Big 4 labels should ‘embrace’ file sharing sites
p2pnet news view | Music:- Radiohead’s In Rainbows was “stunt marketing at its best,” says Will Page, MCPS-PRS chief economist and co-author of a report which says it’s gone time for the Big 4 record labels to realise which way is up.
The album was launched on a kind of pay-what-you-want honour basis. And it generated all kinds of traffic to the band’s site.
“Legal” downloads far exceeded “illegal” torrent downloads of the album, says a by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents music rights holders, and BigChampagne, the online media measurement company, says the Financial Times.
“Rights-holders should be aware that these non-traditional venues are stubbornly entrenched, incredibly popular and will never go away,” the story has BigChampagne’s Eric Garland (right), co-author of the study, saying.
And there’s “strong brand loyalty” to .torrents and the P2P networks.
It’s time for Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG to, “stop swimming against the tide of what people want,” he said.Almost 400,000 illegal torrent downloads were made on the first day and 2.3m in the 25 days following the album`s release, “compared with a full-week`s peak of just 158,000 for the next most popular album of the period,” says the FT.
“The expectation among rights-holders is that, in order to create a success story, you must reduce the rate of piracy,” but, “we`ve found that is not the case, says Garland in the story.
Record companies should ask themselves: What are the costs and benefits of control versus the costs and benefits of scale? asks Page, who, also, “challenged the assumption that no other band could achieve the same benefits, saying Radiohead`s experiment had reduced the marginal cost and risk for those following their lead.”
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.Stumble It!
Financial Times -Music industry ’should embrace illegal websites’, August 3, 2008
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August 5th, 2008 at 5:28 am
I don’t download music (never really been into music much), but I do download TV shows I like. I’m downloading an older one right now to replace my aging tapes. I’m getting it off a file sharing network and it’s downloading *VERY* slowly. It’s been working on the same three episodes for almost 5 days now. At this rate it’s going to take at least a couple weeks to finish the season. If I could go to the network’s site and download an unrestricted copy with no ads or logos for maybe $1 an episode, I’d seriously consider doing that rather than wait for the pirated copies to trickle in.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Record companies should ask themselves: âWhat are the costs and benefits of control versus the costs and benefits of scale?â
How true. Unfortunately the entertainment industry is laboring under a number of false assumptions. Their biggest mistake is believing that each download equals a lost sale. Sooner or later they are going to have to accept the fact there is absolutely no way to achieve the kind of control they seek. Even if the internet didn’t exist people would still share, just as they did before it came along.
I’m sure the industry would love to find a way to collect a per person fee each and every time a song is listened to or a TV show or movie is watched. Obviously (to us at least) that is completely unreasonable, not to mention utterly insane. They have their heads in the clouds. Their financial greed and lust for absolute control is blinding the entertainment industry, and it will be the death of them in the end.
Technology continually changes and most of the time the goal is the betterment of all mankind. Companies are duty bound to adapt their business strategy to take advantage of new and emerging technologies, not subvert them. It’s becoming clear what will happen when they refuse to accept the fact that they have an obligation to not only their shareholders, but their customers as well. Without customers there is no business.
I suppose it’s possible that in the case of the music industry they’ve realized the internet has made the middle man obsolete and are attempting to drag things out for as long as possible before their century-old empire inevitably collapses. If they cannot or will not find a new business model that embraces the freedom of the internet, then perhaps they deserve to die. After all they’ve leeched off of the hard work and creativity of artists for far too long as it is.
I am a reasonable person, and I have absolutely no qualms at all about donating what I feel is a reasonable fee directly to the artist for works of theirs I like. I do not think I should be punished for sampling an artists work. If I do not like something, I do not pay and the work is deleted from my PC. The times of being forced to pay for garbage (ie: no refunds) have ended, and this can’t be anything but good for the consumer. In the end it is history that will show who was right and who was wrong.
@Rekrul: If they chose to do as you’re suggesting, they would most likely use bittorrent or similar means of distribution to vastly reduce their own bandwidth costs in order to maximize profits. While legal, I doubt such a service would be anywhere near as popular as sites like The Pirate Bay and others are, meaning even fewer seeders and peers to leech from than you’re seeing right now. On top of that you have all the ISP’s out there currently throttling the heck out of not just yours but everybody’s bandwidth. Put all together I’d say you would likely be even worse off than you already are.