the beeper in some circumstances or to send technical status messages.
But then the public discovered the SMS and turned them in a cheap chat system. And suddenly a technical byproduct became a main selling point for GSM plans, and the prices for SMS services skyrocketed.