NARAS vs. the RIAA 183
sdbrian writes "An all around excellent paper concerning the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) and their position with regard to the RIAA has been published on Salon.com. The author (John Snyder) quotes from many articles that have been discussed on here on Slashdot. One of Snyder's conclusions, "NARAS should take the lead in this matter. Those who are taking it now are leading us over a cliff. The RIAA has staked out an untenable position that is as unrealistic as it is anti-consumer and anti-artist.""
drag and drop file sharing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:drag and drop file sharing (Score:3, Interesting)
This is just opening a moral can of worms, if you ask me...
But it's good to see more and more, people getting back against the RIAA.
But what will come if the RIAA dies? What after that? Will it manifest itself in the form of a new P2P program that monopolizes all file sharing (somehow, kinda like fileplanet) and charges ridiculous prices?
Re:drag and drop file sharing (Score:2)
That seems highly unlikely, due to the large number of commercial interest and open-source projects focused on P2P style software.
Re:drag and drop file sharing (Score:3, Insightful)
Excellent questions. While I don't have a crystal ball, I do have an idea of what could happen.
RL experience this weekend: I am an 80's music junkie. Pop, punk, bubble-gum...I love all of it. Relatively recently, a station opened here in Atlanta that plays 80's music only (thank you 105.3!!!) so that's pretty much all I listen to now. I was on my way to $somewhere this weekend and Pat Benatar's song "We Belong" was played on 105.3. My impulsive nature kicked in and I whipped the car into the Best Buy store that I was about to pass. I walked right by all of the artist-specific CDs and went straight to the "compilations" section. (I was a DJ at one time, so I learned long ago that it is not cost efficient to buy a CD for just one song.) Wham! Billboard's chart-toppers compilations for every year of the 80s. I looked over all of the 198x comp and sure enough, I found that song on one of those CDs. Price? $7.99 (USD). I got my song (with the bonus of having a lot more songs from that year that I also love) for less than half the price of a CD from a single band released today.
Based on this experience, I think (hope?) that the future of the music industry is a future where they offer songs (or even portions of songs) and let people vote. Based upon the outcome of those votes, they release compilation CDs with the most popular songs on them. I also think (hope?) that the artists themselves get more power and sell their songs themselves so that if I like the work of one artist, but most other people don't, I can just go get it directly from that artist/band. This is a radically different business model than what is in place today and it might have flaws that I haven't considered. But, based on my experience this weekend, I think it might be a workable solution where everyone (the artists, the customers, and the RIAA) can find a balance.
--K.
Property? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's all about the money (Score:4, Insightful)
-Mark
Re:It's all about the money. NOPE! (Score:1, Insightful)
Capitalists (free market thinkers) are anti-government subsidies and regulations. Mercantilists are pro-subsidies and regulations. Do not get them confused!
I am a business owner, and I love competition -- it drives me harder to work to better meet my customers needs.
If I was the best in my business, I'd prove it by providing the best service possible at the price that my customers can afford. That is capitalism!
I don't want the government to subsidize my business and regulate my competitors' businesses. The RIAA is mercantilist. Do not allow these anti-business greenies steer you wrong. Capitalism = GOOD, Mercantilism = BAD.
LINK to article on mercantilism. (Score:5, Informative)
There's a great article that speaks about mercantilism in an easy to read way. The entire time you'll be thinking "THIS is what the RIAA is about."
Re:It's all about the money (Score:5, Insightful)
And thus we have an excellent illustration of the difference between the interests of certain capitalists and the usual meaning of capitalism, the free market. The copyright regime allows certain moneyed interests to pursue what is economically called "rent-seeking" behavior: the pursuit of legislation and legal precedent for private benefit, without regard for its effect on other people's property rights or personal liberties.
Increasingly, it should be obvious that the "intellectual property" approach -- the discussion of copyright as a kind of property rather than as a special privilege granted to advance a particular public good -- exists solely to make this rent-seeking seem legitimate. If copyright is "property", then temporal limits upon it seem absurd; after all, we do not have limits upon the amount of time any other property ownership remains valid.
However, copyright is not property. It is a privilege granted by government, which permits a certain party (the copyright holder) to forbid others from using their own actual and physical property (e.g. hard disks, CD blanks) for particular purposes, namely copying the covered works. This privilege may well be legitimate insofar as it serves the public benefit, by encouraging the production of original works. Yet perhaps it is not so legitimate, in a period of history when evidently many artists and creators will create high-quality works whilst disclaiming any such protection. I'm not sure.
However, either way, this "intellectual property" talk has to stop. It's just a sneaky way of slipping unfounded assumptions (namely, that copyright is like property) into the public discourse. Let's call property "property", and copyright "copyright" -- and rent-seeking "corruption".
Re:It's all about the money (Score:5, Interesting)
Real artists don't mind if their work gets "stolen". They're proud it is so good people want to "steal" it.
Re:It's all about the money (Score:3, Insightful)
Mastercard was signed up as a sponsor, but they made a condition of their sponsorship that only people aged 18 and over, in other words only those who could lawfully hold a credit card, would be allowed to attend the ceremony.
In previous years, all ages were allowed to attend, and this made a fairly happy time for the teenage fans of all the boybands, the music companies create and tout; getting to see their idols perform live, and share in their recieving awards.
The record companies, the creators of the award ceremony, caved to Mastercard's demands in return for their cash, and essentially gave the finger to all the teenage girls on whom their cocaine habit ultimately depends.
If that doesn't define them as scum...
Re:It's all about the money (Score:2)
Real artists don't mind if their work gets "stolen". They're proud it is so good people want to "steal" it.
Without regarding your other similar comments, what the hell kind of elitist philosophy of this? I suppose Gilbert and Sullivan weren't real artists? I suppose Thomas Edison wasn't a real inventor? I suppose METALLICA, an example that you might be aware of, aren't real artists? Come on...
Re:It's all about the money (Score:2)
If you listen to Lars, he still doesn't care that average listener is trading Metallica bootlegs with his friends. He knows that there was a time when Metallica couldn't afford to hear the bands they liked and the only way they could hear them was to listen to "stolen" copies.
He was against a corporation making commerical profit off songs he wrote and produced without his permission. I don't think any of us have a problem prosecuting counterfeiters. He didn't understand Napster, didn't want to understand it, didn't bother to understand it, and his corporate masters made sure he didn't understand it.
Re:It's all about the money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's all about the money (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, how about if I transfer, from my account to yours, the 1s and 0s that represent -1000000 dollars? *GRINS*
Owning "intellectual property" is like owning the wind. Once an idea is manifested, it can no longer be owned, as anybody who saw it, heard it, touched it, can now use it and even improve upon it, without depriving you of anything. All our laws are trying to do is encourage people to be creative, to innovate and thus advance the well-being of all our society. Big monied interests have been trying to use these laws to make more money, as is their obligation under capitalism. Eventually, though, the roof *will* fall in on them, and what emerges from the chaos afterwards will be a radically different world.
I'm a small-scale jewelry artist. I create items that I consider beautiful, and sometimes sell them, or just give them away. The designs are, by current thinking, my "property", but I don't care. I create for *me*, and once an item has been created, duplicating it endlessly becomes a chore, keeping me from doing any more creative work. So, to stay creative, I refuse to "protect" my "property" by hiring lawyers to fight anybody whose designs look similar to mine. My muse freely gave the ideas to me, and I freely share them with the world.
What goes around, comes around.
How can you sell property more than once? (Score:2)
Or, say I sold you my car but included a set of rules saying that only you can drive it, you'll have to pay me extra if you want to bring passengers, and you can't sell it to anyone else when you're done using it. (And oh yeah, even if the thing is a defective POS when I sold it to you, tough!)
Do you really think we'd all sit and quietly accept the terms we get for most IP if we were buying real property?
Re:How can you sell property more than once? (Score:2)
A better analogy would be say owning a bar. Some bars require patrons to pay a cover charge to get in, and patrons who sneak in through the bathroom window are tresspassing. There's no problem with selling multiple admissions to multiple patrons, or even charging different admission prices based on gender or time, becasue you're not selling your bar, you're selling permission to use the bar.
Personally, I prefer the bars that don't charge a cover.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to re-frame the discussion about violating IP as tresspassing rather than piracy. It seems to me to be a more accurate description.
Au Contraire (Score:2)
Look at the Qt toolkit. You can either use an Open Source license and include it in anything you write with an Open Source license. Thus the IP is being "given away".
However, if you don't want to open source your work then you can go and buy the Qt IP and include it that way.
Remember, with IP you have two separate issues. The first is ownership also known as copyright. The second is the licensing of that IP. You can sell your IP licenses to as many people as you want. You can even give it away free to one person and sell it to another. There is no limit to what you can do.
There are numerous ways to frame the IP violation discussion. I was originally objecting to the notion that the Property aspect of IP should be emphasized. I was merely showing how if we extended the current limitations that are put on IP onto real property how absurd they would seem.
No, that's anti-capitalist. (Score:2)
RIAA is trying to make it so those currently making a bunch of money continue to do so.
If capitalistic forces do reign supreme in the end, either RIAA members will change their means of doing business, or they will cease to do business at all.
