p2pnet - rss feed: Don’t buy CDs this Christmas !!
p2p news / p2pnet: "Mein Gott!" I said to myself in a bad German accent. I was reading the Wall Street Journal’s latest piece on the music industry’s imminent death-by-a-thousand-cuts. Just to be sure I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree, I called up a stock broker friend to make sure my understanding of the free market wasn’t as screwed up as the RIAA’s seems to be.
"What happens to an existing monopoly when the market is opened up to it’s competitors?" I asked
"Well, the first thing that happens is the share price of the company with the monopoly takes a hit. The market has to deal with a lot more new information about the industry sector, because there is more competition. Basically the whole thing is a mess for a while until everyone works out who the biggest player is going to be; whether the old monopoly can keep it’s market share or if the new companies have taken such a big chunk of the action that the original leader has lost their dominance," was his answer.
"What is a market correction then?" I asked.
"In that situation? There would be a correction happening when the market takes the new players into account and the share price of the monopoly goes down. A correction is basically a reality check."
"How’s the new iPod?"
"Oh, you’re talking about the music industry! (Note: This kind of quick thinking is the reason he makes about thirty times the amount of money I do every year). Yeah, they’re going to have some issues to work out over the next few years. Some of the smart ones will get through it, but a lot of the guys I work with think there’ll be some big falls. I’m betting there’ll be at least one big implosion. There’s too much money and too much disruptive technology out there for someone not to go out with a bang".
Okay, so it wasn’t just me thinking the music industry is coming out with the usual crap. At a first glance, their "nearly 20%" drop in sales looks legit. I wonder why that is? I sat down and had a think about it:
To start with, it seems my personal boycott is working! I do have to give some credit to the tens of thousands of other people who also refuse to buy music from major producers who back extremist legal wars on ordinary people, but for the moment I’d like to think a lot of it’s down to me.
I also happened to glance at the all important Top 20 this week. Anyone else who saw it won’t have any trouble figuring out why people aren’t buying music. Interestingly, a comparison with the top ten highest grossing music tours this year shows that all the top touring acts are more than a decade old. Ah, the good old days!
That 40%-down-over-Thanksgiving thing was kind of weird. Wait a minute…when did the Sony rootkit fiasco start going down? Mark Russinovich broke the news on October 31st, right? And Thanksgiving was on the 24th of November this year, right? So the CD buying public in the US had a good three weeks to freak out about CD manufacturers putting easily hacked spyware on their precious PCs before the Thanksgiving holiday came along.
Just so we’re all clear, the big record companies got caught trying to fuck over their customers, right before the biggest shopping season of the year. Smart move guys.
What I think the music industry needs now is a good old Commie shake up. It needs to be nationalized. For those too young to remember, this is what used to happen when an important industry was being managed by knuckleheads and started going down the toilet: the government would take over running it. You know all those public assets that the politicians keep selling off? They used to be "nationalized industries".
Now the music industry keeps telling us how important it is, so we should obviously take their word for it. Being vitally important, it seems the music industry needs some guidance through these troubling times. I mean, look what happens when you have a privatised energy market *cough* Enron *cough*.
It looks like the "creative industries" are faced with three choices:
1. Keep doing what they’re doing now (my mate the stock broker knows some great bankruptcy lawyers if anyone should need them).
2. Hand the entire lot over for the governments to sort out (he also knows some exellent people who specialize in fraud and incompetence cases).
3. Be creative (Oh! The irony!) and work through it.
Whatever happens, I won’t be buying any music this Christmas and I’ve specially asked my friends and family not to buy any for me either.
Instead, I’ll be giving an amount equal to the price of a full CD to the Salvation Army.
There are people out there who really need my cash this Christmas, and they’re certainly not billion dollar record companies.
Alex H, p2pnet - Sydney, Australia
[Alex is an operations manager for an ATM (automatic teller machine) supplier and he specialises in infrastructure development and maintenance, and logistics. He’s also an[other] active member of the Shareaza community.]
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. as a stocking stuffer or anything else over Christmas. 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.
