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Universal Wants a Slice of Apple's iPod Pie
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Nov 29, 2006 08:36 PM
from the pay-to-play dept.
from the pay-to-play dept.
vought writes "According to a Reuters report, Universal is now taking the precendent set by Microsoft's Zune and moving to force Apple to include a royalty payment with each iPod.
In the words of Universal Music's Doug Morris, 'These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it's time to get paid for it.' Does Microsoft's precedent mean the start of a slippery slope that will add a 'pirate tax' to every piece of hardware that touches digital music?"
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To Doug Morris... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the regretful, embarrassing, yet immortal words of Dick Cheney...... " Go F$@% yourself ".
I personally take offense at the allegation that there is *any* stolen music on my iPod or any of my computers. All of my music has been purchased on CD or the iTunes Music store as it is on most of the peoples iPods and computers that I know of. Your allegation suggests that you actually do not know about your potential customers, their desires, technology or most disturbingly, the music industry itself. Apparently, you also don't seem to be able to understand that you need to out-compete the piracy industry by offering a quality product at a reasonable price and in a manner that is easy for people to pay for. Marketing 101 tells us that the way to make money is to create a product people want and then remove any barriers that will prevent people from *willingly* giving their money to you in exchange for those goods or services. The iTMS has shown you how it is done, yet you get in bed with Microsoft who apparently cannot design a device that will compete in the same arena with the iPod, then you force people to buy points that they can then exchange for music *and* you want a slice of the hardware market. If you want into that market, why not create your own hardware? To do anything else is leveraging your monopoly to extort money from another industry and the last time I checked, that behavior is illegal.
So, quit whining about all the pirates and do something constructive that adds to your product or services rather than placing restrictions on your product that makes it less appealing to the end user or customer. Oh, and while you are at it, you might want to put more energy on finding good musical talent for the music industry. Its out there, but you need to stop focusing on engineered pretty boy and girl acts and put more effort into finding and promoting real talent.
Re:To Doug Morris... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Fuckin' A Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have too easy a time imagining this 'fee' increasing every year, every time you buy a new music-related device.
So yeah...they pull this off and I will have ZERO ethical issues about copying every bit of music I can find. Greedy fucks.
Parent
Re:Fuckin' A Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Fuckin' A Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
They charge a piracy tax, so we pirate.
They sue, we move to dismiss: "We've already paid for the licence to do this your honour"
-nB
Parent
Re:Fuckin' A Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not a good thing in disguise. Why? Because that music tax would only go to RIAA-owned artists. Every other musician would get entirely fucked over.
Parent
Re:Fuckin' A Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it be too much if it meant that, having already paid the price of your piracy, that you could not be sued for subsequent pirate activity?
I believe this is the situation in Canada. They pay the tax, yes, but then the Canadian music industry cannot go after any of the Canadian pirates. So in theory, you could just go out and download every song they ever published. I bet it's the recording industry who would think they got the short end of the stick on that one!
It won't work that way in the U.S. of course. In the U.S., we will end up paying the tax on anything even remotely capable of pirating music (which is soon going to be everything in your house from your computer to your door mat), and you will be emminently sueable (soon to be jailable) if you actually do pirate anything. They'll charge you coming and going, even if you never touch anything they make, and imprison you if you dare not pay them. Because here in the U.S., we hate the idea of government-owned business, but we love the idea of business-owned government.
Parent
Re:Fuckin' A Right! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Fuckin' A Right! (Score:5, Interesting)
The levy is a fee paid to the recording industry to subsidise the industry for the loss of revenue taken from duplicate media sales to compensate the industry for *fair-use* backups of media for personal use. Really a coup for the music industry because they're getting paid every time you exercise your rights, and they still get to take you to court if they can fake enough evidence about your downloading.
But this new one is fantastic, because if Apple accedes to the music industry's wish (and I personally hope they will as quickly as possible), it hopefully (IANAL) creates an circumstance where you have already paid damages to the music industry, and hopefully double jeopardy means they can now not take you to court and say "well you took our music but we weren't compensated" because they will have been (for any music published by Universal at least). Thus making their entire catalog free for download by anyone, anywhere, who owns an iPod.
