Slashdot Mirror
New Head of EMI Says 'Embrace Digital Music or Die'
no0b writes "Guy Hands is the new head of EMI, Britain's largest music publisher. Hands has come out publicly with a statement warning the industry against something music listeners have probably understood for some time. In the words of the Telegraph article, 'the industry will not survive if it continues to rely on CD sales alone.' More from the piece: 'With both new and established acts now capable of making money without the backing of a big company, McGee says record labels are being left out of the loop. He scoffs at their efforts to make up lost ground by developing into "multimedia entertainment companies that can manage bands and share in live income". But try they must. Revenues from record sales in Britain have dropped by more than £130m since 2004. The true cost to the industry could be far greater. TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.'"
Radiohead were signed to EMI, and now they've decided to go it alone and release their new album online, at a price the fans agree on. Could this be what caused this exec to sound the alarm?
Actually, music video budgets are shrinking.
2+2=5 for very large values of 2.
The cost of something is determined by the lowest retail price. For music that is zero today. Most people are unwilling to assign a much higher value to it either.
This means any commercial enterprise which revolves around selling music is doomed. People will redistribute it and remove any possible value from your product.
This means the end of recorded music as a commercial enterprise. Period. I don't see a choice. I understand this is now how it is in China today - they gave up against piracy. I is going to be that way elsewhere shortly.
Movies are probably next.
Your belief that everything should be free is what is putting many artists out of business.
Please name a few.
I will counter that those "artists" are "out of business" because THEY SUCK.
At your job, do you work for free?
No one is saying the artists shouldn't be paid. We're talking about the middleman here. There is no more room for the middleman, he has been made obsolete. Nice switch of the argument. EMI is not an "artist" as far as I know.
Now how hard would it be for a band to set up their own "store" on the internet and sell their tracks directly? Not very. I think the technological advances of the past 10 years have gone right over your head. Wake up, the world has changed.
The old model had the record industry going out to "scout" new bands to find a sound that they thought hopefully would sell. Now the bands just have to make themselves available electronically, and the people will decide what sells.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
3 would reduce sales, 4 is a prescription for losing money, 6 is the exact opposite of what most people want, and 7 is a recipe for not making any money at all. Do you honestly think we would be stuck with crappy pop acts if they didn't make money for the record companies? The reason mass media is so awful isn't because of some conspiracy to dumb down the populace--it's because the populace is already dumb enough to want those things.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
In theory, this is how the music industry is supposed to/used to/sometimes does work. Someone who is in charge of the money side of getting the music made (dedicated producer, one of the artists, it depends) hears some new band and thinks, hey, I like that. It's kind of cool. So, they go to the band and in exchange for a cut of the proceeds they give them a chance to get better known. This might be letting them open for shows, collaborating on a song or two, producing a CD, whatever.
Then the new band either takes off or not. If they do, a few years down the line, they hear someone know and the cycle repeats.
Right now, the section of the industry that has this working best is the rap industry. For all their other faults, they are really good at bringing in new talent(?). You can see it if you look at most rap artists on Wikipedia. Their history goes "was discovered by.." who in turn "was discovered by..." and so on.
I think you can judge the health of any section of the music business based on the percentage of the artists who got their starts playing small gigs until someone bigger gave them a shot.
Well, to be more precise about it, the major activities of the recording industry which enabled it to maintain itself as an oligopoly are being radically transformed by technology. It no longer takes a multi-million dollar recording studio to cut and mix a decent recording, you can do it with a Macintosh and Logic Pro. Distribution doesn't require production and distribution of expensive physical media. Copy a file to a web server and pay for bandwidth as it's needed. The recording industry won't survive in its current form. It has enormous volumes of valuable copyrighted material, so it will probably survive in some form. There is one leg holding them up right now, which is that new bands don't yet have a way to become super stars without expensive promotion, done by the record labels. If new bands ever figure out how to make money with the record labels, say through some thing like google ads or some mechanism as yet unthunk, this industry is so totally over, overnight.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
If the record companies had changed their business model when the business actually changed, they might have survived. As it is, they spent years alienating their consumers, crushing innocent people in extremely vindictive lawsuits, and generally establishing themselves in the minds of young people as the worst thing since the Third Reich.
Changing direction might have worked before you all made yourselves into the embodiment of corporate greed, contempt for humanity and disregard for civil liberties.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Folk isn't dead, it has just gone independent of the major labels. Many artists either have their own label, or record for small labels like Compass, Waterbug, Red House, Gadfly, or Rounder. The economics of the big labels just don't work well for smaller, independent artists. Labels will often dictate the terms of recording to smaller artists, forcing them to spend more money to do it the label's way rather than the artist's way. Artists on their own label usually make more money (better budget control), and have full artistic control, to boot. Folk artists learned early on to use the Web, email lists, MySpace, and other means of electronic communication to maintain a fan base. CDBaby has also made it easy for an independent artist to sell CD's nationwide.
The biggest obstacle to folk music is not the record labels, but the corporate concentration of commercial radio. Independent singer-songwriters are pretty much relegated to public radio, or satellite radio. ASCAP and BMI's methods of computing airplay for royalties favors the large commercial stations and shortchanges the artists who don't get airplay there. Since voting in ASCAP and BMI is apportioned in accordance to royalties received, that isn't likely to change. The royalty rate negotiations for webcasting will have a major effect as well, since the viability of smaller webcasters (and simulcasting of public radio) are threatened.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
The above isn't entirely correct. Capitalism builds on a premise that what people spend money on is a decent expression of what sort of things they want and what sort of things they think are "good". When you stop spending money on music
sigs are hazardous to your health