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Warner Music CEO Says War With Consumers Was Wrong
l2718 writes "Edgar Bronfman, CEO of the Warner Music Group, has publicly framed the music industry's failure to accommodate file-sharing as an 'inadvertent' war on consumers. I'm left wondering how you can file a series of lawsuits inadvertently. 'We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding ... By ... moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.'"
I think he means that back in the Napster lawsuit days, when all you idiots were crying about how the RIAA should be suing illegal filesharers and offering up a stream of condescending analogies about how toolmakers shouldn't be responsible for the actions of users, they made the mistake of believing you.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This is definitely off topic, but I was thinking the exact opposite. I have a large DVD and game collection that I hardly ever use. I figure I've gotten maybe 5 hours of enjoyment per DVD (some more, some less) and maybe 10-20 out of an average game. On the flip side, each song that I buy from itunes at $1 each have gotten played at least 20x. That's over $1 / hour of enjoyment for music as opposed to $3-$4 for a dvd and $.50-$6 for a game. If I buy a whole album, it usually gets the same amount or more play than the songs i buy a la carte, which usually leads to a higher value over time.
It's a rare movie or game that gets played more than 2 or 3 times for me, but it's even more rare for me to have a song that doesn't get played at least 10x. From what I've read and seen, this is the case for most people.
sigs are hazardous to your health
I think the implication here is that they failed to realize the people they were taking to court were also their customers. There's often a disconnect in the mind of business (created by those who stand to profit like lawyers) between one's customers and those who do things one may not like.
Another example that comes to mind would be loitering laws at malls (as teenagers who loiter often have the highest disposable incomes to spend, and those who complain are often the ones tight in the wallet).
Warner may have believed they were suing "bad people" and providing music at the same time on CD for "good people" and have finally realized (possibly as a result of recent studies) that they've in fact been alienating their customer base.
Yes yes, we all knew this already, but its also quite obvious to me that most executives thought the loud "we" who hate these lawsuits were also not customers of theirs and therefore irrelevant. I've had personal discussions about this with people who work for record companies (some related, some not) and they often have a strange view of my perspective as somehow only existing within the "pirate" world and don't see it as pervasive amongst their customer base.
Hopefully that's changing.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
In the "war on piracy" their intention was to prevent people from sharing music (i.e.: to at least maintain their previous business model). However, the consumers won that war: at present people routinely fileshare. Most people I know have an iPod (or equivalent) and all of them have it filled with music, where they only paid for 0-20% of those tracks. The average consumer is file-sharing. The industry couldn't stop it. The consumers won that battle, and the industry lost.
As they say, however, the battle may be won but the war is far from over. The grander issue here is whether copyright law itself is valid in its present form... and whether changing it means more protections/enforcement (for the established industry), or more freedoms/rights (for the citizens). I'm still boycotting new music purchases. As well you should. There are so many better sources for music (independent labels, creative commons music, etc.) that there is no excuse for purchasing any music from companies involved in the unethical legal and lobbying tactics of the established cartel.
That's when the real victory will come: when these currently "fringe" sources of music become the norm, and the established cartel withers away (or reinvents itself to survive).
Ah, but he's not apologizing for the lawsuits -- he's apologizing for not releasing DRM-riddled restrictively-licensed music fast enough, which he thinks is what forced consumers to share music illegally.
Exactly. The bottom line is this article isn't saying anything like what's being implied in the summary; in fact, just the opposite.
His "war" with consumers, from his perspective, is that the music industry wasn't offering consumers what they wanted, so they went out and took it. But if you read the rest of his comments, the problem is he still isn't understanding just what it is that people want. He thinks that DRM-free music is just being used as a means to an end rather than being an end in itself. He thinks that if the record labels just give everybody music pre-made in the formats that they want, even if it comes saddled with DRM and even if consumers need to buy the same music over and over, that they will buy it as long as it's easy and convenient enough for them to get it.
He's totally missing the point, which is that if I have a CD, or a DRM-free digital download, I buy the music once and can then put it anywhere I want to. I can listen to it, my wife can listen to it, I can make a ringtone out of it, I can put it on my iPod or make a mix CD. His idea is still to sell you multiple copies of the same tracks in all these different places, and he thinks where his company went wrong was in not doing that early enough. That's just as wrongheaded as Warner ever has been.
And he says absolutely nothing about the lawsuits, which he will no doubt continue supporting.
