Apple Holding Back the Music Business? 705
conq writes "With average weekly download as of Nov. 27 sales down 0.44% vs. the third quart, BusinessWeek speculates that Apple might in fact be holding back the music industry." From the article: "As has been true since the start, iPod owners mostly fill up their players from their own CD collections or swipe tunes from file-sharing sites. Now legal downloads may be losing their luster. According to Nielsen SoundScan, average weekly download sales as of Nov. 27 fell 0.44% vs. the third quarter. Says independent media analyst Richard Greenfield: 'We're not seeing the kind of dramatic growth we should given the surge in sales of iPods and other MP3 players.'"
Silly (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, it's right before Christmas, as the article points out. Nobody's going nuts buying music because they're spending all their money on presents and other holiday shit. Apple says they're selling a crapload of gift cards, and I believe them, given that everything iPod seems to fly off the shelves, virtual or otherwise. Regardless, since you no longer have to buy the physical media songs come on, there's no reason to buy them when you're doing your normal Christmas shopping, so sales very well *should* be down.
iPod sales are nuts, as usual, but that doesn't mean that music has to be selling, either. How many people you know, out of those who have bought iPods recently, are buying their first one? I'm sure a large portion of whatever iPods they're selling are peoples' second or third such devices. They're not going to be re-buying songs just because they got a new player, at least for now...
All this amounts to is another chance for the music services that lost (and it was pretty much over before they even got started) to bash Apple in a futile attempt to gain some traction. It's pointless, though. There's no buzz about Napster or Rhapsody, it's all iPod, iPod, iPod, for better or worse.
Not that bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention a lot of the MP3 player sales they're basing their estimates on could have been bought as Christmas presents.
I think they just WANTED a big growth in sales and things just don't always work out that way. They should compare things year to year, not quarter to quarter...
That's my $0.02
A saturated market. (Score:3, Insightful)
For now.
That's all.
0.44%? (Score:1, Insightful)
Be my guest (Score:5, Insightful)
If music industry is considering non-propietory technology and prices below 99 cents/song, there is nothing Apple can do to prevent that. All they have to do is put their stuff on mp3tunes.com
Too Expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
They're GIFTS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sell us better music! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm... sales suck on CD, sales suck online... maybe it's time for the record industry to reconsider its current business model of pushing albums where the musicians lose almost all control to producers who churn out an album with three good songs and ten filler tracks.
An industry with millions of users is down 0.44%? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely Correct (Score:3, Insightful)
The article mentions this too....how does that hold back the music industry? They're still making money (and probably more per song than through Apple) on people buying CD's.
Not Apple's Fault! (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs wants to lower the cost of songs, but the RIAA has insisted that they raise the cost of new songs in order to lower the cost of other ones. Many people are not willing to pay $.99/song muchless $1.xx for one. And the complaint from Napster in that article is pathetic... they are just upset that Apple dominates the marketplace. You want more sales... then lower the price!
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Who cares about 0.44 percent? (Score:4, Insightful)
I.E. So of an average of 1,000,000 downloads, that means last month there were only 995600?
Seems like someone is reading alot into it.
Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Lies! (Score:5, Insightful)
blame apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely Correct (Score:5, Insightful)
When CD's came out, the vast majority of music lovers replaced the albums they already owned with new CD's.
I seriously think that there are music execs out there who were hoping that a new format (downloaded music) would mean that we would all want to buy our entire music collections all over again, in spite of the fact that the power is in our own hands to convert files this time.
Consequently, the back-catalog sales are absolute shit compared to what the early days of CD's were like. Lots of people are using iTMS to buy songs from Fountains of Wayne, Death Cab for Cutie, and/or the latest pop princesses, but nobody's re-buying the old Pink Floyd albums they already own in another format, and that's what's driving them nuts.
Why, we even have the audacity to BACK UP our media files, so we no longer need to buy a new copy every few years because of loss, damage, or wear. It's KILLING their sales numbers.
I love statistics out of context. (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, over the course of the product, I've owned 4 different iPods. Apparently this means that my online music buying should have quadrupled, which it did not.
Thus, the link between iPod sales and buying music online is not directly proportional.
Who wanted Apple to use DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the lock-in future that DRM brings to the world. The music labels are crying bitter tears because they don't control the locks. Whaa whaa whaa. What would be different if Sony had succeeded instead of Apple? Do we think we'd be seeing Sony offering whatever they had to everyone? No. DRM simply sucks. It's anti-consumer, anti-competitive and restricts the growth of the marketplace. Reap what you've sown, you greedy bastards.
