Any thoughts on this?
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/10/04/music.copy.reut/index.html
Musicians tell how to beat system
Web sites instruct fans on how to beat copy-protected CDs
Major labels Sony BMG and EMI are releasing more and more new CDs that block fans from dragging their tunes to iPods.
8 comments:
This is such complete bullsh*t. So what, are we supposed to but an record twice now? The CD version and then the download version so we can have it on our i-Pod? What a crock. If this practice of "blocking" CD's from being dragged to i-Tunes becomes common practice among all record companies, it's going to kill CD sales. Then again, CD's are almost obsolete anyway. I any event, this really blows.
What retard would purchase a CD anyway? The companies are as usual respsonding too late to a battle that has already been decided. Humans want to store, manage, and play their music from a computer. Using a physical disk to transfer this electricronic file from a record company's headquarters to my computer is retarded.
However, I did have a buddy over the other night with a CD in his car of the Black Eyed Peas. After lambasting him for posessing a CD and using it to play music in his car, I asked if I could borrow it for 30 minutes... the time it took for me to rip it into my iTunes. Now I also can listen to it in my car.
If the Black-Eyed Peas want my money, charge a quarter a song for an internet download. That will make it so cheap as to not be worth my time stealing. At the current rate of $1 a song to download, it's still worth my time to steal. I think that $.25 is the magic number that will make the most money for the record companies. At a quarter a song, why *not* purchase an album? Via the internet, it costs the same to facilitate 1 song purchase as it does 10 million. Would you rather sell 1 million downlaods for a buck, or 10 million for a quarter?
By copy-protecting cds, the majors are hastening the death of the compact disc format, which isn't wholly a bad thing.
Some people like to have a physical product that they can hold. The rise of MP3s will diminish appreciation for album credits (listing the artists, musicians and technicians who created the work) and album artwork which is a slowly dying art anyway since the demise of the 12" vinyl album.
Still, the cd is almost obsolete, and will probably disappear completely even before vinyl does.
What the record companies really fear is the loss of their power to control the reproduction and distribution of music. Digital distribution lowers the cost considerably for both the consumer AND the artist and allows the facilitation of a direct relationship, without the need for a middleman.
What artists need now is a low-cost promotion method. Payola in radio remains as the number one barrier for independent artists.
What other means do we have of promoting our music to a wide audience?
I predict that more people will be listening to more music, with more people making more money from music, than ever before. Probably this will occur via 25cent downloads, with copy-protection that is porous and irrellevent.
The quarter-per-download is cheap enough for the vast majority of people to prefer that to the hassle of finding people with the songs they want and obtaining the songs, or the free download websites, which are unreliable and riddled with trash files. At $1 per download, it's still worth it for me and many others to search a few times on the free sites and suffer the hassle of bum file and disconnections, or wait until I happen into a situation where where I can snag the songs I want from a friend.
At $0.25 per song, I would not bother doing anything else but going to iTunes. The record companies can never stop file theft. What they can do is create an alternative that is easier to use (Apple has done this for them) and offer the price that seduces enough people to produce an attractive profit. The price of $1 is probably too high; I say it is four times too high.
So the question now for the artist is, "how can I get a million downloads of my record without a major label?"
I think that this will be very easy, Nadir, for an artist to bypass major labels. I am interested to know what role labels will now play. Two essential functions that only they could provide are now available without them: publicity, and sales distribution. The internet provides these to everyone. This doesn't mean that everyone can get massive publicity, but rather that it is surely *possible* to get massive publicity without huge cash expendatures.
Well, "huge" is a relative term. It has always been possible for independent labels to bypass major label influence with the right amount of money and connections. The problem is that the majors (in collusion with radio) have kept the prices high. These anti-free market practices squash competition and diminish the quality of music that is brought to consumers.
Right now, it will still require a substantial investment to gain any significant amount of radio play at commercial radio. And let's not even mention Viacom's video outlets (MTV/VH1/BET).
Nadir: Isn't the internet bypassing commercial radio? Isn't commercial radio in the same boat as the record labels?
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