That might be the funniest piece of BS I've read in a long time. A war was inadvertently started against the consumers, just like Hitler inadvertently started WWII.
isn't the various Idol shows to be found in North America and abroad the ultimate expression of that
IMHO that is not entirely the case. In fact, compared to the "new" material that the "professional" artists are putting out in the MAFIAA label system these days, shows like Pop Idol and American Idol are a breath of fresh air. These shows actually do find and select some talented new vocalists from among the general populations (the diamonds in the rough if you will) who would never have gotten exposure otherwise under the marketing driven, make anyone sound good in the studio, craptastic MAFIAA label system. Consider the following:
1) The contestants are selected in a grueling process of elimination where actual performance is judged brutally by judges, like Simon who doesn't pull punches when the performance is sub-par, without regard to favoritism, who the contestant is connected with, or crap like that but rather solely upon whether or not, in the opinion of the judges, the contestant could earn the best return on their (Simon's) money if they sign them for a recording contract. Now, admittedly the audience sometimes votes for bad contestants just to make some trouble, but everyone knows that they are still bad so in the end it doesn't really matter that much for who wins the competition.
2) At almost every stage the contestants get to choose what songs they are going to sing and although the choices are sometimes limited to the catalog of a particular guest professional artist or genre there are generally plenty of potential song choices for each contestant.
I particularly like it when professionals make a guest appearance on the show and end up sounding worse then the talented young contestants. They invariably invite the comparison just by appearing on the show. In fact, I don't understand why some professionals appear on the show, it only highlights the fact that they are over the hill or even worse that they were never as talented as some of the up and coming contestants...a potentially bad career move for them.
Frankly, I don't much care for pop style music, but there have been some really good female African American Jazz style vocalists on the show who sound great when they sing the old standards from the likes of Billy Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.
My point is that contrary to contributing to the problem of mediocre music, shows like American Idol, could potentially be the antidote to no-talent bands and the crap that has come out of the marketing driven "promotion" of sub-par "artists" by the MAFIAA labels. It is really hard to hide the fact that you suck when you have to sing live in front of a studio and television audience straight into the mike with no second takes, remixing, or other studio tricks. In such situations the real talent tends to come forward while the hacks leave in disgrace (or hopefully don't even make it onto the show in the first place).
Well, what do you expect? Read Bronfman's entry on Wikipedia. He was the heir to Seagram's Liquor. His whole life has been carried along by family connections. Highlights from Wikipedia:
- "He was particularly active in school theatre, an interest his parents supported by donating to construct The Ann and Edgar Bronfman Theatre during a 1967 expansion at The Collegiate School, the prestigious private school in Manhattan which Edgar Jr. attended."
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"The summer before his final year of high school, in 1972, he was a credited producer on the film, The Blockhouse. Despite his inexperience, Bronfman's involvement was accepted because of his connections and access to financing."
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"By 1994 he became the Chief Executive Officer (of Seagrams), where he began a move away from the traditional liquor business and into entertainment.
The first step in this diversification was the widely criticized sale of Seagram's stake in DuPont."
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"Bronfman, Jr., then led Seagram into a disastrous all-stock acquisition by French conglomerate Vivendi in 2000."
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"Seagram's for all intents and purposes ceased to exist."
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"On February 27, 2004, Bronfman finalized the acquisition of Warner Music Group and he has served as Chairman and CEO of the music company since that time."
He didn't build up Warner Music, or move up within the company, or come to it from success elsewhere. He bought the thing with inherited money, after a long career as a failed executive.Consumers/sharers won. Music has no monetary value today. If you want to sell some recorded music, you might find some people that don't know how to download or have too slow an Internet connection. Some people might pay money on iTunes for the same MP3 that you or I would just download for free. A few folks with heavy guilt complexes might want to pay or they wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
Now the record companies can move on. Only problem is, where are they going to move to? Nobody in their right mind is going to pay lots of money for trinket go-with items like jewel cases for their CDs. Pretty much the "recorded music industry" is going to disappear now that the exec's have figured out their "war" is over.
I'd expect to see in the next year or so some new media distribution deal coming along. One that doesn't involve music in any way but is difficult or impossible for the average person to re-distribute. Probably because of raw size, but also temporal locality - something like a 24-hour live Big Brother show but only on the Internet. If you miss something, well, keep watching because something completely new and original will happen - just keep watching 24x7.
Just think about some unknown "instant celebrity" having a camera on them 24x7 (night vision in the dark) for people to watch. Look! She's combing her hair again! Look! She is putting on THAT dress!
iTunes is just a stopgap measure between the old world and the new
in the new world, all music content will be free. artists will support themselves with tip jars and advertisements and touring. and THERE WILL BE NO MIDDLE MAN. because the internet has simply replaced them
iTunes, bertelsman, polygram: dust in the wind. the dutch east india company. extinct. defunct, irrelevant and unnecessary
and these developments have nothing at all to do with all the tired old legal arguments. it will just happen, because it's simple economic forces at work
the final implications of the new technology called the internet is the extinction of all music publishers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it