Nope, they provide a central point of control for an artistic medium as a "value add" service.
They control the format in which artists may distribute their work, the format in which we (the customer, who is apparently always right) may store the product we purchased. They offer the artist the option of enforcement, seeing to it that life is as inconvenient for the consumer as humanly possible.
Seriously though, I'd like to see a serious list of the services the record companies provide - advertising for music is almost nonexistent (I hardly ever see a poster or TV commercial that is specifically advertising an album or single, unless it's one of those compilation CD's). Face it - the ultimate form of advertising for music is wide distribution. The more times you hear their songs, the more likely you are to buy the CD. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard a song on the radio, at work, or at home in MP3 format and gone out and purchased the entire album.
Sure, you can download the whole thing. But people like actually holding the product.
So since I'm a moron, how 'bout you elaborate on your flame - some details on these services would surely shed some light on this topic for myself (and all the other morons out here).
Another perfect example of the record labels just wanting to suck more money out of us. If we brought our original CD's in, stuck them in a CD tower, and played them at work, that'd be legal, but using something slightly more advanced to store the music (like MP3 files) is considered illegal....
One of these days, the record companies are going to find themselves out of a job - artists will realise how useless the labels actually are, recording equipment will become too cheap for the record companies to justify their (huge) slice of the revenue, and we will finally see the end of this rubbish.
I have a garden gnome that compares favourably to some management...
I'm interested in this book simply because it's the first time I've seen management (or a management consultant) acknowledge that "special" category of tech - the ones who understand the incomprehensible.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a drastic shortage of these Einsteins. Most of the techs working around me struggle with basic concepts like plugging the things in.
In a previous life, we named our servers thus:
sbbbffrxxyy
Where....
S = State that the server was in (eg. V for Victoria).
BBB = 3 chars for building ID numbers. We used the building ID numbers for all sorts of things, so they were easy to remember
FF = 2 digits for the floor the box serviced (the datacentre floor for general purpose boxes)
R = 1 char for the role of the server (P for PDC, B for BDC, F for file server, E for Exchange, etc).
XX = 2 digits for which switch they were connected to
YY = 2 digits to "make each box unique". 00 for the first one, 01 for the second, etc.
A bit of a pain at first, but you get into the habit of referring to them as "level 10's first file server is down" - very precise way to identify each server (VML110S0100 in this case).
Being in Australia, single character state codes were fine but I could imagine most countries requiring at least two chars.
This strategy begins to fall apart when you have servers that do many things at once - using the one character role to represent which of the many roles the box does in binary is just a bit too hard to work out on the fly;-)
On the other hand, I had a manager once who insisted we name print servers after colours. Amazing how few colours they could actually name when it came to the crunch though...
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Nope, they provide a central point of control for an artistic medium as a "value add" service.
They control the format in which artists may distribute their work, the format in which we (the customer, who is apparently always right) may store the product we purchased. They offer the artist the option of enforcement, seeing to it that life is as inconvenient for the consumer as humanly possible.
Seriously though, I'd like to see a serious list of the services the record companies provide - advertising for music is almost nonexistent (I hardly ever see a poster or TV commercial that is specifically advertising an album or single, unless it's one of those compilation CD's). Face it - the ultimate form of advertising for music is wide distribution. The more times you hear their songs, the more likely you are to buy the CD. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard a song on the radio, at work, or at home in MP3 format and gone out and purchased the entire album.
Sure, you can download the whole thing. But people like actually holding the product.
So since I'm a moron, how 'bout you elaborate on your flame - some details on these services would surely shed some light on this topic for myself (and all the other morons out here).
Another perfect example of the record labels just wanting to suck more money out of us. If we brought our original CD's in, stuck them in a CD tower, and played them at work, that'd be legal, but using something slightly more advanced to store the music (like MP3 files) is considered illegal....
One of these days, the record companies are going to find themselves out of a job - artists will realise how useless the labels actually are, recording equipment will become too cheap for the record companies to justify their (huge) slice of the revenue, and we will finally see the end of this rubbish.
I have a garden gnome that compares favourably to some management...
I'm interested in this book simply because it's the first time I've seen management (or a management consultant) acknowledge that "special" category of tech - the ones who understand the incomprehensible.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a drastic shortage of these Einsteins. Most of the techs working around me struggle with basic concepts like plugging the things in.
In a previous life, we named our servers thus: sbbbffrxxyy Where.... S = State that the server was in (eg. V for Victoria). BBB = 3 chars for building ID numbers. We used the building ID numbers for all sorts of things, so they were easy to remember FF = 2 digits for the floor the box serviced (the datacentre floor for general purpose boxes) R = 1 char for the role of the server (P for PDC, B for BDC, F for file server, E for Exchange, etc). XX = 2 digits for which switch they were connected to YY = 2 digits to "make each box unique". 00 for the first one, 01 for the second, etc. A bit of a pain at first, but you get into the habit of referring to them as "level 10's first file server is down" - very precise way to identify each server (VML110S0100 in this case). Being in Australia, single character state codes were fine but I could imagine most countries requiring at least two chars. This strategy begins to fall apart when you have servers that do many things at once - using the one character role to represent which of the many roles the box does in binary is just a bit too hard to work out on the fly ;-)
On the other hand, I had a manager once who insisted we name print servers after colours. Amazing how few colours they could actually name when it came to the crunch though...