Re:No, that's anti-capitalist. (Score:2)
Daniel
Re:No, that's anti-capitalist. (Score:3, Informative)
We have to make our views known with intelligent, clever action. If you think US society is being perverted by corruption in companies and Congress, then *do something* about it -- boycotts aren't enough. You don't have to paint a sign and walk around city streets, though that's one option. It is probably more effective to educate your friends and family directly. Other *do something* options are to fund people who are already doing things, like the EFF or FSF.
I would like to make two notes about the eduction process:
1) People learn best when they control the dialogue, i.e. when they are asking questions. No matter how much you want and try to teach something to someone, they control the learning.
2) You cannot educate unless you are educated on the topic. Read. Think. Rehearse arguments to find your weaknesses, and explore those weaknesses. If you want to know how smart you are, see how simply you can state your position. If you can't state it succinctly, then you don't know your position well enough.
These are things I've learner (learner the wrong way, I might add) in GNU/Linux advocacy over the last 5 years. I've been far more successful in having my voice heard, and changing people's minds, since I learned these things. Never have these lessons been more important than now, with America's apathy towards the "reasoned and wise" actions of our current Congress and administration.
-Paul komarek
They are not pro capitalist (Score:2, Insightful)
It sounds more like communism to me. (Score:3, Insightful)
"The RIAA and the music business are trying to legislate profitability."
Essentially, what they're doing is creating a structured economy that pays tribute to them. They're trying to legislate away all the things that it thinks are causing it to lose money. This is made ever more clear by how Canada's government has dealt with the issue: charge a tax on all blank recordable media to be paid to a large, amorphous blob called "The music industry," regardless of whether or not they're selling products that we even *want* to buy.
Perhaps communism isn't the best term for it, since after all, under a communist government there's a social contract between the people and the government that directly controls the entire econonomy. That contract basically says that the people gives up their free will in return for benefits such as a guaranteed job, and guaranteed health care, and other such. Instead, this contract with the RIAA says basically we've given up the right to free choice about what products we buy and we pay for them anyway.
What the RIAA wants is a total dictatorship over music and music consumers. That's not pro-capitalism, that's Evil.
Government intervention? (Score:3, Interesting)
And the sky is blue... That conclusion is obvious. What I want to know is why the government hasn't stepped in against the RIAA... Microsoft had anti-trust against them... The RIAA has got to have something... Isn't having more than half the US population hating you enough? Any lawyers out there care to elaborate... Is there some legal thing I'm missing that we could use to finally hurt the RIAA?
Re:Government intervention? (Score:2)
The music industry is not noted for doing things by half measures - they just hit a rest but plan to complete the piece. The working title is "Requiem for a Dinosaur".
The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:5, Insightful)
This maybe OK for the big bands, but for the small guys it makes life impossible until they get a top 20 album. Once that occurs they have some clout and can negotiate better record deals.
I feel for the artists. The RIAA says "Its for the artists", but that has proven to not be the case. The RIAA needs to get a grip on reality and change their business model or they WILL become obsolete. What will happen is that the Artists will start using their own recording studios and sell their work over the internet directly, thus removing the need for the RIAA.
I will not feel sorry for the RIAA at all when this happens.
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:2, Insightful)
They should care about the artist because without them, they would have nothing to sell!
You're absolutely right in two ways, depending on what "it" means.
First, the reason they can even exist is because the artists keep doing their job making music, then they try to make a few bucks by selling it. Without the artists, the RIAA would have no new material to sell, and they would die very quickly. Because of this they should care VERY MUCH about the artists.
Second, this whole about "protecting the artists property" is a load of crap. I don't claim to be an expert on how the industry works, but from what I understand, the artists sell their rights to the record companies, who then make CD's and sell them to consumers. If I'm right about that, then they aren't protecting the artist's music, because they don't own it any more!
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:1)
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:1, Informative)
All corporations are this greedy, it's part of the ethos
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:2)
All corporations are this greedy, it's part of the ethos
I think I'd modify that to "most" corporations. Surely, there must still be some companies that value ethical behaviour in their management and not just ethics training for the low level employees. . . Then again, maybe you're right.
© is nothing but a handout (Score:1)
It's not this free hand-out thing that the government gives the NEA.
But copyright in the United States is just that: a free handout given by the U.S. Congress to authors "to promote the Progress of Science".
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, so that huge price-fixing suit against them was a farce? Just spew whatever you think makes your arguement sound good out, chances are people won't bother to check your thoughts against reality. That's how it works for everyone else anyway.
Re:The RIAA's first, and ONLY care (Score:2)
property (Score:1)
Arguments against RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Arguments against RIAA (Score:1)
File sharing viable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:File sharing viable? (Score:1, Insightful)
Timed? (Score:2)
But really, make a backup! We're talking about downloading an ogg or mp3 anyway.
Somehow I don't quite buy that.... (Score:2)
Not really. Only because P2P is full of crap, and ten thousand different encodings. Imagine P2P advertizing with "100% original format MP3s - CRC verified" Probably even with client-side CRC whitelist & verification for the most popular songs. No crappy encodings. No fakes/renames or corrupt downloads. Complete ID3 tags (or auto-supplied by CRC list or something like freedb using CRC instead of track length). How many do you think would *really* put their money where their mouth is? Some, I guess. But not even close to as many as say they will on slashdot...
Kjella
Re:Somehow I don't quite buy that.... (Score:2)
The water out of my tap is pretty good, and the filtered water out of my refrigerator is even better. I could buy a super-expensive filter, or catch rain water and use that, but I don't. Why?
Because bottled water is all about convience. I can get it just about anywhere, and I don't have to worry about what the local water tastes like, or the off chance it might be contaminated. I don't have to buy a filter, and I don't like the way it looks hanging off my faucet, and it's expensive to boot. I could make the claim that bottled water tastes better, but I think that's a placebo effect.
The record companies won't be able to offer P2P with "perfect" files if they are going to charge a dollar a track like they want. But, if they offer a reasonable price for the product, give a product that is guarunteed to be as perfect as a variable bit-rate, reasonable size MP3 can be, and make it easy to find, I'm not even going to waste my time installing Kazaa. I don't want their spyware, I don't want to worry about the miscreants on the network, I don't want to waste an hour looking for a file at a decent bit rate and quality. My time is money, and it's worth $0.05 or $0.10 to have that song now and not worry about finding it.
It can be done, but it can't be done the way the RIAA wants to do it.
Anti history too (Score:5, Interesting)
Very interesting read.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Makes a great point, as you give the public more options to choose from, you get more of the publics cash....
Maybe one day MPAA/RIAA will learn this...
NAAAAA it's easier to have congress protect them.
Re:Very interesting read.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The public will spend more money if there are more options. The fear of the MPAA/RIAA is that most of those options are going to come from non-members. Until it became practical to download audio/video they pretty much had a lock on widespread distribution of their types of content. Now basically anyone can do it. This puts non-memeber entities on level ground with them when it comes to digital media distribution. Their business model requires them to be the only game in town.
So you see them being dragged kicking and screaming into online distribution. They don't want to do it, but they don't have a choice. In the meantime they do everything to make it harder for people to distribute content over the Net. P2P software (or any software) that makes it easy to find and easily acquire music published by just anyone is a huge threat to them.
They'd like to keep the options narrowed down to what they can produce and profit from so that they get all the money.
Another Interesting Article (Score:2, Informative)
A Building Momentum (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't piss in their wheaties! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait one gosh darn minute there ... Don't the people who run the RIAA/MPAA own the copyrights to the stuff ... they're just looking to make sure they get every last sent out of someone elses work. Damn it and I thought they were trying to protect my intelectual property with all these strict copyright laws.
I think the artists (and no I don't mean britney) should take a stand ... and forget their old stuff and the souls they sold ... and move on and make some great new music they own the rights to ... I think the music industry needs to follow the book industry and be publishers, ONLY.
I'm tired of the MPAA/RIAA throwing billions of dollars to buy their laws, if they want to impress me they'd just shut the fuck up and lower the price of their shit.
Re:Don't piss in their wheaties! (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately you contracted with your label to deliever 3 albums. So far you've only delivered 2 and thanks to the studio bills from those two (and the dragging of feet in getting you your royalty checks, assuming there's anything left after the double billing) you're too deeply in debt to afford to produce the third in the label approved studios.
Since you haven't produced your third album yet, you can't pick up and produce your own music... you're still under contract, it's still the label's music. If you should do something so improbable as actually turn a profit, they'll probably sue you for breach of contract and take your masters.
In short: signing with a big-name recording label is the end of your music career.
Re:Don't piss in their wheaties! (Score:1)
No they don't. The RIAA and MPAA do not own anything, they are simply member organizations. It is the members themselves who own the copyrights. The RIAA is a non-profit organization so they don't even turn a profit or make a dime off the artists.
"I think the artists (and no I don't mean britney) should take a stand
I don't know where to begin here. You clearly do not understand how these industries work. Th emusicians are members of the publishing industry in much the same way musicians and singer/songwriters are members of the music industry.
You also suggest that artists breach their contracts with the record labels. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the record labels are providing a service these artists want? No one forces the artists to sign these contracts and nothing forces the consumer to purchase the products this collaboration creates. Artists are free to go out on their own but they will find that many services the members of the RIAA provide are expensive and/or impossible to achieve.