This is different from the Zune, which pays money to the publisher simply as a gratuity for the favour of their songs being available on the Zune music purchasing outlet. The establishment in this case is not being compensated for copyright infringement.
Parent
Re:To Doug Morris... (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW I was in a band signed to a UK indie label during the 80's which was had licensing deals with pretty much every major label around the World. Then came the 90's and slowly but surely the CD's started disappearing off Tower Records' shelves. Then came the 00's and we get our own section on iTunes.
Needless to say if I'd bought my first MP3 player in the 00's I would have gone straight to iTunes and bought my albums from there, but instead I bought my first MP3 player in the late 90's and had to resort to grabbing un-licensed MP3's of my songs from wherever I could find them, basically because I didn't have the orginal CD's (my entire record collection is just that, records, and stored back in the UK) and I couldn't find CD's in used record stores.
If the record labels had got their shit together to build their own kickass online record store, and made their own kickass players so people could listen to them, Apple wouldn't have seen an opportunity and created iTunes and the iPod.
So FUCK YOU Universal, and every other label that starts crying about lost revenue.
Parent
Re:To Doug Morris... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I'm paying the "pirate tax" to help them recover the "losses" they have from piracy, there's no problem then, right? If they are still going to sue my guts if I have pirated mp3s on my ipod, then why I am paying extra money with the purchase of an ipod? I'm paying them protection money and they still come after me? If they are going to act like the mob, they should at least do it properly...
Parent
Re:To Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, today the playing field isn't tilting toward Microsoft; it has only manged to sell enough Zunes to eat into PlaysForSure players in week 1; it has since dropped off the charts.
Anyone who thinks Universal can pull its content out of the iTMS and be the victor is smoking crack. The iTunes Store isn't selling everyone their music; its only selling to a small segment regularly. Everyone else is buying CDs or using the iPod to listen to their own music. The iPod has no lock with iTunes Music, you can fill it any way you like.
The labels somehow think that consumers should repurchase their entire music library in electronic form, and when PlaysForSure stores and the iTunes Store didn't, they were puzzled. What is happening is that a small minority of people are paying for music in the iTunes Store, far more than are using any other online system (apart from piracy of course).
If Universal pulls out of the only system that works, it will be left to watch its sales slow down right when online sales through iTunes are the only growing market left for commercial music.
Apple can't afford to be too arrogant, but neither can Universal. Right now, Apple is handing Universal the vast majority of the profits it collects from iTunes sales. If Universal poisons the deal, they're only screwing themselves. The iPod and iTunes aren't going away, and the Zune isn't going to funnel any money to Universal at all.
In the big picture, Universal is desperate for sales, and iTunes is the only system offering something that works. Apple is building that into a movie business, too.
How Original Content Will Change Entertainment [roughlydrafted.com]
Steve Jobs has connections in music, movies, and TV - how long before Apple begins commissioning original programming? Here's a look at the music, movie and TV business, and why Apple's involvement in each is far larger than the mainstream media seems to understand.
Parent
Sounds good if you legalize file sharing (Score:5, Interesting)
If they charged a fee for each device and let us have free, legal file sharing (since we paid for the content with our device fee) it sounds semi reasonable.
Of course that's not what they are talking about so...
Re:Sounds good if you legalize file sharing (Score:5, Interesting)
What happened in Canada is exactly what could happen here.
They started charging a pirate tax on media, so some clever people figured out that as long as they were paying the tax and being branded a pirate, that gave them a legal right to download. The courts apparently agreed.
Amazing that the idiot proposing this doesn't know it.
Parent
Re:Sounds good if you legalize file sharing (Score:5, Interesting)
The iPod is a media player, so look at how it relates to other media players. When you buy a TV, does part of the purchase price go to Paramount just in case someone watches a pirated version of Indiana Jones on it? Does every movie theater built in the USA have to pay construction fees to movie companies (I'm not talking proceeds of ticket sales, I'm talking about a fee just to build the damn theater) because it's possible a future owner might show a pirated film there?
