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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?"
EMI is one of the big four RIAA member labels, along with Sony, Universal, and Warner. I stopped buying their shite ages ago, and I don't really care if I'm not buying it from a little store or a big one.
Loose lips lose spit.
Presumably, one explanation would be that the profit from the smaller stores that it is smaller than the administrative cost of sending them CDs. They could ask for more money, I guess, but perhaps they just don't want the administrative overhead.
You gotta think like a Music Executive to understand their logic.
Fixed Costs and shipping costs per CD shipped rise uncontrollably when sending it in small batches to mom-and-pop stores.
Their sale price is fixed. WHich means, EMI earns less from each CD shipped to corner store as its shipping costs eat up money.
Better way is to ship HUGE amounts to a few stores and ask the corner stores to buy their copies from them.
Of course it assumes that small shop owner still want to waste their time & money and drive to Walmart supercenters, negotiate a price with manager and come back with 100 CDs of latest Jessica Simpson singles.
LOL
That wastes two days: one day for shopping and one for sorting.
Who the hell wants to do that.
If i were a mom-and-pop shop owner, i would point my customers to allofmp3.com or some other seller of mp3 songs.
EMI's CEO has proved his tactical sense for next quarter results is strong, while his strategic business sense is as low as the IQ of his Turd.
Good luck EMI. You have given me one more reason to pirate.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
One stops are mid level distributors that carry product from multiple labels. Somewhere the person writing this article got very confused by what is going on here.
If you look at the article comments there is a guy there who is also pointing this out.
Not saying EMI isn't annoying as are most of the labels, but this article is seriously confused.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
I stopped buying EMI products the day the Harry Fox Agency accused me of being a criminal for putting my own work on the web.
Not only did I stop buying things from this company, I went from being an *avid* collector to them being *dead to me* and unlike some others, I never looked back.
At the same time, I started discovering independent music, *many* genres with artists who are far more interested in getting their message out than getting a 1/16th cent royalty from you. Many of these artists benefit from being discovered -- not by a record producer but by YOU, the person who might become a fan after listening, and who might actually attend a concert, not at a megastadium but at a club or a festival.
I don't really care what EMI does, or doesn't do. They are dead to me, and I do not believe in ghosts.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Because often, aspiring artists are not being courted by many labels simultaneously. Remember, most in the music business are looking, and perpetually waiting, for their "big break" - a major label offering them a contract. No-one will turn down a label because they think they'll do better with another. Labels are not a service industry for musicians. Musicians are raw material for the labels' products.
In the days when free market capitalism wasn't a dirty word and huge corporations didn't think they had a birth right to cashflow and generally worked hard to make money - 10 or 20 cents profit per CD would have still been seen as profit and worth working for.
Must be nice to have so much money that they can refuse to service customers because it requires some work.
EMI were a wonderful company once. They were not a mere record label, they were a leading electronics company. They developed the UK's first transistor-based computer, but arguable even more important is they helped Hounsfield develop his CAT scanner. The first CT machine was no the Siemes/General electric stuff we see today, it was an EMI. EMI have developed a machine that will probably save more lives than any drug (bar anti-biotics), for a tiny price (per scan).
How the mighty have fallen.
As this article points out, for musicians the alternatives are not just go it alone or sign with a record label. New business models are developing that permit musicians to raise money directly from investors and still maintain ownership of their copyrights and master recordings. While there may still be a place for the major record labels in the future, it's going to be a lot smaller than it is today.
How much does a billboard cost these days, anyway? or a radio ad? Do you really need to sign your life away to get these things?
Because it seems to me that all the labels really provide is the initial financing for advertising and studio time at usury rates.
It's not the labels that pay for the billboards, radio ads, etc to promote a performance. It's the venues and event promoters. However, those venues and event promoters won't spend the money on a non-signed act, nor book them to appear in the first place. Nor will booking agents that handle those type of higher-paying venues accept an unsigned act as a client.
For an average talented, but unsigned regional band to spend thousands on billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, etc etc on promoting a gig at some average bar/club where they'd be making a few hundreds of dollars would be insane.
There is a sort of glass ceiling effect where unless a band is signed, many of the most-lucrative venues and opportunities are simply not available.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
It's a bit of an irony that they go for "loud". CDs have a superior dynamic range than LPs, yet going for "loud" wastes this.
The loudness race started in earnest with Sony's Discman and other portable CD players. A lot of these used a cheap op-amp to drive the headphones, and discs had to be loud in order to be heard over outdoor noise.
Y'know, a year ago I would've agreed with you. But in that year I went off to college and discovered a wonderful little record store just off campus. Prior to this, the only places I ever got music were iTunes, my friends, and The Pirate Bay. I'm going to assume that's the case with you, that you've never been to a really good record store. Let me tell you what it's like.
Inside the store they have three separate racks: new, used, and used-and-no-one-likes-it. The new rack generally sells albums for $12-$14, which is slightly more than iTunes would run you. The used rack sells albums for $5-$9, or slightly less. The third rack sells albums for $2, or $1 if you buy 10 or more at a time. The third rack's quality, however, is a lot more suspect than the other two.
At this store, I found used albums by bands I had heard of, but never actually listened to (in this case, The Decemberists and Neutral Milk Hotel). I bought the used albums, listened to them, then went back and bought as many of their albums new as I could. I randomly stumbled upon a few great bands among the duds on the $1 rack, then bought some of their new stuff too. I splurged for the special editions of albums which I would not have on iTunes. In the past year, I have probably sent ~$100 on music. That's probably at least twice what I spent in the 18 years before that.
If this news is true, it's very sad. In my mind, the way the music industry can stay afloat is as follows:
So that's why I really don't want this to be true. I can't stand buying music in a large retailer, and hope that small independent stores can make a comeback.