YRO Needs an annual public cluefulness award... (Score:4, Interesting)
NARAS is a more technical organization than RIAA, right? (More audio engineers, etc., than executives.) And regarding executives...
Record companies are not logical, righteous entities. They are ramshackle, profit-driven enterprises. They act in their perceived best interests, and they act ruthlessly and, in many cases, irrationally. The people who run them still have their e-mail printed out by their secretaries.
Did anyone else visualize Dilbert's PHB sitting at the desk of President of the RIAA? Scary and yet strangely compelling.
Re:YRO Needs an annual public cluefulness award... (Score:2)
Why was NARAS [aol.com] formed?
"In 1957, a visionary group of music professionals and label executives in Los Angeles recognized the need to create an organization that would represent the creative people in the recording arts and sciences.
The founding members of the Recording Academy [NARAS] wanted to recognize and celebrate the artistic achievement of not only talented musicians and singers but also important, behind-the-scenes contributors such as producers and engineers.
Conceived as a way to create a real recording industry community and address some of these concerns, the Recording Academy was born and the GRAMMY Awards process began."
Now, how about the RIAA? [riaa.org]
"The RIAA was formed in 1952 to facilitate the technical standardization of records by bringing together engineers from member companies to develop the RIAA curve, a frequency response specification for optimizing the performance of phonographic playback systems."
So, the RIAA was formed as a standards organization which would ensure that competing standards would not be an issue. In 1958, they decided to copy RCA 's "Gold Record" sales award and gave one to Perry Como (I think) for selling something like $50,000 worth of albums.
So, the RIAA was initially a totally technical organization which slowly got into the business of also certifying sales figures with their gold/platinum albums.
Then came Hilary.
Article with the evil redirects (Score:1, Informative)
art Embrace file-sharing, or die
A record executive and his son make a formal case for freely downloading music. The gist: 50 million Americans can't be wrong.
Editor's note: John Snyder is president of Artist House Records, a board member of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), and a 32-time Grammy nominee. On Thursday night, he submitted the following paper to NARAS.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By John Snyder and Ben Snyder
printe-mail
Feb. 1, 2003 | The following was written in response to a discussion by the board of governors of the New York chapter of National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) regarding the position NARAS should take with respect to a new public relations campaign proposed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) condemning those who download music from the Internet.
The subject of digital rights, and the position NARAS should take with respect to it, is near and dear to me. I've read a great deal about it. If I may, I would like to offer a few thoughts:
I. Intellectual Property
Irrespective of what we think should be done, it is still currently illegal to download copyrighted music that you didn't buy. This is a problem that needs to be addressed. The statistic discussed in the December meeting that there were 3 billion downloads the previous month shows that the law is going to have to be changed, unless you take the position that downloaded music is stealing and thereby criminalize the society. But how can 50 million people (over 200 million worldwide) be wrong? How do we reconcile the reality of downloaded music with the idea of intellectual property?
Intellectual property has not always been defined and protected as it is today. Thomas Jefferson wrote about the philosophical considerations:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
The above quote appeared in John Perry Barlow's excellent essay, "The Economy of Ideas," published first in the March 1994 issue of Wired magazine. Barlow writes:
"If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?
"Since we don't have a solution to what is a profoundly new kind of challenge, and are apparently unable to delay the galloping digitization of everything not obstinately physical, we are sailing into the future on a sinking ship.
"This vessel, the accumulated canon of copyright and patent law, was developed to convey forms and methods of expression entirely different from the vaporous cargo it is now being asked to carry. It is leaking as much from within as from without.
"Legal efforts to keep the old boat floating are taking three forms: a frenzy of deck chair rearrangement, stern warnings to the passengers that if she goes down, they will face harsh criminal penalties, and serene, glassy-eyed denial.
"Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum..."
The entire concept of intellectual property needs to be reexamined, and ways of protecting it need to reconsidered. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry has, by legislative crook and judicial hook, obtained a 20-year copyright extension. The Supreme Court recently upheld the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA)" that extended the life of existing copyrights an additional 20 years. This, in the face of Justice Steven G. Breyer's estimation that only 2 percent of works copyrighted between 1923 and 1942 are available to the general public. The Supreme Court case pitted the public against Disney, whose early Mickey Mouse cartoons were to enter into the public domain in 2003, and for whom Congress drafted the legislation in the first place.
This is a clear case of a multinational conglomerate using its political muscle to the disadvantage of everyone but itself. So, instead of creating new content and allowing long-standing laws to work, the entertainment business frantically seeks to manipulate the process to its own ends. And it does this with the obsequiousness of penurious politicians and a supinely acquiescent Supreme Court. That is the best the establishment has to offer, and it has nothing to do with progress or the good of the society.
II. Competition for the CD
The current argument over intellectual property is the result of the sharing of music files encoded as MP3s, Windows Media files, RealAudio files or other formats currently available. The music business blames these downloads, which it perceives as piracy, for the 10 percent decline in sales for the year 2002. This raises several questions, among them: How and why do people listen to music? What other products compete with CDs? And what is the role of radio?
Why is it that record companies pay dearly for radio play and fight Internet play? What is the real difference between radio and the Internet? Perfect copies? If we look at the Internet as analogous to radio, the problem becomes one of performance rights, not the unlawful exploitation of intellectual property. People are creating their own "radio" on their hard drives, and they are constantly changing it. Would this have anything to do with the "McDonaldization" of radio by Clear Channel and others? Would the fact that almost every song on commercial radio is bought and paid for have anything to do with the narrow focus and homogeneous nature of radio? What drives radio is advertising and money, not music. A lot of music gets left behind thanks to the current state of radio; that consumers are rejecting it shouldn't be surprising. They're creating their own MP3 playlists, and if the labels were smart, they'd be doing everything in their power to be on those playlists, just like they do everything in their power to be on the playlists of radio stations. Instead, they scream copyright infringement and call their lawyers.
There are other reasons for CD sales to be down.
Dan Bricklin and Forrester Research list reasons for the drop in CD sales:
"... the economy, competition from other forms of entertainment (including the yearly $6 billion of video games and the rush to the new DVD video format), and finally the shorter playlists on radio (partially a result of Clear Channel's control of 60 percent of rock radio listening and their style) that leads to fewer new musicians becoming well known
Price is a major reason for the decline in CD sales. On Bricklin's Web site there's a chart that shows that between the years 1991 and 2001, the average price of a CD went from $13.01 to $14.64, which is a 12.53 percent increase in price. The record companies raised prices precisely at the time costs were coming down. When a DVD costs $19.99 and includes the movie in multiple formats with bonus material and no hassle, and a CD costs $18.99 and comes with potential legal hassles, limits on fair use, and all the finger waving the RIAA can muster, the choice of which product to buy becomes clear. To put it simply, consumers feel that out of all their entertainment options, CDs provide the least bang for the buck.
There are five or six new and growing ways for people to spend their entertainment dollar. The video games market is one place the consumers went, and music followed suit. VH1 News recently reported that the new place to break an artist in is a video game. Some companies, such as Island Records, know this. They have a great track record of getting music on video game soundtracks. But unlike Island, most don't. There are other distractions that draw business away from the record companies: DVD, the fastest-growing home electronics development in the history of the world, the Internet itself, e-mail, cable TV, movies, and even mobile phones. In addition to that, the product marketed by record labels is narrow and significantly overpriced in comparison to the other available entertainment options. Portable CD players are being replaced by iPods. Instead of the 12 songs on a CD, there are 1,500 songs on an iPod. Why shouldn't CD sales be down? Truth be told, the record business is lucky to be alive.
Ananova.com reported that 3.8 million DVD players were sold last year, double that of the previous 12 months. DVD sales reached 80 million last year, representing a 111 percent increase over 2001. Twenty million DVDs and 1.2 million DVD players were sold in December 2002 alone. The movie industry sold 1.6 billion tickets, taking in $9.3 billion in gross box office receipts in 2002, up 11 percent from the previous year, despite President and CEO of the MPAA Jack Valenti's recent statements that the future is bleak. Not since the 1950s have so many movie tickets been sold. Meanwhile, movie sharing on the Internet is at an all-time high. The movie business isn't suffering because of activity on the Internet. Quite the opposite -- the industry is making more money than ever! This is happening at a time when consumers are being offered more choices to view movies than ever before. This supports the view that people spend more money when they have more choices.
Advances in hardware and software have propelled the movie business ever since the VCR, which at the time was decried as the death of the movie business, just as the cassette was to be the death of the music business. In both cases, these "copying" devices enhanced their respective businesses. Whether it's the MPAA or the RIAA, there is no reason to trust those who have cried wolf in the past about new technology, especially when history has shown that advances in technology increase consumer spending.
Then there is the reality that the Internet is changing many businesses. EBay, the fastest-growing and most profitable of the major Internet companies, is selling everything in entertainment (and everything else) to scores of millions of people every week, including music and musical instruments. As a result, they have put many music and instrument stores out of business. In an era of rapidly evolving technology, businesses that adapt will survive, those who don't, won't. As reported by the New York Times on Jan. 17, 2003:
"EBay reported a profit of $87 million for the fourth quarter, more than triple the $25.9 million posted a year earlier
These are startling numbers, and they reveal the way of the future. According to the Times, sales at Amazon increased 28 percent, to $1.43 billion, and this in the face of one of the toughest retail markets in years. They did this by expanding their product lines (to include clothing) and offering free shipping to consumers whose orders exceed $25. They did it by providing greater service for less money. Perhaps the music business will take note.
