Many are claiming that Itunes, p2p and the internet have ended the record label’s reign as the controlling force in the market. I’ll pull my head out of the sand just long enough to comment.
Here are a couple of salient points:
1. Technology is the culprit and the solution. The ease of Internet distribution and the hurdles of providing legal protection for intellectual property in a Core2 world has created the dilemma the industry faces. If the RIAA and the courts solidify the boundaries and technology enables control of distribution, the labels will recover. Otherwise, control will be the pipe dream Prohibition turned out to be.
Americans have given a vote of indifference to music subscription services and have sided with the iPod/iTunes model. Morris obviously needs to find a way to overcome this problem if subscription services — thought by many executives to be labels’ saving grace — are ever to take off. The Morris plan is a leap forward because music companies are finally treating their product as a service and looking at the best way to get it into the hands of music lovers. The best way is to make the product feel free — much like a file-sharing service paid for by ISP taxes would feel free. Working with hardware manufacturers is a surprising stroke of near-genius. If the digital music era has shown us anything it’s that people are motivated by the hardware, not the services.
2. Quality and Convenience are important.
Ian Rogers at Fistfulayen makes a great point about convenience:
History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses.
3. With the decline of brick and mortar stores and the unbridled ability to share/distribute over the internet, Supply has increased and Prices will fall.
4. Yes, the Recording Industry has flaws. But that doesn’t make illegal filesharing legal.
Hypebot linked a great rant by demonbaby.
The pirating community continues to out-smart and out-innovate the dated methods of the record companies, and CD sales continue to plummet while exchange of digital music on the internet continues to skyrocket. Why? Because freely-available music in large quantities is the new cultural norm, and the industry has given consumers no fair alternative.
Piracy is the norm? Well, maybe for some. I seem to remember that one of my students had a similar view of marijuana use. I’ll spare you the cultural relativity lecture here…
He’s talking about Oink getting closed down. Oink was an invitation-only pirates’ cove of mp3 sharing. In it’s place is a link to a google search that gives you a list of other similar sites.
As Demonbaby concludes, he references John Snyder’s manifesto about filesharing. I’d like to sumarize using Snyder’s excellent analogy:
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.
This, my friends is the future of the Recording Industry:
Cheers!
-j
No Comments
Comments feed for this article