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EMI Only Selling CDs To Mega-Chains From Now On
farrellj writes "According to Zeropaid, record company EMI has been notifying small music stores that they will no longer be able to buy EMI CDs from EMI, and will have to buy product from mega-chains like Walmart. Independent record store customers are some of the most loyal music buyers around. You are not going to find the back catalog, what used to be the staple of the music business, at your local Walmart. One wonders when the music business is going to run out of feet to shoot?"
Well, no. But you won't find the vast majority of that at specialist retailers either, they don't have the space. They would order it for you, but everyone knows its easier (and frequently cheaper) to get it from amazon or their ilk. The web retailer own that long-tail retail space, and that's not going to change.
Specialist records stores will have to survive solely on the quality of information and advice their staff can provide -- it's their only market advantage.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Probably more important: Why would an aspiring artist go to EMI and have a limited reach when he could as well go to some competitor and be sold also to customers of small music shops? The loss of small music shop customers may not directly hurt EMI (otherwise they wouldn't have done this), but a loss of content to sell will probably hurt them. And it will not be obvious until the current hot stars are not hot anymore, and the new hot stars are with different labels. And then it's too late.
I personally think it's a bad business move. If I had EMI stock, now I would sell.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
People here seem to taking the "music industry is evil and outdated" thinking route again. However when I saw the title and summary, I couldn't but think that they're starting to see how internet distribution starts to dominate.
So now they're cutting extra costs by only delivering physical media to the largest retailers, and maybe putting that effort into online sales. If so, for me this sounds good.
However, their distribution network doesn't just consist of delivering those cd's to retailers or making them. There's lots of else involved too, from actually finding the artists that could be something, providing them studio time and sponsoring them so they can get their job done, making the music videos, doing promotion, making sure the actual product is somewhat quality (yeah, quality can be argued!) to actually delivering the products to retailers, tv and radio stations and whatever other places. Lots of times people forget that record labels do lots of other work too and sponsor the bands, and they're not there just to collect money forgefully.
This is why I think the record labels will continue to exist and will be used by artists. Yes, I said used. Its not necessary for artists to use them, noone force's them to. But lets face it, all that usually needs lots of money and time and work. Not a single person can usually do so much, but go work with record labels so they can handle all the other stuff and artists can spend the time on their core thing -- making music.
Agreed, I've read the original article, the summary here is seriously skewed, and most of the comments aren't reflecting what has really happened.
But I have to wonder about your claim this is not an excuse to pirate. As you point out, "the onestops don't have the depth of product"
So, if I want something that's 'in the deep abyssial trenches of the mighty product ocean', it's less and less likely to be available on a physical medium in my area. If they don't want to sell item X to me, I'm not a customer for it, from their point of view, not just mine.
Then, they want a high enough price for the non-physical version, at lower audio quality, without other support such as liner notes, album art, and preferably with DRM, they are effectively pricing that too to say "customers go away, we don't really want you".
Some of this makes a pretty good excuse to pirate, or at least a reason for the government to stay out of enforcement. Just like region encoding. If the distributer insists on there being region encoding, and then doesn't sell the product at all in certain regions, they've basically said they don't regard those people in those regions as even potential customers - so they can't have lost any sales, can they? Even if I grant all claims that the piracy is still both immoral and illegal, if there was zero market, the pirates did zero damages.
Where we may not see eye to eye on this is how completely this counts as a refusal by the companies to do business. A lot of people seem to think that offering digital versions at any price counts as still being interested in providing the goods to a potential customer. I don't think so. To make a bad car analogy, if gas sells for about $2.50 a gallon in your area, and you ran across a gas station that had some unusual gas formula that had some minor advantages and some major disadvantages to use, but they want $25.00 a gallon for it. I think most of us would drive past, saying "Well, they obviously don't want me as a customer", and some of us, like me, would add "... or anybody else either.". At some level, a bad enough price gouging counts as saying you have no intention of actually doing business at all, and if you're not actually in business, you've got some nerve demanding the government enforce the laws protecting your business.
Who is John Cabal?