It is true that downloading music is a very popular entertainment option for many people. The number one P2P application, KaZaA, was downloaded 3,145,095 times during the week of Jan. 6-12, 2003. The number two P2P application, iMesh, was downloaded 440,877 times during the same period. KaZaA estimates that it had 140 million users by the end of 2002, twice as many as Napster at its peak. These fantastic numbers indicate a desire among consumers for music that the music companies traditionally satisfied but increasingly no longer do. This raises another question. Why don't the record labels have P2P networks? They have proven to be wildly popular. They don't require expensive investments in technology to start and maintain, and most importantly, the online community has embraced them wholeheartedly. The reason is, they can't agree with their "partners" -- publishers and artists -- on how to share the money. The same greed that got them into their current problem prevents them from extricating themselves from it.
Let's suppose I'm a kid. I have a fixed allowance or a minimum wage job. I have $100 a month to spend on entertainment, if I'm lucky. With that cash, I can rent or buy DVDs, pay for my Internet connection, go to a concert, a movie, or a sporting event (at which I might buy some merchandise), buy a video game, pay my mobile phone bill, drive through the drive-thru, or buy a CD. From that list of options, what's the least likely thing I'm going to spend money on? I think the answer would be the CD, even if downloaded music didn't exist. I would argue that it's not the presence of a "free" alternative that has caused the decline in CD sales, it's the presence of competing choices offering more value and fewer hassles.
III. An Argument for Downloaded Music
It could be argued that MP3s are the greatest marketing tool ever to come along for the music industry. If your music is not being downloaded, then you're in trouble. If you can't give it away, you certainly can't sell it. Daniel Bedingfield recently had a top 3 song on the radio, with "Gotta Get Thru This." However, his music was hardly available through any of the P2P networks. His record lasted on the Billboard Top 200 for less than a month, even though the single had been on radio playlists all over the country for several months. It's also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was "The Eminem Show," by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and "The Eminem Show" is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less.
As VH1.com recently reported, at least one company believes that file-sharing is good for business, and that it's a "promotional tool and boosts the sales of albums that deserve it." M.S.C. Music & Entertainment is encouraging listeners to download 20 tracks from rapper Tech N9ne's new album, for free. "The major labels can no longer fool the consumer. They don't want you to sample their music because they know that if the fans realize there are only two good songs on a record, you will not buy it
50 Cent, Eminem's newest talent and rap's current street king, sees an advantage to having his debut album, "Get Rich or Die Trying," available before the release date:
"The bootleggers are gonna go crazy with this record. They understand how much of a presence I have in the streets. They'll probably get the record two weeks before the album actually drops and it'll be all over the place
# There's a provocative piece on P2P.com regarding piracy and on-line distribution titled "Piracy Is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution," by Tim O'Reilly. His article discusses a number of subjects, including: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
# Piracy is progressive taxation.
# Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
# Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
# File-sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing, they threaten existing publishers.
# "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. He has been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. His Global Network Navigator site (GNN, sold to AOL in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web. O'Reilly takes a long-term view of the intellectual property problem, as opposed to the short-term view that is characterized by the "sky is falling" rhetoric of both the music (RIAA) and movie (MPAA) business.
O'Reilly's observations about the book business apply to the music business. As with the record industry, the publishing world enjoys only a 10 percent success rate. "More than 100,000 books are published each year
O'Reilly continues:
"For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits.
"I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. What's more, she has introduced me to her favorite music, and I too have bought CDs as a result. And no, she isn't downloading Britney Spears, but forgotten bands from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, as well as their musical forebears in other genres. This is music that's difficult to find -- except online -- but, once found, leads to a focused search for CDs, records, and other artifacts. eBay is doing a nice business with much of this material, even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity."
O'Reilly makes other persuasive observations:
"Piracy is a loaded word, which we used to reserve for wholesale copying and resale of illegitimate product. The music and film industry usage, applying it to peer-to-peer file sharing, is a disservice to honest discussion...
"The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price...
"The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so...
"New media have historically not replaced but rather augmented and expanded existing media marketplaces, at least in the short term. Opportunities exist to arbitrage between the new distribution medium and the old."
O'Reilly compares an on-line music subscription service to people paying $19.95 a month for an ISP when "free" Internet is available, or $20 to $60 a month for TV programming when there is "free" TV programming:
"Why would you pay for a song that you could get for free? For the same reason that you will buy a book that you could borrow from the public library or buy a DVD of a movie that you could watch on television or rent for the weekend. Convenience, ease-of-use, selection, ability to find what you want, and for enthusiasts, the sheer pleasure of owning something you treasure."
Comparing TV to music, O'Reilly says a lesson that can be learned from television "is that people prefer subscriptions to pay-per-view, except for very special events. What's more, they prefer subscriptions to larger collections of content, rather that single channels. So, people subscribe to 'the movie package,' 'the sports package,' and so on. The recording industry's 'per song' trial balloons may work, but I predict that in the long term, an 'all-you-can-eat' monthly subscription service (perhaps segmented by musical genre) will prevail in the marketplace."
People want what they want and they have made their choices. They will still buy CDs, but they want to download music. The failure of the music business to provide a comparable alternative to peer-to-peer networks is the most logical explanation for the "illegal" downloading of music. And rather than address the problem by examining their own behavior, the music companies declare the consumer to be their enemy, support intrusive, overreaching legislation, and act precisely against their best interests. This remains true even in the face of the recent truce the RIAA agreed to with several technology groups. Rather than realize the profit potential of that about which they complain, they try to kill it, then they try to control it. Now they're trying to control the consumer. As O'Reilly points out in his final paragraph:
"And that's the ultimate lesson. 'Give the wookie what he wants!' as Han Solo said so memorably in the first 'Star Wars' movie. Give it to him in as many ways as you can find, at a fair price, and let him choose which works best for him."
The RIAA tries to "give the wookie what he wants" by giving him what they want. Their newest attempt is with a handful of half-baked music subscription services. The New York Times recently reported that "Jupiter Research expects consumers to pay about $79 million for downloaded songs and CDs in 2003. Subscription services
"The brewing battles among these services will be over how they package songs, what kind of exclusive access they can offer subscribers to particular artists and whether they can be used for portable devices, stereos and cars."
If subscription services offer a broad range of music and no digital rights management schemes, and properly labeled high-quality files, at a reasonable price with fast downloads, they will have a chance to compete against "free." Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the music business will avoid copy protection issues. Instead, copy protection remains the No. 1 priority for both the music and movie industries. The future of digital media will have movies or songs offered in various ways for various prices. If you want to just play it once, or for a 24-hour period, it will be cheaper than if you want to download it to your hard drive and copy it. If you want it to play on all of your players, you will pay more than if you just want to hear it or see it over the Internet. 2003 will be a crucial year for industry online music subscription services PressPlay (Universal/Sony), MusicNet (BMG/Warners/EMI), and Rhapsody. They will have to develop an approach to these issues that satisfies the demand currently being met by the P2P networks if they hope to compete in this emerging market. Consumers are reluctant to accept limitations on use, so it is unlikely that copy protection will lead to a cure for what ails the music business.
The music business isn't like the movie business, even though both are involved in the digital dissemination of intellectual property. A song is not the same as a movie. Listening to a song on the Internet isn't the same as watching a movie for free on the Internet. It is arguable that downloading a song functions as a substitute for radio, a first step in the process of consumption, while watching a movie is, arguably, the last step in the process of consumption. Consumers may accept limitations on the use of a movie, making it more akin to the licensing of software, but they find it more difficult to accept limitations on the use of a CD they buy or music that they acquire by way of a subscription service. Consumers are used to renting movies; they're used to buying and owning music.
Music companies are more egregious in their abuse of consumers than the movie companies. Consumers don't hate movie companies, but they do hate record companies. The question is, why is this happening and what is going to be done about it? Digital copy protection (known as digital rights management or DRM) will only add fuel to this fire, so expect a very big blaze in 2003. In the end, it will be the music companies that run the risk of being consumed by it. Music companies have the opportunity to adjust to the new realities of digital distribution but instead they cling to their existing business models where they control as much of the distribution channel as possible. It is doubtful that this behavior will be rewarded with increased sales.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed by Congress in 1998 to address how technological innovation would affect intellectual property. In drawing up the document, Congress looked to the RIAA and similar groups for guidance as to what the law should contain. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently released a study titled "Unintended Consequences: Four Years Under the DMCA" which goes on to detail how the "anti-circumvention" clauses of the DMCA have been used to stifle innovation, censor free speech, and threaten academic/scientific research. These chilling effects of the DMCA contradict and limit the "fair use" doctrine that is an important part of copyright law. Additionally, the digital rights management (DRM) initiatives that the RIAA and MPAA propose to protect their copyrights do nothing to protect the "fair use" rights of consumers.