Confused? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see how it is holding back the portable music player industry, since they can't access iTunes, but they are direct competitors to Apple in the hardware arena. Apple made it easier to get to their service with their software, but that is the name of the game.
[For the unenlightened, the rules DO change if you are a convicted monopolist [microsoft.com].]
-Charles
It seems to me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Burning it to CDA and re-ripping it doesn't count. It's annoying and drops all the metadata, in addition to the transcoding quality loss. If they want to sell me music, it MUST be in a non-DRM format that I can use on ALL of my devices, MP3 for example. If they refuse, I'll take my money/time elsewhere. Indy, filesharing, certain russian sites, etc.. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'd be happy to pay $1/song, for high-quality (LAME-Standard minimum) MP3 or FLAC audio files. Hell, let me pick the format and bitrate and charge me a little more for the bandwidth for the higher filesizes. Oh, wait, someone else allready does that.....
The Songs are Gravy, not Blades (Score:3, Insightful)
0.44%!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally ignore the fact that Christmas is comming up and people stop spending money on what they want and start saving for others, very often presents arn't music so the money goes else where.
Re:Silly (Score:5, Insightful)
I think by demonstrating that it's possible to be a profitable "middle man" in the online music business, Apple has in fact saved the tushies of the music companies by offering an alternative to napster-like music trading systems. This exemplary system can be emulated by the music companies, if they so wish and assuming they have the intellect and vision, or they can go through Apple or Real or whoever else jumps in (Microsoft, probably).
The iPod would not have succeeded if Apple had tied it strictly to their iTunes database and disallowed any other formats. The secret of success for any great product is its power to do one thing really well and flexibly, emphasis on the latter. They had to let people rip CDs to their iPods, and of course that will lead to trading and avoiding paying for tunes, but it also allowed the iPod to revolutionize the "walkman" generation's listening habits.
Business Week is a pretty astute publication but this is clearly a case of short term-ism getting in the way of seeing what a revolutionary product the iPod really is--and now they're doing it again with videos. Should be interesting to see where they go with this. I think iPod may eventually absorb the cell phone and handheld organizer and we'll see excellent high capacity, wifi/cell-enabled personal bliss bars in everyone's shirt pocket in a few years.
Re:Absolutely Correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, they need to come up with a solution to the "segue" problem. Many albums are mixed such that one track segues smoothly into the next. You get this when you buy the CD. When you buy digital downloads you get hiccups (gaps) between the tracks. Kludges like a crossfade in the MP3 player are not acceptable. I want the exact segue as mixed on the original CD!
There are two pieces to fixing this: the files themselves need tags indicating that a segue exists into the next track from the album and, for compressed audio formats, there needs to be a tag indicating any "gap" (coding delay or frame padding) at the beginning and end of the file such that the MP3 player can strip this off during playback. (The LAME encoder does this and so you get gapless playback on an enabled player eg Foobar2000.) The other item the tags should contain is a recommended fadein and fadeout to use when a track is not played among the other tracks of that album. That way you dont get abrupt cutoffs when playing songs in shuffle.
Did I mention I still buy music on CD? Lots of it too!
Nothing old either (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry RIAA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, RIAA... you had your chance.
and (Score:5, Insightful)
Some, but not all (Score:3, Insightful)
You can get lots and lots of music from other services in other formats supported by the iPod, especially MP3s, but usually those are from less-well-known bands or from services of dubious legality, like allofmp3.com.
Disposable Music (Score:2, Insightful)
Music is like the new fast food, its junk for our brains & ears & people want a lot of it, I don't get how the music industry doesn't realise that & where the hell do they get their market research from.
People want lots of music & they want it as cheaply as they can, when your competeing with a free market like the internet you can't try to restrict your competition you have to vigirously compete with it, even if your competition is illegal, its still competition.
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are protectionistic, rearview focused, and generally useless for even lining a bird cage. The sole redeeming feature is that they are pretty good at calling the top of a mainia (by focusing on why you should be there now).
It has always surprised me that the music companies blessed Apple's entry into music, when the most basic sales calculations were demonstrating that the iPod was the thing that legitimized the public use of shared music for a large subset of mainstream consumers.
Re:Too Expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital sales are VERY efficient. Once something is recorded and set up, your only distribution cost is bandwidth. So why the heck does one CDs worth of material cost the same as one physical CD?
