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UK Music Retailers Beg, Drop the DRM
thefickler notes that consumers aren't the only ones carrying "Death to DRM" placards. UK music retailers are telling the recording industry enough is enough — that the industry's obsession with copy protection is hurting, not helping, profit. Kim Bayley, director-general of the UK Entertainment Retailers Association, said that the anti-piracy technologies are not protecting industry revenue but instead "stifling growth and working against the consumer interest." The ERA hopes the industry will drop DRM in time for the holiday season. Good luck with that.
You set up an unfair system and many people fall while some people avoid the trap.
After a while everybody knows about your trap and starts crying foul.
That's the time you have to prepare your next unfair system.
I fear the time when record labels say "We hear our customers and are removing the DRM system." followed by "Piracy is rampant! The only solution is...".
It can't be good for business if making a purchase becomes this difficult and piratism is actually much easier. Some weeks ago I was actually looking for a song in online music stores, and I found what I was looking for. Then trying to buy it was the problem, some were not selling to Europe, some had some ridicolous protections, weird formats. I was supposed to install some plugin/program to even listen to the music I just bought. For me that was too much to ask, and I after some time I just gave up.
If the music industry is a volume box shifting business, it has to rely on high volume low margin. It cannot expect the buyers to pay a premium price for singers and musicians who will be forgotten after they've had their Warhol (that's 15 minutes of fame).
It's like the car industry. The margins on a BMW are high because it costs a lot to persuade you to buy it. The margins on a European supermini are minimal because it costs almost nothing to get people to buy one, but people won't pay a high price for it. The music industry is alone in wanting to sell you a Trabant with the marketing budget of a BMW. This business model is based on the idea that the public is, in effect, too stupid to tell a Trabant from a BMW. It can't be guaranteed that this will remain the case.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Few people really care about DRM on DVDs. All DVD players will play the things. It's easily circumvented. It's more or less invisible to most people. DVD recorders are still quite rare amongst non-techies.
I think they're mostly talking about DRM for downloads. This is more of a problem. People expect their music to be portable, and don't want any complexity or compatibility problems transferring music to their mp3 players.
The reason the bookstore is doing well, but the CD store isn't, isn't because of piracy. It's because people want to read books (not just stories, but stories in books), but they want to listen to music, just not music on CDs. They'll buy their music from iTunes, Napster, etc because they can then listen to it on the move, on their 'portable music device'.
The only reason for anyone under 40 to buy a CD now is so they can rip it and put it onto their portable music device... Since record companies are trying hard to stop this, it means that less people will buy CDs. Anyone who does rip a CD is made to feel like a music pirate anyway - so they may as well go the whole hog and download it off the Internet - if you're a pirate for buying a CD and ripping it, why not be a pirate by downloading it, and save yourself a fortune at the same time.
Most people do NOT want to pirate music, but if that's the easiest way to get hold of the music to use as they want, that's what they'll use. If it cost £0.50 to buy a music track and was easy to do, and they could use it as they wanted (eg on all their music players) that's what most people would do - especially if they knew that £0.40 went to the artist/composer, rather than £0.01 to them, and the rest to the record label.
The problem with any 'how much piracy is around' surveys today is that they are looking at the situation today, when it's really hard to get a useful downloaded music track legitimately, and it's even harder to find a decent CD. So, people almost HAVE to pirate music to get what they want. Fix that, and there'd be less piracy.
November? The mince pies, xmas cake, and xmas puddings, were on the shelf in the local Tesco at the end of September this year.
I'd heartily support a ban on all Xmas activity until December, if it wasn't such a nanny state thing to do.
and they'll say "WHAT? SPEAK UP, WHIPPERSNAPPER. DOWN-LORDIE EMM PEE WHAT? Y'ALL FROM THE FUTURE?"
Buying hard copies at retail is a geezer's activity. Once you can store your entire collection on a fingernail-sized iPod clone, and get new tracks within seconds using weekend-daddy's credit card, why on earth would you want to go out and buy a huge bit of plastic to store a copy of the two tracks you want plus eight that you don't in a medium that you'll never listen to?
Physical distribution of CDs is dead in the water. It's an inefficient, unnecessary and expensive holdover from the ancient past. You might as well give away a free buggy whip with each 'album' (another dying concept) to try and boost sales.
Lest you retort with the stale old "There will always be a market for uncompressed music", fie on that. CDs are effectively compressed. Audiophiles already need to get their fix elsewhere, and their sad devotion to their ancient religion demonstrably isn't enough to keep disks-and-mortar stores open.
CDs are dead as a retail proposition. It's time to put down the buggy whip, and move on.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.