Hey, RIAA, ‘You don’t fight the consumer!’
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- It’s a little too little – It’s a little too late” ~ Pat Benatar
Am I scared of ISPs becoming rogue enforcers of the law… OF COURSE! But, it appears for now that the RIAA agreements with ISPs are all bluster. And Cary Sherman admitted that issues of “due process” have not yet been worked out. Yup, that’s the record business for you, they don’t want to fight in the marketplace, they want to go all the way to the Supreme Court, they want to argue issues of constitutional law!
Press scuttlebutt says that only 19% of the public is downloading. If this is true, and one accepts Michael Eisner’s theory that ten percent of the audience will NEVER pay, we’re fighting here over nine percent of the population. When really, we should be focusing on the other eighty one percent!
Most people will pay for music, if a reasonable offer is made.
Today’s news that the RIAA is dropping their lawsuits just shows that the labels have no strategy, that they’re so busy playing catch-up that they’ve squandered their business.
ANYBODY could have told them that the lawsuits wouldn’t have worked five years ago. But these assholes had to prove something. That they owned the music and you’d better consume it their way. Obviously didn’t work, their revenues have tanked.
You don’t fight the consumer, you FOLLOW the consumer.
Instead of charging a buck a track at the iTunes Store, you realize that iPods have thousands of songs on them and you figure out how you can get paid for the installation of each and every one.
You don’t fight consumer behavior, you embrace it. And if you’re truly intelligent, you’re one step AHEAD of the consumer. Pundits said that the original iPod was too expensive, 5 gigs for $400, most people didn’t even know they wanted one. But now, the iPod is the de facto music player.
What people don’t know they want is instant access to the history of recorded music. It’s thrilling when you experience it, via today’s Sonos/Rhapsody world, however imperfect that system might be. Let people own tracks now, because believe me, they won’t want to in the future, convenience dictates that.
So, sell buckets of tracks to people today. They want a deal. Entice the people not downloading P2P, not buying at the iTunes Store or buying very little there. Have the equivalent of a fire sale. Maybe a going out of business sale. Because that’s what the labels are doing. Generate some excitement. You know people will end up buying the same music over again in a higher quality format, and that they’ll want new music, but don’t even tell them this. Just give them the greatest hits today, for a cheap price.
We’ve come to an era where the major labels have been marginalized. No one goes to the concert for free, but people acquire music for nothing. Superstars don’t even bother with labels, they go directly to retail. They make much more money. What is the major label for? To combine with its brethren to sue people? To hold back monetization for indies? To represent the past, like the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution)?
If the majors want to have relevance in the future, they must focus on what they do best. Which is producing music and getting people to pay for it. Suing people was a sideshow. Refusing to license tracks is like refusing to sell your product to Macy’s. This go slow strategy has not worked. Suddenly, the business is falling off a cliff, there won’t be any place to buy a CD, and the majors will be relics selling catalog, at best.
Acts need money. Great creators tend to be lousy businessmen. Instead of seeing themselves as big kahunas, who the artists should worship, record executives should see themselves as servants, as expediters, as the link between artist and fan. The conduit should be opened wide. Deals and prices must be fair. Accounting must be transparent. There must be trust.
Remember when the RIAA was the most hated organization in America?
Most kids today have no idea what the RIAA is. The organization squandered its capital. Actually, people shouldn’t know what the RIAA is, but they should love record labels, just like they love artists. But it’s hard to love these pompous fucks who get their music for free, or are so rich that music prices are irrelevant to them.
Somehow today’s surviving execs think they’re royalty. That they are entitled to supreme rule over the land, forever. But this is patently untrue. At heart, they’re businessmen. Lousy ones. History will see them as out of touch despots whose power was stolen by the proletariat in a revolution that they weren’t even aware was happening while their assistants printed out their e-mail.
You can live in the present, or be destined to the past.
Arista just had a reunion. At some point in the future, the other labels will too. Kind of like a summer camp get together, these convocations represent a lost era, when everything looked better. But times change, people move on, and those who are locked in the past end up staying there.
The customer is absolutely living in the present.
He’s not watching commercials on TV, he’s TiVo’ing his shows.
