Killing the golden goose
p2p news / p2pnet: Yesterday we ran The 99c question, an item from David Faiman who runs Odessa Mama Records, an indie label in Australia.
Here’s a p2pnet reader’s response, which kicks off with a quote from Faiman’s article >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“Fans buy what they hear on the radio and see on TV …”
Reader’s Write
This one part of a sentence deserves a bit of looking into. The author of this article sees it as business. He doesn’t care if anyone makes a profit in the process but he does care about killing the golden goose. He also makes mention that timing of price increases is more critical to him than "if it should" be raised.
What’s coming out of radio and tv is very similar to what’s coming out of the media cartels. After all, for the most part, they’re the same groups in both of them. When a business loses touch with what its customers want, when a business forgets the customer and not themselves determine the well being of the industry, and when it loses the idea that keeping the customer happy with the purchase is on par with long term survival; they’re up for a belt tightening in the economic circles.
The media cartels have been hell bent on control ever since they became big.
AM radio at one time was "the place" to hear new music to determine if that one tune was worth buying as a single. Then payola hit the scene and hearing new music was strangled by replay. Folks got tired of on-going commercials, steady replay over and over, and the lack of new material on a regular basis.
Literally, the public abandoned AM in favor of FM that was still new and didn’t have payola going to the extent it is now. (Does any of this sound like it could apply to tv also? Just replace tunes with movies and shows.)
I got tired of tv for that very reason. Know what? I have a tv, but no antenna, no cable, no satellite reception. As things are now, I plan for it to stay that way. There’s nothing on pay tv that’s worth the money being charged.
As a customer I’ve lost interest in tv because of the steady commercials and replays. We won’t even get into the subject of content. So what happens when I’m not a front runner in trends but merely another echoing the public’s resentment to the hijacking of the entertainment for the sake of money? Where, then, comes the new exposure to fuel the purchase as this author seems to think exist now?
Overcharging to the point of all the traffic will bear has consequences. Any first term would be economist can tell you that. There’s a direct relation to charging more equals fewer sales. That point has already been reached. DRM infested material isn’t worth what uninfested material is worth.
DRM exists for the sole purpose of limiting the buyer in what he can do with his purchase, so much so that for the buyer to do anything he wishes with his purchase and apply it to his style of life, he’ll either have to become a criminal or, worse, become what the industry wants to label a pirate to take his music with him, or store it as he’d wish.
It’s become such a limitation to the buyer that many people such as myself won’t buy for that one reason alone. Anytime you make a product that puts extreme requirements on the buyer to make use of it, you have far less happy customers. You also have those at some point that refuse to continue to jump through the hoops to do so.
Now the cartels have managed to kill off the source of fresh and new sources, decided to sue their very best customers, and want to charge out the yang-yang for what limited product they do get, is it any wonder folks aren’t showing up in masses at the pay for sites?
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi
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 political representatives. 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.
October 19th, 2005 at 3:47 pm
Yes the music industry as we know it has been shot dead by the record (RIAA), music publisher cartels and others, including the yellow press, whose artist articles are paid for by the record labels or their so called independent agents and promoters.
Just look at what publishers have done to Cuban music and composers:
http://rafa_venegas.web.prdigital.com/cubaandpeer.htm
And radio payola, we all know about that, except that some may not know that payola payments are getting through as payments for advertisement time.
No wonder music fans should revolt.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
October 19th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Corporations are machines built for the sole purpose of maximizing profit for their shareholders.
(Look it up, if you were a CEO and did not hold the shareholders’ interest on top of your list, you would be breaching your fiduciary duties)
So far I have no roblems with it… after all, we can call a Corporation an ‘interest group’, just like a Union would be… maximizing the profit (benefits) for the union members.
What I do have problems with is when these interest groups / Corporations gain status of an individual human being (with all his/her rights).
First of all, a machine operating under one narrow-minded rule is NOT a fully formed human being. A single-rule machine has no concience, empathy, reason, humor, etc. It has no sense of ethics, morals or anything that may even come close to ‘the golden rule’.
So, to give these single minded profit making machines (whose existence I have no problem with) the ability to lobby, finance campaigns and write legislations is ABSURD!
We are effectively letting the “single rule of profit making” decide how the world should look like and function for all the human beings living on it.
We gave away our power to control our own lives to machines who care about one thing: making profit.
We deserve what we get in return
October 20th, 2005 at 2:58 am
Geeze,
*note to self*
Gotta quit writing long winded replies.