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Music Industry Tells Advertisers to Boycott "Pirate" Baidu
An anonymous reader points to a story at PC Authority, which begins: "Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu, China's largest search engine, because they believe it is encouraging music piracy. Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China, according to the representatives, who describe the company as 'incorrigible.' The Chinese firm's music search engine is accessed through what is described as a prominent link on the company's home page."
Why would advertisers care? They don't have any music being pirated (or obtained legally, for that matter).
Maybe they should have sent Baidu a DMCA notice instead. </sarcasm>
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AFAIK, artists may be able to earn more money by putting their music to download for free on a website with advertising, than by going through a record company. When will the record companies finally realize they need to adapt?
It's not that simple.
For a start, advertising doesn't really pay big bucks any more. We've had companies flop during the peak of advertising money in the dot-con years with that model, what makes you think it's more viable now?
A quick search says that the Cost Per Click (i.e., what the advertising companies pay) can be as low as 1 cent per click. After the ad provider takes their share, it's even less money for the site carrying the ads. And that's per _click_. So if every single person downloading your music were to actually click a banner per song downloaded (fat chance) and the ad provider gave you the full cent (fat chance), you'd need to sell some thousands of songs per month just to pay for your hosting costs. Probably more, since you use bandwidth too.
Pay per view, even less. If you go really per view, expect it to be small fractions of a cent.
Remember, you're not Penny Arcade or PvP Online as a musician. You're not going to make a new song per day, and serve an ad or two with each one.
The RIAA members also provide one valuable service: they create a scarcity via marketing. There are hundreds of thousands of girls who can sing just as well as Britney Spears, and don't look much worse. But there's only one Britney Spears. And boy band members are even more dime a dozen, and chosen mostly on how well they look (i.e. how wet would they get a 16 year old girl seeing them on stage.) Not on any skills in composing that music or expressing anything profound. There are a few tens of million of young guys who'd be not much worse than, say, Backstreet Boys, and some would probably be only better.
So while it's easy to say "OMG, musician X is only getting a pittance out of the CD sales, and gets all the money out of concerts anyway," the more cruel reality is that musician X would be yet another _nobody_ without the publisher. Maybe a thousand people would know about his music, and maybe a dozen of them could be arsed to show up at a concert.
To put it otherwise, it's an economy of massive overproduction. If left to the free market, you'd be about as able to make a money out of music as you'd make money out of your farm in 1929. When there's 10 times more produced than anyone needs, and the products are perfectly interchangeable, the price doesn't just go 10 times lower. It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily the best model for society, but that's how it works.
And the moral of the story is: well, maybe a better model can be found, but it will have to be a better one than, basically, "but I want them to work for me for a tenth of a cent in ads."
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