Record labels are confused and contradictory. They use MP3s in private while they deride them in public. If they're promoting a new band, they'll post the band's songs on P2P networks (often in a covert manner) with the hopes that they'll be traded and talked about in chat rooms. If it's an established act with a history of sales, they'll "spoof" the P2P networks with fake files (also in a covert manner). It's just another way of using MP3s, albeit a subversive and anti-customer way. The RIAA has apparently engaged in "poisoning" P2P networks.
The biggest damage done by downloaded music is the paralysis it has inflicted upon the traditionalists in the music industry. The path to profitability does not include a long and drawn-out legal battle with consumers, yet this is exactly what the RIAA is doing. The choice for NARAS is whether to lead the fight for what's best for the artists or whether to endorse the self-serving positions of the music industry's congressional lobbying group, the RIAA.
There is a convincing piece by Damien Cave on Salon.com titled "File Sharing: Innocent Until Proven Guilty," which argues that there is no proven correlation between downloaded music and the decline in CD sales. He continues to argue in "File Sharing: Guilty As Charged?" that a good deal of the "sky is falling" rhetoric created by the record companies and the RIAA is based on supposition and self-interest. In addition, the article "RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy" analyzes the RIAA's own statistics and argues that they do not support the RIAA's conclusion that downloaded music is the cause for the decline in CD sales. In this detailed analysis, George Ziemann argues that the record industry released 11,900 fewer titles in 2000 than it released in 1999, a 25 percent decrease, yet the total number of units shipped decreased only 10.3 percent and the dollar value of these units fell by only 4.1 percent. It seems that the RIAA is misinterpreting its own statistics.
IV. Record Company Complicity
It could be argued that the record companies are responsible for their current predicament. Again, how did they turn themselves into one of the most hated corporate sectors, and what are they going to do about it? Five years ago nobody gave a second thought about record companies; now they are reviled. Record companies need to realize that music is now viewed as a commodity with a shelf-life of 90 days, and that they made it so. As Prince recently put it:
"So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need 2 provide appropriate compensation 2 the artists 4 their works? We've said it b4 and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-2-peer file sharing has little 2 do with people's intrinsic respect 4 art and artists, and everything 2 do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed 4 more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the xpense of authentic art and respect 4 artists.
"If people do not feel enough guilt 2 prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration 4 their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the xpense of artistic works.
"The fact that actual works of art still manage 2 seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, 2day more than ever -- i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
"As a simple xample of how little music is valued as an art 4m by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available -- and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available 2 music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
"It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (b it music, TV shows, movies, or other 4ms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect 4 his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason 2 have any respect 4 the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people r not demonstrating their lack of respect 4 art and 4 artists, but r xpressing -- consciously or not -- their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the xpense of both art makers and art lovers.
"The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry r only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by xploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that r completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people."
There is good reason for consumer cynicism. AOL Time Warner owns Warner Bros. Records (along with America Online, Time, Life, Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Studios, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, and Road Runner). AOL makes a lot of money as an Internet service provider. There is no question that a large portion of the people using AOL's service are downloading the very music that Warner Bros. Records claims as being stolen. There is no question that the executives at AOL Time Warner know this. Also, let's not forget that it was AOL that bought Time Warner. Service trumped content.
The conglomerates are reeling from the impact the Internet and digital downloads are having in changing how the consumer thinks. But it is not the downloads that are wrecking the music business, it is the inability of the conglomerates to adjust to the Internet and the new ways consumers want to consume music. AOL Time Warner just posted a year-end loss for 2002 of $98.7 billion. Sony, the only multinational corporation to have interests in both the music and consumer electronics worlds, has relinquished its leadership in the portable market to Apple's iPod due to Sony's conflicting interests in music copyrights (Sony Music) and in hardware. Sony hardware comes with anti-copying features, making it cumbersome and inflexible. For example, as reported in the Wired magazine article "The Year the Music Dies," the five major music companies sold $20 billion worth of music last year, but Sony alone had $42 billion in electronics and computer sales, making their music business much less significant. "If Sony wants to sell MP3-capable cell phones -- a big thing in Japan and potentially worldwide -- how much attention will it pay to Sony Music's protests?"
In another recent article in Wired magazine Frank Rose writes:
"As a member of the Consumer Electronics Association, Sony joined the chorus of support for Napster against the legal onslaught from Sony and the other music giants seeking to shut it down. As a member of the RIAA, Sony railed against companies like Sony that manufacture CD burners. And it isn't just through trade associations that Sony is acting out its schizophrenia. Sony shipped a Celine Dion CD with a copy-protection mechanism that kept it from being played on Sony PCs. Sony even joined the music industry's suit against Launch Media, an Internet radio service that was part-owned by -- you guessed it -- Sony. Two other labels have since resolved their differences with Launch, but Sony Music continues the fight, even though Sony Electronics has been one of Launch's biggest advertisers and Launch is now part of Yahoo!, with which Sony has formed a major online partnership. It's as if hardware and entertainment have lashed two legs together and set off on a three-legged race, stumbling headlong into the future."
Sony is also the largest manufacturer of writeable CD drives. It, along with Philips, co-developed the CD and collects royalties from various CD patents. All CDs, whether used by commercial replicators or bought by the general public, are subject to these royalties, which currently stand at $0.033 per disc. There were over 500 million blank CDs sold last year. The advantage of being a multinational corporation is the ability to use one asset to create another asset. Sony may make less money on music but is using it to make money elsewhere.
Similar internal conflicts exist within AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and the Bertelsmann polygon. Nevertheless, they continue to engage in businesses that infringe on their own copyrights. They are trying to have it both ways, in all ways. Instead of dealing with their own inconsistencies, they direct and fund the RIAA to lobby politicians to support legislation like the "Peer to Peer Piracy Protection Act." This act gives record companies the right to invade your hard drive (an otherwise illegal activity) if they suspect that you have illegally obtained their copyrights, their music. This anti-piracy law is actually an anti-privacy law, and it also limits fair use and threatens academic freedom. The RIAA and the music business are trying to legislate profitability. NARAS needs to take a position with respect to the copyright issue, but it should be an independent position. NARAS should come up with its own ideas. The RIAA is acting irrationally.
Also, the record companies recently settled a price-fixing suit in which they admitted they were overcharging consumers. This point seems to be overlooked by the RIAA in its attempt to place all blame for the woes of the music business at the feet of file-sharing. Is it possible that the decrease in CD sales is related to the conspiracy by the major record labels to fix inflated prices?
V. Opportunity and the Future
One other word about the 3 billion music downloads each month: That's a lot of music. There aren't 3 billion songs. Music has become fungible. People are going through it faster than toilet paper. Never in the history of the world has there been more music in the air and never have more people listened to music. Out of this incredible desire and need for music, surely some good must come. I think more opportunity than ever is available to the musician and songwriter, and the record company too. They just have to create new ways to deal with this opportunity, and it won't be by the old rules. Janis Ian is a good example. Downloaded music has resurrected her career. She's actually making money because of downloads. I think that if it weren't for all of this activity on the Internet and all of this downloaded music, the CD market would be suffering more than it is. MP3s are lessening the decline of the music business, not creating it.
Record companies are not logical, righteous entities. They are ramshackle, profit-driven enterprises. They act in their perceived best interests, and they act ruthlessly and, in many cases, irrationally. The people who run them still have their e-mail printed out by their secretaries. We have to wait for the next generation to take over, the "software" generation, the generation of people who don't remember growing up without a computer around. I would argue that the future of music is multimedia, the future of multimedia is DVD, and the future of music companies is software. In five years, record labels will be software companies and I don't think they know that yet. The music business will be saved by someone from the software business who can impose a new business model on music assets.
In the future there will be no record stores as we know them, no tangible product as we know it. The CD is going the way of the 8-track and the cassette. Soon there will be no need for the tangible thing. Consumers have made their choice. They want to listen to music while they're working at their computers, on a portable device like an iPod or MiniDisc player, or on a home theater jukebox (similar to a feature of Microsoft's Xbox). Digitally available music has given the consumer choices, and they like those choices. They don't want music just from commercial radio. They also want it from their hard drives and from the Internet. Yet record companies still want to force tangible, overpriced media on consumers who want to obtain data files and temporarily store them on their hard drives or on cheap, disposable discs (CD-Rs). If record labels don't start trying to be part of the future they will be bought up and converted to it by someone who is.
People have always listened to music while they were doing something else. That's almost the essence of "American music." Record companies guessed right on the "something else" for a long time, but that was before the myriad of other choices became available to consumers. At one time in this country, listening to music on the radio was a miracle. It's no longer a miracle, and when you look at the technological developments in the last 70 years, there's little wonder why. It's been one miracle after another. And yet even to this day, radio is the sine qua non of a hit record. This is especially true in the era of radio consolidation, where corporate Goliaths like Clear Channel are allowed to exist. Maybe that's the only way radio can remain relevant: It has to become one big punch. In a world where diversity is an evolutionary step, radio moves furiously towards consolidation, aided and abetted by the FCC. Someone should ask the question, why is this allowed?