If this Universal casehas any merit, it should extend to everything just to point out how ridiculous it is. Eg, every hammer sold should include a fee to De Beers because that hammer can be used to break a window and steal one of their diamonds. Likewise every diamond purchased should include a fee to Home Depot, because that diamond can be ground to make diamond dust, which can be used to saw through locking gates and bars and to steal hammers. Rinse lather repeat.
Parent
just say no (Score:5, Insightful)
Universal Music, Here is My Reply (Score:5, Insightful)
Tag: Asinine (Score:5, Interesting)
What kind of environment do you have to be raised in that instills a sense of entitlement so absolute that it reduces onlookers to standing agape in stunned silence?
These people need to be kept away from sharp objects and heavy machinery until they grow up.
Schwab
Fast forward to 2007 (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Jobs: No.
Doug Morris: We asked Microsoft for $1 for each Zune sold, and they said "Yes".
Steve Jobs: They were desperate. We're not. By the way, how has the Zune deal been working out for you?
Doug Morris: So far, we've gotten $52.
iTMS Sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not $1000 dollars per iPod? (Score:5, Insightful)
What seems likely is that Morris is demanding an approximation 3% tariff on the sales price like the 3% tariff the industry **already** receives from the sale of all recordable CDs marked "for music." As with Morris proposed "iPod" tax, the public receives nothing in return for music CD-R tax which was supposed to compensate the recording industry in return for not suing equipment manufacturers over Home Recording. As history shows, The Audio Home Recording Act did nothing to squelch the industries thirst for litigation, so there is no reason to think that giving in to an "iPod" tax will do anything along those lines.
If UMG wants to "tax" iPods, they need to give something up in return--like submitting to compulsory licensing for download as they have to for radio station playback and Jukeboxes.
And how would they make that happen exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Supply and demand applies here:
85% of all MP3 players are iPods.
After briefly debuting as the 7th most popular MP3 player, the Zune dropped to 13th most popular.
Universal gets three choices here:
Put up (only sell music through the Zune store as that is, let's face it, the only influence they have) and deal with only having the 13th most popular MP3 player market to go after... Not going to happen.
Shut up... Also not likely to happen.
Neither... They'll whine loudly, whilst sensibly not daring to cut their noses off to spite their faces, and occasionally create hype inducing headlines.
The previous MP3 taxes on hardware got through five plus years ago when MP3s were something weird the kids do. Passing laws to fine people who don't get a vote is really easy. In the half decade since, huge numbers of middle Americans have bought iPods and they're a part of mainstream society. The ignorance and "aren't l33t pirates bad!" claim doesn't work so well when middle American voters realize it suddenly applies to them and they'd be voting to make their toys more expensive.
So, Zune is such an embarassing joke it can hardly be called a trend setter, Universal won't dare actually boycot iTunes in order to make a point and MP3 players are so popular that the laws that got snuck through in the past now get soccer moms outraged. They can't affect it through business models or laws... Game over.
In much the same way, I want endless women. However, I control such a small part of the dating market that even if I boycot women, I doubt it'll bother them half as much as it'll bother me. I can't get a law passed that forces women to like me because it'd be political suicide for politicians. So, much like universal, that leaves me whining loudly about how things should be and yet nothing actually changing.
Re:Braindamage? (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, what did the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics [aiaa.org] ever do to you? (ducks)
Parent
Re:Seriously (Score:5, Funny)
"ADSL modems! They all know they are being used to download illegal mp3s (well, and porn)"
"Monitors! Everybody knows people use them to find songs to download illegally"
"Mice! Everyone knows that they are mainly used to download songs illegally"
"And don't even get me started on chairs, food and houses. They are only being used to maintain themselves so they can download more music!"
Parent
Re:YES! This makes PERFECT sense! (Score:5, Insightful)
I RTFA looking for this juicy little quote and couldn't find it anywhere. Am I blind or did the submitter make up a quote for Mr. Morris?
Parent