Big Music: defeated by DRM
p2pnet news | Music:- “These are ailing businesses on their last legs.”
That’s BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland, quoted in the Mercury News.
It’s all about DRM and CD sales, but the question of DRM, “matters a whole lot less to them than it once did”.
In fact, “DRM-free music seems to have had, at best, a slight positive benefit”.
But what these remarks are really saying, is: after having ignored the obvious and persisted in throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars of what should have been shareholder dividends, the incompetents who run Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) are finally having to admit they were as dead wrong about so-called copy protection as they have been about P2P and file sharing.
Not that all four of the members of the organised music cartel have bitten the bullet.
Universal, the largest, and Warner, the smallest are still, “just experimenting with DRM-free music, and Sony BMG isn’t even doing that much,” analysts note, says the Mercury News.
And in a brilliant, and typically meaningless, RIAA non-statement, “The marketplace will likely dictate how companies will move forward with respect to the protection of their product,” according to RIAA mouthperson Cara Duckworth.
Meanwhile, “They can’t stick with this [current] model with the weighted costs that they have,” the story has Mike McGuire, vice president of research at Gartner, an industry research group.
In other words, they’ll soon have to once again start wooing their customers instead of suing them, and looking to P2P and files-haring technologies as their saviours instead of the agents of their demise because as Garland says, “There is no one silver bullet solution.”
To paraphrase Pogo, they’ve met the enemy, and he is them.
Also See:
Mercury News – Record labels’ bigger issue is replacing CD salesNovember 17, 2007
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November 19th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
The music industry is controled by a band of neoconservative parasites. Lie other neoconservatives they are mean immoral and stupid.
Considering the damage that these criminals can do it is advisable to neutralize them on sight.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Actually it has nothing to do with being “neoconservative” and everything to do with resisting change.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Far too many people have had it with buying something over priced for the value and over protected to the point of punishing the wrong people.
Your choices are to pay an expensive tab for a single digital song, put up with the DRM lock down while trying to use it, or buy the cd, or go pirate it which has no restrictions whatever.
In the end run the customer realises the cost to hassle ratio tells it all. He is rewarded for not paying because of the ease of use. He is rewarded again by sampling the media without payment to see if it is any good or if it is the same old usual that isn’t worth the money.
There’s an old saying about kissing a lot of frogs to find the prince. That same saying goes equally for music in general. You can never judge the insides by the artwork nor the hype. The only way to find out if it is any good is to try it out before buying. If it is good, then most want the higher quality and the artwork. Something you don’t get on locked down digital files. Until recently you paid a higher price than if you bought the cd in equal song prices, you get no artwork, and you get a lower quality bit rate. None of that makes any sense to someone serious about their music.
The shame of it is that the music industry thinks it’s a bargain that can’t be refused. As usual, a day late and a dollar short.
November 20th, 2007 at 3:15 am
It`s to late, I HATE the music industry and can`t wait to see them DIE!!!!!
You see, many customers will NEVER come back, the movie industry better be watching ( and learning ) Don`t make the same mistakes.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:32 am
I agree with Dario. If they lowered prices and start making money off the Internet now, in 20 years we’ll be seeing this same bad behavior again when another new technology comes around. It’ll be just like it was with records, radio, audio tape, video tape, and even ipods.
Did yall forget when the RIAA tried to kill portable music players?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=riaa+rio&btnG=Google+Search
The Rio is the great great great grand daddy of the Ipod and Zune, and Archos, ect. They failed to kill it and make billions off Itunes now.