The way things are going, a few corporations are going to control access to all digital information, and if the current administration has its way, these activities will be monitored. The reason why the RIAA is screaming bloody murder about little ol' MP3 is because it means that they are losing control. People are making their own individual choices, and they aren't going along with the program of manipulation that has always limited those choices. Now that they're making choices, industry executives and politicians are shocked.
The same argument extends to the television industry with respect to TiVo and other personal video recorders (PVRs). Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, which encompasses everything from CNN to TNT and is a part of AOL Time Warner, was asked in an interview why PVRs were bad for his industry. He responded that it's "because of the ad skips
VI. The Role of NARAS
In order for the record industry to remain relevant it will have to determine how to get people to buy something they can get for free. In addition to the cable television business, print publications, and ISPs, there is an industry that has found a solution to this problem, and the music industry should take notice. That industry is the bottled water industry. Bottled water is a growth market. But common sense would indicate that when water is virtually free (i.e., tap water) that people wouldn't want to pay $1 for 16 oz. of water. Yet, most of us frequently do just that. Why? Because it is convenient and because we have been persuaded that it is safer, more pure, that it is "better" water. Convenience becomes necessity, belief becomes profit.
The bottled water industry is built on customer service. If the music business were to take this approach and ally themselves with consumers rather than fight them, it's quite possible that their profits would still be growing. But record companies distrust their customers even more than their customers distrust them. The circle is unlikely to be broken, which in turn creates wide open spaces for the entrepreneur, for a "new" way. NARAS has to appeal to the new, not the old. NARAS supersedes the short-term interests of the record companies. NARAS has an obligation to art and to the artists who create it, to creative excellence in its presentation, and it is those obligations, above all, that should define its actions. The relevance of NARAS exists in direct proportion to its independence.
Charlie Feldman suggested that the board undertake a "study" of the matter. He's right, only we should go further. I think we need a symposium, a gathering of eagles. NARAS should take the lead in this matter. Those who are taking it now are leading us over a cliff. The RIAA has staked out an untenable position that is as unrealistic as it is anti-consumer and anti-artist. Their interests and the interests of NARAS are not the same. Their solutions are not good solutions. They cling unsuccessfully to the past rather than embrace the stunning opportunities offered by the future. They will be unsuccessful in their attempts to criminalize the society, and in their attempts to stretch the drum head of old laws onto the drum of new technology. It is one thing to be unsuccessful, it's one thing to argue a bad position, but it's quite another to be silly and laughed at, and that's where the RIAA has ended up. They appear to be totally irrelevant except as bagmen. It's more than just bad P.R., it's bad science. The RIAA reached its conclusions, then looked for supporting arguments, all the while ignoring reality, opportunity and fact. They overstate their position, misinterpret their own data, and make dubious claims for artists' rights when the biggest abusers of artists' rights are their benefactors, the record companies themselves.
ZDNet reported that the sale of illegal CDs increased 50 percent from 2000 to 2001. This translates into $4.3 billion dollars in sales from 950 million illegally sold CDs. This strikes me as a much more serious and obvious problem than downloaded music. So serious in fact that the problem of MP3s pales by comparison. This is where the record companies and RIAA should be putting their moral outrage, their money and energy. Those bad guys really are bad guys, profiting from the mass counterfeiting of someone else's property, unlike 14-year-old kids, who download music because they can't afford $18 for two songs that are going to be replaced in a couple of weeks anyway. Equating the downloading of music with counterfeiting for profit brings disrepute to the RIAA's more important and necessary efforts to stop counterfeiting. Then again, it's ironic that if the RIAA is successful in shoving everyone back into the CD market, almost half of the CDs they buy will be counterfeits.
With respect to the question of downloaded music, NARAS should embrace new technologies, be the voice of reasoned analysis, and act as an arbiter to reconcile the conflicting views of the various parties involved. In the past, NARAS aligned itself with the RIAA and the record companies. This is a mistake, in my opinion, and I hope that the opinions expressed in this paper will at least give us reason to pause and to thoroughly examine our position, as well as the position, claims and statistics of the RIAA and their corporate backers. Above all else, NARAS must not rubber-stamp what is quite clearly a self-serving position (as happened on last year's Grammy broadcast when Mike Greene berated and branded music consumers as thieves and shoplifters). NARAS must be the independent voice, a voice of objectivity. NARAS should be the "think tank" of the music business, not an enforcer or a PAC. What we have here is the potential to become a leader in the new frontier of intellectual property rights, artists' rights, consumers' rights, the future of music, and the power of the art itself. I say let's seize the day. In my opinion, there is a vacuum of leadership with respect to these pivotal and crucial issues and NARAS should step in and fill that vacuum. It is a golden opportunity.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
John Snyder is president of Artist House Records, a board member of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, and a 32-time Grammy nominee.
Ben Snyder, John's son, works for It's a Gas Marketing/Management, a grassroots marketing company that serves the music industry.
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Courtney Love does the math
The controversial singer takes on record label profits, Napster and "sucka VCs."
By Courtney Love
06/14/00
Wrong facts (Score:3, Informative)
It ain't necessarily so.
If the author allows the download for people who haven't bought copies otherwise, or if the copy rights expired, then it is legal.
There are probably other legal cases, but those were the ones I got out of the top of my head.
Great Rivalries (Score:2)
The Gist (Score:5, Insightful)
The meat of the argument is much better. Thomas Jefferson's belief in the free exchange of information (or ideas) to promote intellectual growth is what I have believed in since day one. Stifling the education process by prohibiting the utility of someone's ideas is not only detrimental to those who can't use the ideas, but also to those who hold claim to the ideas.
But at the same time, plagiarism is wrong. But why should utilizing others' discoveries be illegal if proper credit is given? I can't conceive any principle or moral factor that justifies that.
The problem with ideas, words, and anything related to the thought process is that they are intangible. They can not be proven to be the property of someone else, yet the patent office or whoever is in charge simply takes the first person to show up. Further more, any human mind is capable of innovative ideas that can benefit us all. What if it was my great-grandfather who originally came up with the Dr Pepper formula, but he didn't like the way it tasted so he discarded it, only for his neighbor to pick it up and start a company on it? Bad example, but it proves the point for me: it can not be proven that you're the one who worked to develop this idea or product, and it can not be morally justifiable to grant anyone the rights to prohibit the usage of such ideas simply based on the fact that they are the first to go public with it.
Information, ideas, innovation... All should be public and free to exchange. Prohibiting such exchange is prohibiting the advancement of the human mind and of the human race. We would be in much better shape if we did not have legal institutions in place for restricting our rights to apply our own thoughts.
Re:The Gist (Score:3, Informative)
It is unfortuante that people seem to have such a poor understanding of what led to the establishment of a patent system. Prior to patents, businesses and trades kept ideas that gave them a commercial advantage secret (this is where the term 'trade secret' comes from). There was no dissemination of these ideas whatsoever. This had a large negative impact in the growth of technology.
To counteract this, the concept of the patent was developed. In its most fundamental form, the patent is a contract between a government and an individual. The exchange of value is that the inventor fully discloses his invention in the form of a document that becomes freely available (the patent) - this is why patents are NOT copyrighted. In return the government provides the patent holder with a limited time monopoly on the practice of the invention. This system is so effective that the only inventions that are kept as trade secrets these days are those that cannot be patented for one reason or another.
The history is quite compelling - prior to the institution of the patent system there were very few inventions that made an impact in daily life. With the possible exception of the chimney and the horse collar man lived little differently in the 17th century than he did immediately after the invention of agriculture 5000 years previously. The patent was one of the keys to the occurance of the industrial revolution in England in the 18th century, and the onset of modern technological society. In the past 200 years the effect of and growth of technology, and the improvement in the lot of mankind has far outpaced the previous 5000 years.
The patent plays a siginifcant role in this, for the simple reason that it promotes the dissemination of ideas that would have otherwise been kept secret.
correlation, causation (Score:4, Insightful)
Secondly, and more importantly, history is replete with DIRECT counterexamples of the assertion that IP laws stimulate innovation.
Innovations in airplanes did not occur until the US invalidated them soon after the onset of WWI
Innovations in the gun did not occur until Colt's revolver patent expired, even though Browning (and many others) had almost immediately improved on the original revolver design significantly. Patent law prevented any such advances from seeing the light of day for decades.
These are just two examples of the most obvious (and famous) patents stifling innovation; an even CURSORY look at the history of "successful" patents will give you example after example of innovation coming to an almost complete halt during the life of a patent, only to resume again after it had lapsed. To further illustrate this, in endeavors where the patent holder was succesfully able to extend his patent, innovation similarly died off again.
Note also that this effect of patents is ENTIRELY intentional; all competition is supposed to be stifled until the patent holder has "recouped" his investment. This is a "functioning" government enforced monopoly.
Also, note that "intentional" does NOT imply constitutionality either. That has more to do with the lobbying activities of rent-seeking corporations...
Re:The Gist (Score:2)
Re:The Gist (Score:2)
Excuse me, but all of these things were changed with the agreement of the majority. Majority of white, male and rich at that. Otherwise, people would just elect their favourite extremists for the next term and they would undo all the reforms. They elected Bush after all.