For that matter, since a lot of the record company's work has been cut out, they should get a smaller cut of the profits than before, giving more to artists. Companies like CD Baby are doing nicely with this. Magnatune is another neat site; you can listen to streaming music all you like and you set your own price for the download (within limits).
I don't agree with stealing music, but I do think that low prices are a good way for music sellers to win back some of the business that now goes to illegal downloads.
Re:Absolutely Correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Because those greedy bastards want a nickel EVERY TIME YOU HEAR THE SONG
Maybe I'm old school (Score:5, Insightful)
It's mp3 this year but who knows what audio format is coming around next year? Are you going to be able to play your iTunes downloads 10 years from now?
I'm glad Apple is doing well with iTunes, but it's just not for me. I want a disk. I want a disk I can rip to the PC and portable device of my choosing whether it's on Windows, OSX or Linux. And I especially want to be able to find something that can still play that CD 10 years from now.
right (Score:3, Insightful)
Margin of Error? (Score:4, Insightful)
Entitlements (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately, they think they are intitled to make a profit every time someone listens to a song under their umbrella, or iron fist.
So if I own a lot of LP records, and want to listen to them in the car (car turntables are not very stable unless you drive really carefully) they cry "No Fair!" and get a tax put on casset tapes.
If this were really about piracy, that would be the only thing they would mention. The fact that they are complaining about people filling up their iPods with music that they already have a legal right to tells us what is really on their mind. They feel entitled for people to buy music all over again. And in another 10-20 years they will propose yet another format and expect it over again. Like a corrupt utility company, or a corrupt government, record companies want the right to tax us and then keep that money for themselves.
With any luck Artists will control their own music, and profit from it by then and the record companies will be dead.
Timeline (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Buy iPod.
2) Rip CDs purchased way back when.
3) Buy music at iTunes to fill in the gaps in music collection.
4) Load everything on the iPod.
Now, everyone will have their own personalized timeline; you may already have ripped your CD music collection, or bought/downloaded mp3's from somewhere else, who knows? My main point here is that, for most people, buying an iPod is the first step, and buying music from iTunes (if they're going to do it at all) will come somewhere later, right?
Now, take into account that it is right before Christmas. People are buying iPods like mad (I know that in my city it's bloody impossible to find a 4GB Nano anywhere), and possibly iTunes gift certificates with them. Yet these iPods won't actually be opened until Christmas, and then people still have to install them and all that jazz (which, for the more technically savvy, is a piece of cake, but there are a lot of people out there who will have to wait for help from the family geek to get their iPod up and going). So the ratio of iPods sold over the last little while to people buying music from iTunes is of course going to be a little wonky.
Go ahead, iPod customers, prove my theory wrong. But I'd be curious to see what the rate of downloads is between Christmas and, say, the end of January. I'd predict that they'll be higher than the monthly average over the past year.
Re:Not that bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
This smacks of another jab from the music industry trying to cry about how they are all going to go out of business because people can download songs for a dollar. The sad part is some congress critter out there that gets huge amounts of money under the table from the recording industry will use this to launch some legislation that will impose unrealistic and unenforcable laws on everyone.
Re:Absolutely Correct (Score:5, Insightful)
The music industry insists that we all should buy our music collections all over again. It's legal to copy the CDs for your own use - just as it's legal to copy DVDs for your own use.
That's why the laws to make it illegal to break encryption - it was a way around consumer rights. You can rip DVDs for your own use, but you can't break encryption, and the movies are encrypted.
This nonsense of attempting to DRM CDs is just the music industry trying to play catch-up. Trust me, I've ripped my 200+ CD collection, and the music industry would have me pay for every single song a second time.
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
No he doesn't.
He's implying that without Apple, the music industry would have some great online business going and be selling tons more music. That's clearly bullshit. If it were true, they would have their thing going dispite Apple, and people would be using it.
The music industry is pissed because Apple came up with a device that everybody wants, and instead of using it to make zillions of dollars for the music industry, they're using it to make zillions of dollars for themselves.
Boo hoo.
Apple doesn't owe the music industry *anything*. If the iTunes music store didn't exist, people would *still* buy iPods like crazy, because it's the only player out there that is user friendly, stylish, and completely impartail to whether you choose to listen to licensed or DRM-free content. It seems to me that iTunes is just a big shield from lawsuits, because as long as it exists there are considerable and obvious non-infringing uses for Apple's device. iTMS is Apple covering their ass. If this Napster guy wants more control, then he should come up with a device that people like better than an iPod and tie it to his service instead. He won't though, because he can't build a device that allows people to play pirated music, and consumers are fed up with paying high prices for music.
