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Investors, "Beware" of Record Companies
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Motley Fool investment Web site warns investors to beware of 'Sony, BMG, Warner Music Group, Vivendi Universal, and EMI.' In an article entitled 'We're All Thieves to the RIAA,' a Motley Fool columnist, referring to the RIAA's pronouncement in early December in Atlantic v. Howell, that the copies which Mr. Howell had ripped from his CDs to MP3s in a shared files folder on his computer were 'unauthorized,' writer Alyce Lomax said 'a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value.'"
These guys (disclaimer: I'm not one of them and in fact haven't owned any stock for over 20 years) always say that you should pick a stock with a dividends to price ratio if ten to one or better.
Microsoft, the last I heard, pays no dividends.
So I think MS is probably a "stock for fools". If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing. That's not to say that gambling that Mars won't explode in the next two weeks isn't a good bet; some gambles are worthwhile.
As to the record companies, DUH! You don't need an expert to tell you that a company whose sales have been falling for over five years is a turkey.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Oh, they'll be dead before that. Artists are leaving record companies in droves. They'll start producing their own music and hiring niche marketing agencies to create demand instead. Even now, the smart ones are already moving in the marketing/concert promoter direction.
I doubt he'd say much.
RIAA: track record of suing their own customers, based on "evidence" gathered via pretty shady means
MS: doesn't regularly sue their own customers (their competitors, sure, but not random joe off the street)
Failure of vista: Not the only money maker that MS has. Also not their only market.
Failure of music sales: only thing the riaa has.
The parallels with SCO are amazing, especially given the sizes of the companies we are talking about. That they could fail to see the future coming at them and more importantly read the trends (i.e. Napster) and react to them in a positive, money-making fashion, is an indictment of the corporate system, where over-priced CEOs sit in their glass-lined offices looking like suit-wearing fish and providing just about as much value to their company. When you start treating your customers as criminals, you have slipped over the edge and down the slippery slope toward oblivion.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Bad comparison! John Henry was a champion for the dignity of human work. He illustrated the very real danger of big business treating individuals as disposable ever since the industrial revolution. John Henry as the RIAA? Ridiculous.
Now where have I heard that before... Oh, that's right. SCO. And look where they're at...
Yeah, but they didn't have much to market and a very small group that they could actually market their products (invented or real) to. SCO had to invent the "Pay us for Linux or we'll sue later" shit in order to have something that some companies would actually be willing to pay them for.
Those involved with the RIAA still have a product that is mass marketable and that plenty of people will continue to purchase. Just because the Slashbotters (me included on this one) refuse to support RIAA music doesn't mean that anyone else really gives a shit. Yes, artists are starting to come around and going around the RIAA by distributing their music online, and it's working, but it's still not to the point where it's a 100% viable method to get your music out.
It will be at least 5 years and more like 15 to 20 before we really see the fuckers die off -- as unfortunate as that is.
Actually, I wonder how their stock shares fare.
Many companies have been proclaimed dead or dying while their shares kept going up, and they keep going up still. Some portals were proclaimed to be dead because their percentage market share vaned comparing to Google, but they actually gain users as the net grows, and they actually grow and note profits each year.
So how's it for the record industry?
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And Atlantic V. Howell is the context of this story. See how neatly that works out?
It's also been the definition they used in other cases. I don't know whether they think the term explains itself, or whether they're deliberately using vague wording for some reason... or maybe they do define their meaning clearly somewhere and I haven't seen it.
In any case, I think in the long run it's in their own interest to be clear and to use a narrow definition that requires not only shared access but also indexing / notification of availability that facilitates unauthorized copying (in the "actually illegal because it's unauthorized" sense).
While I agree with the sentiment, are artists really leaving in "droves?" Other than indie artists maybe never pursuing a label to start with, how many already-signed artists are leaving the labels? Can you list more than 10? More than 20? Even if you listed 1000, I'm sure it would be something like a tiny single digit percentage (or less) of the total artists on labels, hardly qualifying as droves.
I think it *will* happen, and hopefully at an exponentially increasing rate. But for now, they still have the stranglehold on the artists.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
They have a 20 year old notion of how much a "unit" they need to make. This notion is ludicrous given the tech advances we have. They failed to keep dropping prices for their disks when they could. Instead of using the volume sales concept, they stubbornly stuck to making dollars profits on cents worth of plastic and paper. They just don't get it that price gouging doesn't work. The ultimate decision makers in that industry who decide pricing levels are *all millionaires*, they just can't relate to what stuff costs anymore for people who are not. And the legislators they "consult" with, similar. they live and work in an extremely expensive part of the US, DC, and none of them can be considered "working class" in the traditional sense. In short, the pair of them that try to set pricing and laws when it comes to IP and tech advances mean for tangibles cost just can't see the forest for the trees, they have no practical frame of reference. And even with "market studies", those can be flawed as well, and the ultimate proof of "market studies" is whether or not your widget you sell sells with full customer satisfaction or not, and in this case, they fail it, so even their marketing studies are therefore flawed by empirical evidence. We can all see it, right there in plain sight. If they weren't, we wouldn't be seeing these articles all the time or be discussing copies and copyright and so on. They just can't handle the innovation and ramifications of replicator technology so far, even though we are still in the tiny opening phases of such tech. That means as we get closer to cheap tangibles replication for the "masses" guy, star trek level tech, headed that way, they will continue to screw up, using their concept of enforced luddism by "law" as a business model. It is not only just plain ignorant and stupid, it is harmful to the over all economy and for society in general.