Democracy sucks but it's still the best thing out there. One thing I would love to see is an entrance exam to hold a public office, to prove that one has basic knowledge of medicine, technology, ecology and so on. Big universities can be selected at random to give tests to candidates and then their prestige will hang on his/her display of knowledge or ignorance in office.
Re:The Gist (Score:2)
Re:The Gist (Score:2)
As I recall the popular vote went to Gore by more than 200,000 votes. But the electoral college swayed the results to Bush helped by the mess in Florida.
Re:The Gist (Score:2)
And I'm damn proud of that.
Re:The Gist (Score:2)
A democracy may or may not be governed by popular majority rule. A republic is not governed by a simple popular majority. The entire purpose of representation of the various territorial units -- which vary in size, population, and geographical location (duh) -- is to assert the will of the states along with the will of the people. (This is why the 17th Amendment is bad. Before it was passed, state legislatures elected US Senators. The Senate was intended to be the federal legislative representative body of the states, while the House was intended to be the federal legislative reprensative body of the people. The direct election of Senators has completely removed the states' from having their say.)
But anyway, 29 states chose Bush and 21 states chose Gore. But 48.3% chose Gore and 48.1% chose Bush. *gasp* Would you look at that? It appears that no majority chose any president in 2000!
Note 1: no candidate who has ever won a majority of the popular vote has ever not been elected to the presidency.
Note 2: the Electoral College elects the president based on the popular vote; the people do not directly elect the president.
Re:Not enough money in the world... (Score:2)
Oh, and one other problem: the current media do not provide sufficient access to users of the various types of music that they may like to purchase --most radio is as bad as MTV. The only way we can be exposed to new music these days is to (a) listen to the special, select few that the industry pushes on its top 40 and other specialized stations or (b) get on the Internet and talk to people and do some research of our own ... and download some tracks to test them out.
I buy about five CDs per month now just because I downloaded some cool songs. Before Napster, I bought maybe ten per year because I just didn't hear anything new. That isn't the only reason, but the main reason why I buy so much now is because I keep finding more that I like.
Anyway, I'm rambling, and I leave for work in five hours...
What an excellent article... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What an excellent article... (Score:1)
Once again, I call up my
Re:What an excellent article... (Score:2)
If only (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I'd lose debating with them but (Score:1)
My tiny mind told me what RIAA does on CD price-setting is anti-customer; and when it comes to squeezing the creativeness of minority artists who just want to let people listen to their music, they are anti-artist.
RIAA is in position similar to Satan accusing others anti-christ.
MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL (Score:2)
--Joey
Do the math. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm tired of people (on both sides of the music sharing issue) trotting out the same rhetorical arguments all the time. There's nothing new here. Snyder's arguments about growth in other media don't prove his point; rather they show that the decline in record sales can't be blamed on the slowing economy. I believe I bought fewer CDs from major labels this year, not because I was downloading them from the internet, but because I wasn't interested in them. My money instead goes to new, independant artists (via CD Baby [cdbaby.com] a fantastic way to buy music that doesn't make you feel like a criminal.)
I for one don't believe that we're going to (or that we should) do away with copyright. I just believe that the current music industry is going to be end-runned. I hope that we don't end up legislating it's continued existence. By that I don't mean that we should permit illegal file sharing, but that we shouldn't mandate a technological solution which only allows big media to create content.
-c
Re:Do the math. (Score:2)
At the same time, I believe that it's precisely the fact that record companies are releasing fewer new albums that leads me to other means to acquire new music.
The article is a good read, though, at least because he uses lots of expletives in an attempt to justify his conclusions.
-c
And in The Inquirer too.. (Score:2, Interesting)
At http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7555 a lengthy report on the same subject, just released today.
Similar in some respects but different in others - like it has some stuff about copyright expiry scaring the crap out of the RIAA. Certainly worth a read. Very nice synchronicity!
"an educated consumer... (Score:2, Insightful)
Like books that one 'must read,' the body of good music is vast. And the array of lesser music perhaps even larger. It's not surprising really that out of sheer defense, if not more educated musical pallettes, that people consult music info sites, trade music (and maybe quite frequently delete them) and make more targeted purchases.
If anything, the recording industry should examine trends in shared music and find out what the consumer really wants. And why this isn't being fulfilled by the current state of affairs.
NRA vs RIAA??? (Score:3, Funny)
Overall it's quite a good article. (Score:3, Funny)
NARAS Coup? (Score:4, Interesting)
So I found it very interesting that the link off the article to Janis Ian's Internet Debacle [janisian.com] quotes NARAS as follows:
The NARAS people were a bit more pushy. They told me downloads were "destroying sales", "ruining the music industry", and "costing you money".
Looks like NARAS has done a 180. But if they previously didn't believe in what this article is arguing for, why do they believe it now? Is it really just because they think they have to adapt to the new model? Or are there other motives which we don't know about? After all, I bet a huge load of
Even RIAA members secretly see uses (Score:2)
According to this [accessatlanta.com], it appears that some members of the RIAA have also embraced file sharing - but only as a tool for gathering marketing data.
Re:NARAS Coup? (Score:3, Informative)
Non sequitur. If you pay attention, you'll notice that this article was an address to NARAS, not a statement of their position. Just because John Snyder has expressed this opinion does not mean that NARAS agrees with him. He's only one member, after all.
For that matter, it wasn't even an address to the whole of NARAS: it was ". . . written in response to a discussion by the board of governors of the New York chapter of [NARAS] regarding the position NARAS should take with respect to a new public relations campaign proposed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) condemning those who download music from the Internet." (Quote from the intro of the article on Salon, emphasis added)
Cause and Effect (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. I believe that the recording industry has completely confused cause with effect and refuses to accept the consequnces of its actions.
While I do not download copyrighted material, many years ago my music budget and I completely abandoned the regular commercial stream in favor of independent artists and recordings. The top 4 reasons were:
1) Quality
2) Choice and variety
3) Value for money
4) Contempt for an industry that would be as at home selling hamburgers - a soulless marketing machine that didn't have a clue what real music was, treated it as a commodity and treated its customers and artists with equal levels of contempt while continuing down a path towards providing less of items 1-3. I wasn't alone with my feelings and options arose - we took them. I'm not going back - I'm much happier where I am now.
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:2)
1) Quality
I'm dubious. You may not *like* best-sellers, but dismissing all of them as low-quality is, frankly, ludicrous. Yes, much of the music industry is influenced by pure marketing. However, quality of music is the dominant factor -- if people do not like your music, they will not buy it.
2) Choice and variety
You deliberately avoided buying mainstream music to *increase* your choices available?
3) Value for money
Can't argue with that.
4) Contempt for an industry that would be as at home selling hamburgers - a soulless marketing machine that didn't have a clue what real music was, treated it as a commodity and treated its customers and artists with equal levels of contempt while continuing down a path towards providing less of items 1-3. I wasn't alone with my feelings and options arose - we took them. I'm not going back - I'm much happier where I am now.
Oh, that's silly. *Every* big industry is like that. I don't see people up in arms about their silverware, cordless phone, book publishers, etc, etc, etc.
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:2)
Either your whole post is a very good troll or you're very naive, but I'll try to treat what you said as sincere.
I'm dubious. You may not *like* best-sellers, but dismissing all of them as low-quality is, frankly, ludicrous.
You may want to work on your reading comprehension. Nowhere did I say that I don't like best sellers nor did I dismiss best sellers as low quality. I do have a problem with mindless, repetitive, banal crap. By coincidence, that seems to be mostly what the big 5 labels are pushing. Another coincidence I have found is that much more quality and creativity exists outside of the big 5 label world.
if people do not like your music, they will not buy it.
I think that you're confusing quality of music with effectiveness of product marketing and lack of choice.
You deliberately avoided buying mainstream music to *increase* your choices available?
I deliberately avoid buying mainstream music because most of it is crap and because I have contempt for the artist-screwing and customer-screwing practices of the big label cartel. The decision wasn't made over night but over several years of growing disenchantment - prices were too high and going up and more and more releases had only 1-2 good tracks and the rest was filler.
On top of that, I developed the perception of a general decline in the quality of music and creativity of artists. Eventually, I figured out that the consumer was being hosed on that issue (as well as others, like pricing) by the record cartel and swore off them. The unanticipated benefit was that I discovered that there is in fact a huge amount of choice, that much good music does exist, and creativity is alive and well. It just isn't processed and sold by the cartel and you have to work harder to find it.
Oh, that's silly. *Every* big industry is like that. I don't see people up in arms about their silverware, cordless phone, book publishers, etc, etc, etc.
It appears that you have little trouble with having fewer choices marketed to you as more. And your argument actually underscores my point - that music is viewed by the industry as a commodity like cordless phones (there is quite a difference between the "Arts" and commodity goods). I don't buy hype myself - there may be 157 different types of toothpaste on the shelf and the packages may have different colors and words, but they're all more or less the same, made by a very small group of manufacturers, and being sold on the basis of creating the perception of choice rather than giving real choice.
Quality is as quality does (Score:2)
You're right - it was a poorly chosen word on my part without at least qualifying it. Perhaps "Artistic Quality", or "Quality of Composition" would be better choices, but those still seem subjective and ambiguous. In the context that I (wished to) convey the sentiment, it certainly has nothing to do with manufacturing or marketing values. I had hoped to get away with the word for the purposes of succinctness, but that was not to be. Fair enough, here goes.