Apple isn't holding the music industry back, consumers are. They've reached the limit of how much money they're willing to fork over. They're going to have to be sitisfied with their revenue pit just being bottomless, and learn to live with the fact that they can't keep making it wider too.
All professional rockstars, please stand up. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know dozens of talented musicians in active local bands, but I don't know anyone - not even a friend of a friend - who makes a living from their band.
The solution? Let go of those cherished dreams about getting "discovered" and give your music to the world for free. If you don't like the record industry, that's the best way to screw them. Do it for the recognition. Do it for the chicks. Do it because you enjoy it. But if you're doing it for the money, you'd be better off buying lottery tickets.
Sounds specious at best (Score:2, Insightful)
Second, they do not give any information of mp3 purchases and usage. I just bought a nano because of its size. I am not getting rid of my 40GB ipod because of its storage capacity and I still have the first ipod player I bought years ago (TDK mojo) that I keep around just in case (for what I dont know). Most of my friends have upgraded players as well and intend to keep their original. They are not going to repurchase music.
Third, in all the music sales itunes only makes up 4% [com.com] of music sales. They do not mention if CD proces are driving people to pirate music. Personally, I would rather own a CD but I cannot justify $15. Especially if I am only buying it for a few songs. I stopped file shareing music a while ago but I do understand why some people continue.
Why didnt the author point out that CD prices rarely come down. Sometime a title will show up in a bargin bin but a customer cannot consistently wait for the price to come down. More that often the case is the price is reduced when it comes out and then you can only pay regular after a few months (which can be $18 or more).
Also, why didnt the author point out the pricing of music is almost a mystery for all media. Try to find out how music execs plan to price a cd for its lifetime, how much are production costs and who gets the proceeds at various stages over time (please, try--I would love to know). It is not public knowledge for a reason.
My impression it this guy is either grossly uninformed or a shill.
Re:I love statistics out of context. (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed, and besides people buying multiple ipods I think the reason they're seeing a huge increase in ipod sales but not in music sales currently is because most of the ipods selling right now are probably Christmas/Chanukah gifts. Hence hardware sales now, music sales LATER.
Expecting music sales to increase directly with ipod sales is like expecting people to buy a year's worth of gas at the same time they buy a new car.
And since when has a decrease of less than one half of one percent as compared to a previous quarter meant a product/business model was failing, or that piracy is somehow to blame? I mean we all know no one else has anything more important to buy than music - certainly not higher gas prices, higher home heating prices, a huge portion of Louisiana residents just looking for jobs/homes, and one of the most intense years for charity in recent history (Katrina & FL at home, tsunami and massive earthquake abroad).
Good god music industry, get your heads out of your asses and just fix the numbers in the direction you want like you always do. Of course, online music sales being down won't stop them from continuing to insist iTunes songs should cost MORE.
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Escaping The World Of Monthly Payments (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, a little lock-in scheme. They sell a music player, throw in an on-line service as a sales gimmick. Consumers have alternatives to an iPod, and music distributers have alternatives to iTunes. For some bizzarre reason, consumers opted for the Pod enmass. Go figure.
Naturally, "Napster" is pissed. It may be that they'll stay pissed. Every seller's favorate business model is subscription, for the continuing income stream. A consumer's favorate model is (usually) to buy something once, so that they don't piss away money on goods and services they aren't always using. Most folks are already Washington and Franklin'ed to death by rent/mortgage, insurance, utilitities, cable, phone, cell phone, isp, and transportation. And now some bozos want to add music to our monthly.
Yeah, I'll get right on board with that. Sorry Chris, I already did a snail mail version of Napster with the Columbia Frickin' Music Club back in the day. A pain in the ass, having to turn back the crap they were pushing, once you had your fill of your favorates, and got down to the long haul of sorting out a few grains of one's personal wheat from the chaff.
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as the device can play any other [more open] format than the proprietary downloads, it's not a lock-in. In this case, the iPod can also play MP3s- it's not locked into Apple's format. If the iPod played only AAC, and not MP3s, it would be a lock-in. Just like it would be a lock-in if any Microsoft MP3 player only played WMAs.
If the choice is there regardless of brand, the lock-in argument becomes invalid. Whether or not any businesses choose to use the format is irrelevant- it's a publicly accepted format in very widespread use.
Re:XMas? (Score:3, Insightful)
1)As you say, many of the iPod purchases are gifts which have not been opened yet.