December 18th, 2005 at 4:18 pm
Fluff
Why should copyright holders be given protection for their creation for life plus ?
Their end effort produces a product of no value
Drug companies spend years developing a drug that saves or improves life, yet are protected for only twenty years
Farmers spend millions and get payed at rates that their grandfathers were payed.
The man who repairs your car does not get payed each time the car starts after a repair.
The plumber does not get payed each time you flush after a repair.
When Girl scouts sell you a cookie it,s yours.
When you buy a car, the manufacture does not have the right to tell you how to drive it.
If no music was played from this day on:
People would not die from its loss
There would be food to eat
there would be cloths to ware
there would be water to drink
there would be homes to live in
there would be cars to drive
there would be air to breath
there would be planes to fly
Life would change very little if at all, music is nothing more then fluff, how it’s become a top priority
for the government is beyond me.
The fluff salesman has done their job well i guess.
December 18th, 2005 at 6:20 pm
I agree 100%. it’s a service the industry is performing. however be careful about the auto mechanic anology. I used in on another blog and was flamed by an arrogant know it all lawyer wanna be who supports the music industry.
December 18th, 2005 at 11:44 pm
Since the dawn of time we have evolved from almost everything,
to clothing, hairdo’s , cars, technology.
clothing in regular stores now a days cost over 20 , 40 , 80 dollars for one pair of paints or shirt , what is cheaper to go to a store like goodwill and find it the same pants the same shirt that same dress that cost an arm and a leg a lot cheaper than what it cost in Walmart or Sears or even J.C. Penny’s .
But yet there is some people that is true to form and must , must , buy from these stores because they’ve grown up getting the things they always wanted and the richer the better.
take for instance dvd’s or cd’s which is the controversy of this constant but annoying battle the riaa is going threw with users of the Internet (I will never honor the riaa by capitalizing their name).
The riaa constantly barges in people’s houses trying to take their children away from them because they file share music by using p2p file sharing systems like Kazaa or Grokster or Morpheus, which the riaa have spys and hackers on them watching their every move and once in a while sending their little and hopefully harmless viruses through the songs that people download.
And the Record Companies complain because their paychecks aren’t as big as it used to be and their wives and children might have to go with-out their fur coats and expensive toys, because way back when in the 80’s cd’s and tapes were only for 15 to 20 dollars and people such as the terrible Teenagers (as I think the riaa calls them )
used to buy up a lot of them for half of the price that they are today.
I went to Walmart the other day and did a price check for 40 dollars I could get to popular movies , so I went to a place where they had cd’s and dvd’s both and for 80 dollars I got the two movies that walmart had plus two popular cd’s and 4 playstations 2 games all popular all very , very expensive at the regular stores including walmart which sells how low it’s prices are through comercials.
and I didn’t get them off the net , didn’t pay for them they weren’t hot or the piracy dvd people in New York on a street corner tried to sell me.
I got it through a cheap but very well stocked with good cd’s and excellent movies, store and none of them movies were from off the file sharing systems the riaa is so afraid of .
So lets ask ourselves about the prices we all have to pay.
Some do it to be miss popular, some do it to show authority and they think respect.
But I think they do it because they are old fashioned and they can’t keep up with the times of Technology.
like I say for my title
Since The Dawn Of Time We Have Evolved
too bad for the world the Record Companies and movie companies and the riaa have not!!!!!!!!
Sincerely,
LADYMATIKA
December 20th, 2005 at 9:05 am
wowwwwwww nice post matika tc
December 20th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
I think nationalizing the music industry would be a horrible mistake. Politicians are every bit as corrupt as the music industry, you would merely be taking it from one group of thieves and handing it over to another. I can see a system where companies that donate big money to politicians are left alone, whereas companies that don’t pay up wind up under government ownership. Another negative is that by nationalizing them you are preserving them. A far better idea is to let natural selection take it’s course. The ones that can not adapt to changing technology will (and should) die a well deserved death. What you are now doing is the real solution, refuse to buy any product from them until they change or go out of business.