erickamikaze Posted September 17 Report Share Posted September 17 Op-Ed Columns | Article published Wednesday, September 17, 2003Recording industry: 8-track in an MP3 worldBy JOEY HARRISONMemo to the recording industry: Grow up.You’ve become a tiresome bully. You and your army of lawyers, wielding your lawsuits like truncheons. The youth market that enriched you for so many years is entirely new. It’s a demographic that has never sliced the cellophane on the edge of a new LP. The kids today, they’re computer geeks. Except, what’s a geek when every one of ’em practically grew up with a mouse in their hand?Sure, you miss the old days. Music was everything then. The kids pretty much belonged to you, and competition for the entertainment dollar was slight. Kids today are playing "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" with one hand and IM’ing their friends with the other to come over and watch a DVD. After that they’re patrolling chat rooms or posting entries in their blogs.Thing is, it’s all about the computer now. That’s what Shawn Fanning, the inventor of Napster, understood, and it’s what you guys in the recording industry can’t seem to grasp.You’re strictly 8-Track in an MP3 world.So you killed Napster. Big deal. Thirty lawyers beats four any day of the week. In Napster’s place, a bunch of new file-sharing sites emerged. And like a virulent strain that mutates to evade antibiotics, the new services decentralized, operating almost invisibly to elude legal attack.Next you tried a technology gimmick called Key2Audio to make CDs uncopyable. But, really, are your lawyers too busy preparing lawsuits to clue you in? Making copies for personal use isn’t illegal. This is what music lovers do these days. Get with the program. In any event, someone discovered that blacking the edge of the CD with a felt-tip pen overrode the protection. So that was a bust.Now we’re up to the amnesty deal. A "deal" that, when you get right down to it, doesn’t offer any bona fide legal protection. Sen. Norm Coleman (R., Minn.), in public remarks about the file-swapping phenomenon, has repeatedly remarked on the recording industry’s "legitimate copyright interests." But even he urges caution to anyone tempted by the amnesty agreement. Because, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Recording Industry Association of America doesn’t control all the potential sources for lawsuits. So it’s a cardboard amnesty; a cutout propped up to appear like amnesty from a distance.Or a carrot - as it’s been characterized by some - to team with the stick introduced on Sept. 8. I’m talking about that fusillade of 261 lawsuits you filed against downloaders, with charges of up to $150,000 per song. Will that be enough to salve the pain? One doubts it ever could be possible, judging by all your whining.Enough already. Stop the bleating and start competing.Along the way you’ve launched some download sites of your own. No other descriptive word is more apt: lame. Even the best of them, Apple’s iTunes, sells its 200,000 song titles - a mere dribble from the music pipeline - in a digital format unplayable on conventional CD or MP3 players.I can hear you crying. "But who - boo hoo - can beat free?"Why can’t you guys figure this out?The roughly 40 million folks in the United States alone who downloaded songs last year - those are potential customers. Offering them phony amnesty and insulting their intelligence with industry-run download sites that are overpriced and underdeveloped and suing them for hundreds of thousands of dollars - these are not good ways to attract customers. You’re actually strengthening bonds between P2P sites and their users.Before you completely alienate your future customer base and kill yourself in the process, consider a strategy of beating the download sites at their own game.No, you can’t beat free. But you can offer songs that are always labeled correctly; that don’t end abruptly 30 seconds from the end; that are virus-free. You can offer everything in your collective catalogs, all the time, without waiting. You can offer extensive liner note material with related graphics and art that can be printed by the user at home or ordered by mail to fit neatly in a CD jewel box. You can offer value-added extras, like recorded interviews with the artist, video shorts, and discounts on concert tickets.You will have to charge for this. But if you make it cheap enough, and if you make it a flat monthly fee, you will win your war.And winning the war is your only choice, really. If you continue throwing rocks from behind trees, you will lose.Joey Harrison is a Blade copy editor. He can be reached at jharrison@theblade.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest saleen351 Posted September 17 Report Share Posted September 17 wow, what a great writer and article...the other day on tech tv this white trash slut bag stumped the 5 record execs on the stage. She asked an easy question..What is the difference between downloading a song off the net and burning it, and taping a song off the radio...None had an answer... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
livin42nite Posted September 17 Report Share Posted September 17 Great article. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
o0djfx0o Posted September 17 Report Share Posted September 17 !!!YES!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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