2)Many of the iPod sales are to repeat customers who do not have to fill up their library again. I am sure a significant number of the people who are getting their first iPod also already have music purchased from the iTunes store.
3)There are more outlets to purchase music online now than there were before, so iTunes sales would suffer due to the competition. That's only natural.
4)The previous quarter was the beginning of the school year. I imagine many students would get new music at the beginning of the semester. They are too busy with papers and studying towards the end to shop around for music. And they are getting too tight on funds as student loans or summer job savings have been spent already.
5)Because the holidays are coming up, people are less likely to buy music for themselves, but they have been purchasing iTunes gift cards [apple.com] of which a significant portion will be redeemed shortly after christmas. I'm guessing this alone would account for at least 0.44% of last quarter's sales. I mean, it's not like you'd actually purchase music from the iTunes store to put it on someone elses iPod as a present... you'd just give them a gift certificate to do it themselves. Similar to 1) but not entirely the same. For instance they would probably be inside a card than have a card taped onto them.
Dear Chris (Score:5, Insightful)
Chris,
I know this is hard to wrap your head around. The iPod is a media player with a built in hard drive. There is no vendor lock in. I've been able to downlaod music from napster, kazaa, soundclick, and a variety of vendors. Amazingly, they all work fine. AIFF, WAV, MP3, ACC, all work fine on my iPod. Should your's behave differently, RTFM.
What the iPod doesn't do, is support every god damned DRM scheme on the planet that lets you and your corporate cronies "lease" your DRM infected music to iPod owners. Quite frankly I'm not interested in DRM laden crap from napster, real, or anyone else including iTMS. I bought my iPod to carry around the large collection of music I already have, not to populate it with new music that has been approved by some industry suit.
So, in conclusion, the iPod is a hard drive. I can get files of any type onto it with ease. The iPod is a media player. I can play a fair variety of widely available media types without problems. The problem is in the DRM schemes that lock content to specific devices.
The iPod did not lock me into anything, your DRM infected business plan locked me out of your customer base. I am not interested, and it has nothing to do with my iPod.
I have not, nor will I ever "lease" digital music for my device. If I am paying with real cash, I want real bits I can twiddle as I see fit.
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does that make me wrong? Can't he imply more than one thing in an article?
I fail to see how anything Apple does makes it OK for anybody else to bitch that they're not making money off of it. If you want a piece of the action, it's not Apple's job to open the door for you. In fact it's their job to keep it shut and protect their profits. It's rediculous for anybody in the music industry, or any other business, to expect Apple to do them any favors.
Who cares if other businesses aren't permitted to offer alternative services?
If you want to make money in the digital music market, you need to do it yourself. Why should Apple help you to make money off their product?
If this guy is so smart, he should make a better store and a better player. If he's right, it should be possible, and people should flock to it and leave the iPod behind. Anything he can come up with that nets the recording distribution industry more profits is pretty much guarantreeed to be seen as *worse* by consumers though, so he'll never pull it off. He doesn't want to offer you choice, he wants Apple to stop being so damned nice (in his opinion; obviouly not in your opinion) to consumers because it's preventing them from getting away with charging more (where more is most likely a pay-per-listen or some other recurring revenue model).
We love Apple, the iPod, and iTunes. Who cares...
I don't understand why you assume that any opinion of Apple or their products has anything to do with my point. I'm talking business here, I'm not being some fanboy. I don't have to like or dislike Apple's practices for me to see why it makes sense for them to do that stuff interms of their bottom line. The goal is to make money, not to win a popularity contest.
iTunes Music Store - never have, never will (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll bet a lot of owners have used Napster (circa 1998) to load their iPods. About 20% of the music in my collection is from this previous version of Napster. Most of that is crappy 128k, misnamed, and ID3tag-less. 60% of the rest of it is from legally ripped CDs. The final 20% is legitimate free music - from archive.org, fingertips, The Hype Machine, other blogs, live torrents, etc.
Perhaps the RIAA should reconsider the free ride they expected from iPod users. When I purchased my Nano, the sole purpose was to haul around some of the 120GB of music I own. I never planned on using Apple's Music Store, and I probably never will. Similarly, I will never purchase DRM encrusted music. The music industry should really consider anything they've sold through iTunes as frosting.
And while we're on it, the RIAA will never see me re-purchasing music I already bought. I've downloaded and feel fully entitled to albums I've previously bought on cassette & LP. I could go through the work of encoding it in realtime, but the same thing is available online for free. The same goes for lost or damaged CDs. I've been emailing the RIAA regularly for several years to see if they have a problem with this policy - with no reply to date.