Better yet, he’s watching prime time fare on Hulu.
People want a lot of music. If you don’t sell it to them in a way they want, they won’t buy. As for cutting off their service for stealing via their ISP… As my mother always says, what a way to make friends and influence people.
And if you think you can willy-nilly cut off someone’s Internet service without a hearing, without due process, then you probably think that General Motors can suspend a person’s right to drive.
Internet service is a utility which all depend upon. If you think the government is going to let the RIAA cut off this lifeline in order to save its decrepit business, you don’t understand the legal system.
That’s the problem with the RIAA… They just didn’t realize how small they were.
Silicon Valley was bigger.
The government moved slowly. You don’t fight the system, you join it. Which the RIAA seems to be doing a little bit by forgoing lawsuits, but it appears the system they want to join expired years ago.
Come on, can’t anybody with any power live in the present?
Bob Lefsetz – The Lefsetz Letter
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December 20th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Great story, pity they will not listen to sense. Dum twats.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
“ANYBODY could have told them that the lawsuits wouldn’t have worked five years ago”
Every body told then that at the time but they are just a bunch of old neocon crap who think that they know every thing and are smarter than everyone.
OBVIOUSLY!
If at least they were not just a bunch of criminals sociopaths! Now we have to get ride of them.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
At one time, I had no idea what the RIAA was. Then sue’em started. I became interested in what corporations were doing, in particular the alphabet organizations that are the front men for the labels.
The more I read on them, the more dirty the impression was. I’ve seen articles reported that just amazed me that a business, in business for sales, could be run the way I see them from the outside looking in. Two faced, dirty, slimy, underhanded, thieving, deceiving, only begins to say what I can say in public as to my impressions.
The carrying on that has been done in the name of music, as an artist I would not want my name associated with. I would fear it would taint me with the same brush as they carry. After all these years of reading what they are willing to stoop to, you could not give me their product for free now. I no longer care what they do as far as music goes. I’d rather game or listen to something that doesn’t run in the payolla land of the eternal replay.
The artists today are cookie cutter. It sounds just like it came to be, picked from a computer format predicting it should be a hit because one like it was in the past. Actual mastery of the instrument is unknown. Their not musicians, their entertainers and their performances show that. Only thing is once you get out of the visual section of the media, where they have to stand on the grounds of the actual sounds they bring together, it’s ho-hum. Remove the studio with its electronic wonderland of things like making voices in tune on the fly and you rarely get a group that can carry off a live performance without lip syncing.
To my utter amazement, it was like what is the big deal with a lip sync on live performance? In otherwords its been done so long they no longer recognize it as false because it is an industry standard now. So its a crutch to make entertainers what they are not and sound professional. Just like voice overs to get that dual sound back up when an singer sings. Not real at all. Yet the fan is expected to pay for this falsity and go enjoy a fake concert. Right. Not what I pay money for.
Here’s some more news. I didn’t realize just how bad bad was until I dropped off commercial tv with it’s wasteland of advertisement. The irritation of the commercial is beyond belief. You know what is worse? They’ve sold the audience on the idea that it must be there to reduce the expense of the broadcast. ???
When did they lower prices so that it would reflect the extra money coming in that advertising gives? Mystery to me, bet it is to you too. Truth is, it was never lowered. It’s a second income on top of the first one. One they will protect till the cows come home with all sorts of reasons but never own up to the real one. We’re getting paid twice for the same thing is the real reason. Since I got out of hearing, seeing, listening to the commercial, my time is my own. I don’t have to put up with it and I sure don’t miss it.
I hope the music labels get hungry, really hungry. Because as it is now, they are not hungry enough to be willing to make real changes. Until they are, they will continue down this idiotic path that I want nothing to do with. There’s not many products you can buy that may come with an addon warning that for spending your money on the product, you might be sued in the end for what you do with it. Not much of a sales pitch to do business with them is it?
December 21st, 2008 at 11:50 am
If they had embraced Napster’s idealology instead of suing them out of existance, then they would have had a better business model instead of relying on lawsuits to punish the consumer for not adhering to that outmolded paradigm.