I view music, however crude, as an expression of human spirit and by extension, as art. To me, in order for it to fulfill the quality requirement, an art form must satisfy a group of criteria, some of which are subjective and some almost intangible. I think that artistic quality coveys something of the artist - that the work is indeed a labor of effort and honesty and contains originality; coveys a message and emotion yet challenges the viewer or listener to seek their own interpretation and connect with their own emotions; is not an intentional copy of elements of another work, although it may me subtlety derivative of other works; has structure and flow; follows certain guidelines yet is not bound by rules(sheesh) and has something original to say. The foregoing is a highly subjective, off-the-cuff definition and does not sit well with engineer in me, but since this is not a thesis paper, I'll go with it for now. I guess that part of the nature of art is that it is somewhat antithetical to engineering, yet contains some common elements.
(Now please don't pick the above apart, it's not woth the effort. Even I'm not totally happy with it, but I don't want to spend a month on it.)
Despite the vague definition, I do know (albeit subjectively) quality music from crap and what I hear on the radio and from big labels is more the latter than the former.
Re:Quality is as quality does (Score:2)
(Now please don't pick the above apart,...)
No worries. I don't intend to. I think you actually have a good working definition. I certainly agree with it, anyway.
Despite the vague definition, I do know (albeit subjectively) quality music from crap and what I hear on the radio and from big labels is more the latter than the former.
As the examples I gave above (rondellus, mofro, Atom and his package, Kraig Kenning) clearly demonstrate, I have also been turning to indie music . I guess the problem is that I've noticed that the mainstream music I think is trash - especially the bubblegum pop - must be touching *someone* emotionally. How else could they sustain the sales figures they have?
Snobbery, my ass. I'm tired of McMusic (Score:2)
Big-label and big-radio music today is rotting fish. I welcome you and everyone else to come over to the other side and find out what real music is as opposed to prefabricated McMusic. You're welcome to stay (no snobs here) and you're welcome to go back - it's your choice and your health. I really couldn't give a damn what you do. But for those who are tired of vacuous sound-alike big-label music and the empty feeling with which it leaves you- there is an alternative.
HELP the RIAA!!! They'll love you for it.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Rant about music you like, mention a few unsigned bands that record a similar genre the the RIAA track you're spoiling. Talk about fair use, payola, price fixing, whatever. Mention a few good URL's about the issues such as the one in this story.
Repeat for as much of the top-100 as you can stand, then share it around. If the RIAA wants P2P networks polluted, let's do it RIGHT!
Re:HELP the RIAA!!! They'll love you for it.. (Score:2)
Me singing "Not That Innocent."
You're a sick, depraved person. Did you know that?
In unrelated news... (Score:2)
Article title is misleading! (Score:2)
Note to the Snyders... (Score:2)
Re:Note to the Snyders... (Score:2)
hunter s. thompson quote... (Score:2)
take it from someone who really knows...
"the music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. there's also a negative side." ~ hunter s. thompson
Very misleading.... (Score:2)
If ever one member of Congress got voted out...... (Score:2)
Was anyone actually paying attention here? (Score:2)
A prize to anyone who can spot the logical fallacies & deliberate distortions in the following excerpts:
1. "between the years 1991 and 2001, the average price of a CD went from $13.01 to $14.64, which is a 12.53 percent increase in price. The record companies raised prices precisely at the time costs were coming down. When a DVD costs $19.99 and includes the movie in multiple formats with bonus material and no hassle, and a CD costs $18.99 and comes with potential legal hassles, limits on fair use, and all the finger waving the RIAA can muster, the choice of which product to buy becomes clear."
2. "despite President and CEO of the MPAA Jack Valenti's recent statements that the future is bleak. Not since the 1950s have so many movie tickets been sold. Meanwhile, movie sharing on the Internet is at an all-time high. The movie business isn't suffering because of activity on the Internet."
3. " It's also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was "The Eminem Show," by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and "The Eminem Show" is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less."
And that's just from the first third of the article (cuz I'm getting sick of this). Come on, people. These 3 paragraphs may seem convincing to people who don't have training in logic and statistics, but
My daily karma burn...
-a
Re:Was anyone actually paying attention here? (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I agree. This article read more like a laundry list of all the arguments ever made by the anti-RIAA crowd than an actual well-thought out, well-reasoned, logical position. In that sense, I don't believe it was really all that helpful as it's probably going to have nothing more than a "blah blah blah, we've heard this all before" effect on its intended audience.
The article was 5 quite lengthy pages long, and much of it was alternately contradictory and repetitive (many of the same supporting points are used several times over to buttress different, conflicting main points). The author needs an editor. Pick one or two major arguments that don't conflict, support the heck out of them and leave it at that. This thing should have been 2 pages long at most.
Which is not to say that the basic gist of what he's saying isn't true - we all know it is, and this is why it's so annoying that his contradictions will probably relegate his ramblings to the realm of the rest of us crackpots among his peers. The music industry is in the early stages of a major upheaval, and as the author says, if these companies don't make the necessary changes themselves, somebody more powerful than them will buy them up and do it for them.
Sony will be the interesting company to watch over the next couple years, because as they go, likely so will the rest of the music industry. Sony is a mish-mash of competing interests but their electronics, computer, and game divisions collectively dwarf their music division (and their film division, for that matter). At the moment it's a stalemate between the music and other divisions regarding how to handle DRM issues and "piracy" (which the author rightly points out is a misused term these days), but I fully expect that, like any business, if Sony as a whole sees the music division dragging down their overall profitability (as it is right now), they'll do what it takes to right the ship. That means drastically restructuring how music publishing works for them in the end, as it will eventually become apparent that none of the current band-aid solutions is working. The only question is how they accomplish this - but I fully expect to see non-DRM MP3 players from them fairly soon, and some form of capitulation from Sony Music, which will then be integrated into a re-organized company in a completely new way.
I especially expect this to happen as Sony's Japanese management takes a slightly different view on these issues than the RIAA and even Sony America. Other music publishers will either follow Sony's lead, or get bought up by software or technology companies that will force Sony's new business model upon them. Either way, I believe we're close to the point (within the next 2-3 years) where all the little thumbs stuck in the dyke will no longer be enough to stem the tide and major, major changes will take place in the music industry, one way or another. And I strongly believe it'll be Sony leading the way.
Re:Was anyone actually paying attention here? (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I agree. This article read more like a laundry list of all the arguments ever made by the anti-RIAA crowd than an actual well-thought out, well-reasoned, logical position.
That was pretty much exactly what I was thinking.
No attempt at the logical fallacies?
-a
Re:Was anyone actually paying attention here? (Score:2)
I'll take a stab at it.
A stab at propping up the fallacies rather than identifying them, I see.
1. "between the years 1991 and 2001, the average price of a CD went from $13.01 to $14.64, which is a 12.53 percent increase in price. The record companies raised prices precisely at the time costs were coming down. When a DVD costs $19.99 and includes the movie in multiple formats with bonus material and no hassle, and a CD costs $18.99 and comes with potential legal hassles, limits on fair use, and all the finger waving the RIAA can muster, the choice of which product to buy becomes clear."
Sure, he states the *average* price of a CD is $14, because that's statistical and hard fact proof, but you go to a local chain store and over 60% of the CDs are going to be upwards of 16-18.99 each. Out of that, the artist only makes about
Bad Argument 1: State a fact and then ignore it. I did a quick survey of Amazon.com and found that their top 5 hot CDs were selling for an average of $15.
Bad Argument 2: Make statements about CDs that are equally applicable to DVDs.
2. "despite President and CEO of the MPAA Jack Valenti's recent statements that the future is bleak. Not since the 1950s have so many movie tickets been sold. Meanwhile, movie sharing on the Internet is at an all-time high. The movie business isn't suffering because of activity on the Internet."
So where *is* the fallacy? You're trying to claim Valenti's statement, I believe. Let me break it down a little for you. File sharing is at an all time high yet more movie tickets were bought this last year than any other. Valenti thinking the future is bleak just shows how offbase the upper brass are in organizations like the MPAA (lest we forget his argument against the VCR) *rolls eyes*. Valenti saying things as clueless as that is the exact proof that the Snyders were looking for and therefore very valid in the paper.
Bad Argument 1: Comparing movie sharing to movie tickets rother than DVD/Video sales/rentals.
Bad Argument 2: Saying that something is at an all-time high doesn't mean much unless you quantify how high that is. The all-time high of movie piracy is very low compared to music piracy.
3. " It's also been widely reported that the most downloaded album of all time was "The Eminem Show," by Eminem. It was downloaded so heavily that Interscope took the unusual step of releasing the album a week early due to the rampant online sharing of tracks from the album. Fast-forward to the end of 2002, and "The Eminem Show" is the best-selling album of the year. This seems to indicate the opposite of what the RIAA would have you believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less."
If you know anything about that situation you know that's exactly true. I was listening to it before the cd came out due to p2p networks (and Foo Fighter's new one was out on IRC before it came out, and
Bad Argument 1: False causation. The Eminem album sold well because it was popular and it was also heavily pirated because it was popular. This is a correlation, not a causation.
-a