p2pnet - rss feed: Cashing in on Golden Oldies
p2pnet.net News:- People have always shared music. It’s part of life. But Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel, loathe the idea, saying it robs them of sales they’re entitled to.
It’s an argument as rubbishy as much of current over-priced, low-quality Big 4 ‘product’ available online through the handful of corporate sites such as Apple’s iTunes iPod loader.
But the Oldies are another matter. The labels say they’re making making a come-back, although they’ve never been away. They’re forever golden: quality music turned out by quality artists when music lovers were still customers rather than today’s mindless ‘consumers’ being spoon-fed formulaic ‘product’.
And in the UK, the Big 4 are adding Oldies, as well as downloads, to the Top Ten charts to pad the numbers and bolster the illusion that there’s a viable corporate online market.
One of the reasons the free (in the sense of unfettered) sites and networks are the mainstays in the real world of online music, as opposed to the fake one the labels are trying to promote, is: they offer the full range of buyer-donated music that’d otherwise be kept locked up tight in corporate catalogues.
The Net offers a treasure trove of Golden Oldies, hard-to-find songs which, because the labels are hanging on to them like grim death, aren’t available by any other means.
As usual, the Net has led the way and now, from Monday, “chart position will no longer be pegged to the sale of a CD single or seven-inch vinyl release,” says The Independent. “Instead, digital downloads, which outstripped high street sales for the first time earlier this year, will dictate the risers and fallers in the Top 40. This means that any song available on the internet - including ‘golden oldies’ - could top the charts.”
The move, “is likely to see older tracks brought to a new generation by TV shows, advertisements and films, or newly released digitally, shoot up the charts,” says Guardian Unlimited. “Tests this year showed Mr Blue Sky by the Electric Light Orchestra in the charts after being featured in Doctor Who, and an old Aerosmith track charting after being sung by a contestant on The X Factor.”
And, “Experts said that old tracks revived for television advertising campaigns and films, but not re-released - such as the post-punk soundtrack to the Sofia Coppola movie Marie Antoinette - could well reappear in the charts,” states The Independent. “The soundtrack included songs by New Order, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure.”
The aim is, “to make the charts more representative of what consumers are actually buying and revitalise an institution that was looking past its sell-by date after years of declining sales,” says the story.
Just think how much money the Big 4 could be making if hey offered every Golden Oldie they had at reasonable prices through not only the corporate sites, but also the independent online distributors.
They’d have so much money pouring in that they’d go cross-eyed trying to keep track of it
Instead, they’d rather fix their prices at artificially high levels and try to sue their customers into toeing the corporate bottom lines.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
The Independent - Singles chart remix to favour golden oldies, December 29, 2006
Guardian Unlimited - Oldies but goldies benefit in digital revamp of charts, December 29, 2006
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