"You have this device consumers love, but they're being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple."
- Is Gorog willfully ignorant of free music, or just plain stupid? Has he ever even used an iPod?
Should (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a far cry from cause, and some guy's expectation is a far cry from proof.
Re:My theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who wanted Apple to use DRM? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Because they'd rather have me buy two copies of each song I want to listen to.
Re:Lies! (Score:5, Insightful)
So you bought music knowing it had DRM, and knowing iPod doesn't play it, and now you're complaining. Sounds like you fucked up.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Buying an iPod does not force me to buy from iTMS."
Okay, maybe I'm being ignorant here. What other services can you buy iPod compatible music for? I'm dead serious, I'll back down if you can name one or two. Part of my reaction here is that I CAN'T use my existing music service with an iPod, but with other players I can. You'd be doing me a huge favor if you could suggest an alternative music service with a subscription model that I could use an iPod with.
Failure to fill a market void is not lock in. Your subscription services failure to offer iPod compatible music is not lock in. You are the one that chose a subscription service which locks you out of using the iPod.
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, so what?
iPod users can't download music from Yahoo! or Rhapsody or Napster because of the incompatible format those services have chosen to use. Personally I think that's a strange business decision - denying yourself, what, 95% of the potential market? - but I suppose that's their choice.
Wait, what's that? The record companies insisted they use DRM? They couldn't just offer mp3s for download, which would have played on absolutely anything? Well, isn't that the record companies' fault, then?
It's terribly strange that the recording industry and the non-iTunes download services blame Apple for the consequences of their own policies.
Personally, I have no truck with any of them. I have an iRiver iHP-140, which won't play any DRM'd files as far as I'm aware. I have no problem with this... I put shiny discs into my computer and press 'rip', producing files of whatever bitrate I desire. I hardly feel locked out of anything as a result.
Re:Not that bad... (Score:1, Insightful)
Two things: First, that cash isn't "under the table", it's a "campaign contribution"; second, the legislation being launched by the congress critter was written by the industry in the first place. Can't buy a better law than one you wrote yourself.
Re:Absolutely Correct (Score:3, Insightful)
Ignorance is bliss (Score:3, Insightful)
If ignorance is bliss, you must be very happy every time you contemplate the music industry, or economics or business in general.
Seriously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely Correct (Score:1, Insightful)
What could they possibly do? (Score:5, Insightful)
To get my 70+ year old father to buy more music, you'd have to bring Bob Wills back from the dead to record another album.
I don't think you or my father are the kind of customer the RIAA is trying to attract.
Re:Incorrect (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember the dot com implosion?
"Everything's overinflated, no real assets." "Everything's overinflated, no real assets." "Everything's overinflated, no real assets." The talking heads repeat over and over...
Finally, a downturn and everyone panics, "oh my gosh, everything was overinflated, this stuff isn't worth anything!"
If you broadcast "impending failure" loud enough and long enough, a failure will occur where one may not have otherwise.
Re:What could they possibly do? (Score:3, Insightful)
No? I'm not the guy who wrote the comment you're replying to, but I'm in the same boat. You really think the RIAA doesn't want to attract thirtysomething males with scads of disposable income? Maybe you're right - maybe they don't care about actually getting people who have money to spend, but that's really their problem, isn't it? Shouldn't they be doing something to attract people like me?
I actually do still buy music, but of the last six CD's I've bought, five have been used CD's from Japan. If I told the RIAA this, it would drive them absolutely nuts. They'd tell me I'm everything that's wrong with music consumers these days - buying used, and buying imports! This is what they need DRM and region protections for! And pass a few more laws too while you're at it, make used purchases illegal!
Well you know what? Release those CD's in the US, and provided there was no DRM on them, I'd have bought them new. But hey, RIAA, you didn't. So I had to take matters into my own hands, didn't I?
I have no patience for Britney Spears or JessicAshley Simpson or any of these tone-deaf, generic monkeys from American Idol that they keep trying to foist on the American public. So yeah, maybe they're not trying to attract me; instead they're trying to attract people without any taste that live in trailers and live off unemployment insurance. Well, more power to them I guess, but that doesn't sound like a business model.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is yeah, I've slowed down buying music as I get older, but it's only because the RIAA and its member companies (and the RIAA is the music labels, remember) refuse to release any music I'm interested in anymore.
Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)
When it comes to DRM - don't make it hard, people like a challenge, make it boring.