p2pnet - rss feed: Big Music: ‘No plan, no direction’
p2pnet.net news:- “There’s no plan, no sense of direction. They’re just hoping …”
“They” are the Big 4 music labels, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US), and they have have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
We already knew that but now Billboard says that’s the case. And it’s worse, far worse, than Billboard suspects.
The Big 4’s bizarre marketing game plan is still - ‘Keep on screaming that we’re being ruined by file sharers and sue as many of our customers as we can, and everything will be OK.’
The quote in the intro is from an unidentified digital retailer executive in a story which also asks, “So what are labels doing other than licensing their music to digital services that they hope will become successful?”
It answers, “According to many service providers and industry analysts, the answer is - nothing,” and, then, “They’re just hoping somebody is going to figure all this out for them.”
Meanwhile, their efforts to introduce a tied down, lack-lustre, DRM-loaded, overpriced corporate music bidnes are failing badly. The numbers of people using the p2p networks and independent music sites continue to soar and the one successful corporate site, Apple’s, continues to to make no impression on the music loving online public at large.
Moreover, the Big 4’s efforts to sue their own customers into submission meet with equallu7 unimpressive results.
Eric Garland, who runs the BigChampagne p2p research firm, recently told p2pnet, “We have observed no decreases in file sharing activity. On the contrary, the aggressive growth in popularity of BitTorrent clients (and increases in gnutella users by way of Limewire et al) demonstrate very much the opposite.”
Proportionally, the growth rate in file sharing of film and television (and other multimedia) now exceeds that of popular music, and “we have observed no net decline in music, and music remains the most popular entertainment on P2P networks,” he says, emphasising:
“There are nearly ten million people using only the most popular networks at any given time (to say nothing of private, invitation only, small group sharing etc.) and there are - very conservatively speaking- - more than a billion files a month. The IFPI and RIAA project the volume of downloads to be far greater than that (estimates approaching 3 billion/month), but we do not know the basis of these projections.”
And if BigChampagne and the industry itself put downloads at between one and three billiion a month, a new report says at a conservative estimate, some one billion files mocve computer-to-computer a day!
Apple’s iTunes store “commands” 70% of all digital music sales and the iPod around 80% of all digital music devices, says the Reuters story, adding:
“Yet, record labels are the first to point out that Apple can’t reverse their falling fortunes on its own. They need more services selling more music to more people. And although labels have tried to support potential competitors to iTunes, such as Microsoft’s Zune bid, these services are merely limping along.”
Seventy percent of all digital music sales reads well, but using its own unspported, and unquestioned, figures, Apple has only managed to sell two billion or so downloads since iTunes kicked off in four years ago.
Compared to what’s happening in the real world of online music, that’s nothing.
Also See:
Billboard - Record labels’ digital strategy — do nothing, March 9, 2007
a day - 1 billion songs a DAY shared online, March 9, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze 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.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
March 14th, 2007 at 9:45 am
“Meanwhile, their efforts to introduce a tied down, lack-lustre, DRM-loaded, overpriced…”
Bad product = bad sales. If your product doesn’t make the customer happy sales will be bad, even if the product is a physical good that CAN’T be downloaded. People will find something else to spend their money on. There are very few exceptions to this.
March 15th, 2007 at 3:38 am
“They’re just hoping somebody is going to figure all this out for them.”
Something to understand here. The big labels are not involved in direct retail sales. In fact they have a huge channel conflict problem which prevents them from doing due to the risk of upsetting their existing customers which are the big retail outlets.
So the only way for anything to change is for somebody (like Apple, say) to come to them with a new business model. But when that happens, the lawyers, middle managers, and all sorts of other interests tie the negotiations up in endless powerpoint and chocolate biscuit meetings while they debate how the business model can’t possibly work for them without this that and the other restriction, the most obvious of which is DRM.
So it’s not really that the big labels aren’t doing anything. It’s because they can’t do anything due to their history.
Which is what makes the death of AllOfMp3 all the more galling. Here was a positive new approach to selling music that is being killed by short sightedness as they’ve successfully cut off it’s income. What the labels ought to do is to buy (or encourage someone to buy) the assets of AllOfMp3 and transplant it into the west.