FutureShop gets into online music
p2pnet.net News:- Canada’s FutureShop has been sucked into the corporate online music store frenzy, which suggests the Big Five record labels may be a lot smarter than we’re giving them credit for.
Do the people who run Organized Music have regular meets, do you think, where they sit around a glossy table in semi-darkness, wearing shades and sipping from heavy crystal tumblers? After all, they’re the only ones making any money.
Because they’re supplying the same stuff to a whole sh*t-load of often disperate corporations, all of them frantically muscling and hustling each other to get in on what they think is the action. They can’t make any serious dollars from downloads – serious by corporate standards, that is – but they can’t afford not to be in.
Big Five ‘product’ goes to every one of the online stores and goes out at roughly the same prices. The only operator doing good is Apple, and that’s only because it’s using iTunes to feed the lust it’s been able to create for its expensive iPod players.
Now enter FutureShop, Canada’s largest national retailer consumer electronics.
As of June 12, it’ll be offering its Bonfire online store with, says chartattack here, “prepaid cards in various denominations to be used in conjunction with the download site”.
File sharing is legal in Canada, but FutureShop may be banking (literally) on the hope that Canadians who share music without the permission of the labels will be soon be open to prosecution in the same way their American cousins are.
Napster II is already in the Land of the Maple Leaf, the Big Five are using their CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) to bamboozle Canadians and indeed, Canada’s federal heritage minister Helene Chalifour Scherrer says she’ll help the labels stop people from sharing music online by changing Canadian copyright laws.
Against that, Canadians are an extremely independent race. And anyway, prime minister Paul Martin’s Liberal government is looking very shaky.
Among other things, he says he had no prior knowledge of a Quebec sponsorship program that saw advertising firms friendly to his party get $100 million for doing absolutely nothing, or close to it.
There’s a federal election coming up and look what happened in India.
In the meanwhile, given that file sharing is still legal in Canada, what use are prepaid cards, or any other kind, come to that?
Chartattack does an excellent job of explaining.
It sneers, “as record companies will readily inform you, the majority of illegal downloaders are young teens who, unless they’re spoiled little brats who get their own car for their 16th birthday, have no access to a credit card to access most legal download sites.”
There you go. The CRIAA couldn’t have put it better.
And, “Is it really a surprise that these young people, who are either not working at all or have some low paying retail job, are not rushing out to pay what they do make on music they can take for free?
“Bonfire might help change that attitude.”
Are all you spoiled little brats paying attention?
