Technovia

Why the DRM industry is clueless about consumers

Guy Tennant, chief operating officer of Entriq, a company that helps online stores manage DRM'd products, thinks that a company terminating your use of music is just like when you lose a CD:

"Tennant says he doesn't want to sound unsympathetic but reminds digital-music buyers that CD owners don't demand a refund from stores when they lose their discs. As for backing up songs to a CD, people should just accept the loss of quality because the only other alternative is to lose the music entirely, he said."

It's stupidity like this that makes me think the music industry is determined to commit collective suicide. Of course it's not the same: turning off DRM key servers is the equivalent of coming round to my house, breaking in, and stealing back the CDs you sold to me in the first place.

Idiot.

Amazon will get preferential treatment from the music business

Link: Daring Fireball Linked List: January 2008.

Jeff Leeds, reporting for The New York Times on Pepsi’s upcoming billion-song giveaway promotion with Amazon, on why iTunes only has DRM-free music from one major label:

"A senior executive at another record company, who requested anonymity out of concern about irritating Mr. Jobs, said he was prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label’s songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself. "

Mmm, smell that spite.

And that, unfortunately, is why in the long-term iTunes Store will not be the dominant player in music. Music industry executives are not like computer industry executives: unlike the computer industry, they have no long history of having to partner with people they don't like. Music companies will gladly give Amazon preferential treatment for years simply in order to stop Jobs.

Sales of CDs fall in US... but why?

Valleywag:

"The iTunes effect -- or file-sharing, if you prefer -- was in full force this holiday season. Album sales plunged 18 percent compared with pre-Christmas week sales in 2006. [Variety]"

Of course, this could also be because the current crop of artists are crap, that there's no single blockbuster to lift the market, and so on. Without statistics which include legal download sales, you can't really make a call about the state of the market.

Music industry claims personal use ripping isn't legal

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use - washingtonpost.com:

"In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer."

I'm not even going to be begin to describe the many and varied ways in which this is a very poor argument for the music industry. They should start to remember that copyright is privilege which society confers upon them because it benefits society as a whole, rather than an inalienable right which they can continue to extend ad infinitum.

You think Apple is bad, think about the alternative

David Card - Steve Jobs Is the Devil!

"NBC's Jeff Zucker says Apple destroyed the music business. Wrong, bucko. Hanging on to overpriced CDs and Album-Oriented-Rock destroyed the music business. Apple singlehandedly rejuvenated digital music. If not for the iPod, we'd be dealing with Liquid Audio, SDMI, and Sony rootkit nonsense, while the labels tried to sue their fans to success. Digital spending would be a fraction of what it is now, and, you know what, CD sales would still be tanking."

David is completely right, and Zucker is showing just how backward some record industry executives are over the switch to online delivery. Apple is probably the music industry's best friend right now, but if you listen to their rhetoric, you'd never believe it.

The music industry has a choice: adopt the ground rules that Apple has set (minimal/no DRM, consumer-friendly approaches) or try to turn things around to the way they used to work - ripping off the consumer at every opportunity. If it goes down the first path, it has an opportunity to transition to new business models where record companies add value beyond simply controlling the distribution medium. If it chooses the second, the record companies will be disintermediated out of business.


Technorati Tags: music, Apple, Jeff Zucker, David Card, Steve Jobs

David Card - Signs

Link: David Card - Signs.

This is not a good thing for the music industry.

      The Eagles' first studio release in 28 years, "Long Road Out of Eden," sold about 711,000 copies last week, according to preliminary data released by tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan. Spears sold a modest 290,000 copies of her album, "Blackout."

Still, super-serving fans -- even old ones, if you can't create any new ones -- is absolutely critical in the face of continuing industry shrinkage. Not sure that exclusive deals with Wal-Mart as superserving, though.

Actually, this may be more of a sign that Britney is on the slide than really telling us anything about the music industry.

What can we conclude from the new Radiohead release?

murketing » Blog Archive » What can we conclude from the new Radiohead release?:

"I think it’s a big mistake to draw conclusions about the Death of Big Labels based on the successes (or failures) of bands that built massive followings while on a big label. Radiohead isn’t coming out of nowhere: According the RIAA site, Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, and Kid A are all platinum records. So Yorke can breezily dismiss the need for labels now, but that’s after a decade-plus of benefiting from having the big-label machine work his records at radio, bankroll the early videos and tours when they weren’t megastars, etc. I’m not saying the old model isn’t under serious pressure; I’m saying that you can’t make sweeping conclusions without considering residual effect from the old model."

Of course, none of that will stop the anti-copyright brigade making exactly these kinds of sweeping generalisations, but you could, at least, hope that it would lead some serious economists to look into the effects of lack of copyright on the economy.

Ace of Spades Puppet Theatre

Passed without comment....

Michael Gartenberg on the new iPods

Michael Gartenberg - Apple Introduces New iPods - Second Take:

"Bottom Line - I believe Apple once again met and exceeded increasingly high expectations. It now has a very deep and complete product line for going into the holiday season, at amazing price points and feature sets that will drive different customers into different purchase funnels. While Apple could easily have kept price points on some of these models higher, they wisely chose not to do so. This is not about a re-fresh of the products aimed at the existing market.

Apple is NOT preaching to the choir here, they're looking to get a whole new customer into the house of worship and that's exactly what's likely to happen this holiday season"

Zune Insider : Price Drop

Zune Insider : Price Drop.

Some of you may have already heard, but tomorrow we’re dropping the suggested retail price for Zune to $199.  It’s part of the normal product lifecycle, something we’ve had on the books for months.  We just got some research back and customer satisfaction with the 30GB device is really high (around 94%) and we expect even more consumers will now want to discover the Zune experience at the new lower price.

Oh sure, this is nothing to do with what any other company might be doing on the 5th. Nothing at all.

Actually, a more interesting observation is on the language. There really isn't any passion in the way the poster talks about his product. It's all about "some research", "the product lifecycle", and so on.

A simple proposal to anyone blogging about their product: before you type, think "how would Steve Jobs say this if it was his product?" Then write that. It will sound a lot better than this kind of bland corporate-speak.