Comments on: Forget DRM. It's the music

Studios remain shell-shocked by Napsterization, but CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says the real solution isn't attacking pirates.

[i_made_this]

Well said, Charlie and...

The quality of digital has proven far below that of analog.

About Jobs' battlecry against DRM, he's right and what he's railing about - I believe - is Vista's inability to differentiate between pirated and legal copies. Microsoft's thinly veiled effort to monopolize music and film distribution is transparent here and someone in a position of authority in the industry like Jobs must speak out against Redmond's thrust.

Will the music, film and cable TV industries as we know them eventually be merged or bought out by the likes of Microsoft and Google? Yes, I reckon so. Til then, those content industries will remain a few years behind the curve and unprofitable.

[boratebomber]

Tired of sampling/remixing being promoted as new music...

Either take music lessons and produce something new or go back to the garage. You have nothing to say and nothing of your own.

[boratebomber]

Quit being lame...

Shekels are a monetary denomination just like Dollars, Bucks, Fins, Benjamins (ooh, you could get anti semetic on that one as well, but then BF wasn't Jewish so it's a long shot), Leks, Lira, Deutsch Marks, etc.

As to coding, it's like the feminist I heard giving a speech that was against certain prison terms because she was confusing a latin derivitive with male anatomy. Sorry, but it doesn't hold water.

[donnie0526]

Gimme value for my dollars

Well said. My first "album" was "I Robot" on vinyl. Who can forget Hotel California, or Big Bamboo? If there is value the sales will follow.

Market a product with value. If you build it they will come.

[tahoerob]

Too MUCH Music

I very much agree with Charles's assessment of the challenges
facing the music industry. I'd like to offer another thought on
what ails the industry: too much music.

Consider the entertainment industry of 25 years ago. CD
players were just coming out. VCRs were still relatively new.
Cable TV meant getting one movie channel. And we looked
forward to big new movie releases. Things were smaller,
simpler, more easily grasped. And this is when the industry
really grew.

Today we have hundreds, if not thousands, of television
channels, most showing utterly worthless and mind-numbingly
bad stuff. I can't even keep up with the new movie releases;
there are so many. And music? It's insane. There are so many
bands being pitched at the consumer. Finding quality is like
navigating a minefield, not because there isn't quality music out
there, but because the industry has cranked up the *quantity* of
releases.

I'm considering cancelling my subscription to Dish Network and
simply buying season passes of the shows I want to watch from
iTunes. Why? Paying nearly $100 a month for mostly worthless
television programming is a rip-off. I could order season passes
for 3 shows for one month's payment. No commercials. And I
choose what I see.

I'm tired of the entertainment industry's "throw sh*t against the
wall and see what sticks" mentality. And the worst offenders are
the record industry. I still buy a lot of music (5-10 CDs each
month), but I pay no attention to what the big labels are selling
any longer. Like the rest of the industry, they cannot be trusted
to focus even remotely on quality these days. It's all about
quantity, about cloning successful acts, and feeding us the same
half-baked stuff over and over again. Why pay for that?

[WillCall]

Quantity made old models obsolete

I wouldn't say "Too Much", so much as "Too Much for the old system". The brick and morter stores: (a) can only hold so much, and (b) can only go so far in accommodating consumer exploration (you listen on headphones to 4-5 random new artists, with pretty CD sleeves, then must make a decision to buy or leave). With internet music availability, the exploration and community possibilities for music lovers exploded. It is now infinitely easier to explore online, than to do it in-store. Once you matched the ability to actually acquire music with the ability to explore, the real-world store became completely irrelevant (even for those who like to collect the CD packaging and other tangibles, ordering through Amazon is much easier and more satisfying than the shop at the mall). The only function left for real-world music shops is to push ubiquitous releases by studio giants, or to introduce a very few, very fortunate selected new artists via the Starbucks model.

All said, however, the shift to online download does create a very legitimate paranoia of piracy for the music industry (not just publishers, but artists and everyone up the value chain). While the author and most of the commenters (including me) are undoubtedly conscientious music consumers, the percentage of piracy amongst the collective iPod universe is still a significant economic factor.

Jobs attempted to sell out the content side of the music industry because that's not where he makes money. He has a lot of pressure in Europe on the antitrust bundling question. His proposal doesn't really change the arguments against Apple in such circles, but it did raise a lot of dust and does put a nice, friendly, pro-consumer face on Apple. You didn't see him suggest, however, that he would license iTunes players to other devicemakers, or that he would allow the iPod to be unlocked to allow other media players to be loaded onto it.

If I were on the content side of the industry, I'd be screaming too. The decline in revenues they've seen is extremely painful, even for an industry in technological transition. To have the most successful member of the value chain for the emerging commercial e-music model throw the rest of the industry to the wolves has got to be galling. Especially since what they sell is the real value of the industry, while Jobs sells what should be a commodity piece of plastic and metal.

The music "industry" got behind the curve on customer preferences and technological evolution, and then let a hardware guy flip the value chain on them. It is 3 strikes against them, but you can't possibly be surprised that they are absolutely foaming at the mouth about it.

[pete anderson]

i still make gr8 records/pete anderson/little dog records

help the talented survive

[riozen]

The Recording Industry is Dead! Long Live Music!

After many years of telling everyone I could in the recording
industry this very same opinion to no avail, including I might
add, Ted Cohen, I decided to do something about it. I started,
muzlink.com. The Corporate Recording Industry is Dead. The
corporations killed it, not the kids. Long live the music! Online,
artist first, music maker to music lover and yes, peer to peer is
the new radio. Get used to it. The customer will pay for a good
thing. After they hear it. The Internet will liberate the music lover
and music artist from the A & R dominated lack-luster flop of
top down control. further...

[Chevaliermusic]

I think this went off track a few times

but I basically agree with most posters. The labels are in trouble because most popular music artists are overproduced. However, I don't believe that hip hop sucks. (It's been said quite a few times in this thread. There are still plenty of great artists in the genre. The problem is the same for any interested party as it is for me (jazz-lover/composer). If there were a customer who wanted quality pop/jazz/hip-hop how could you find it. Clear Channel plays the same music across all of their stations so you're only gonna hear Gwen Stef, Kenny G, and Snoop Dog. Not really representative of those genre's. Not when Sting, Pat Metheny, and Mos Def are still breathing.

Just my 2 cents. You can disagree without yelling - I do it all the time.

[Martin Ozolin]

Pseudoculture is 100% political

People promote artists by exposing them in public places. That generates sales. What is less known is that these promoters are not even disk jockeys but people fed up with the recording industry and its sexually confused constituents.

[lexicon_z]

CD exchanges (or It's the pricing stupid)

I haven't read all the responses yet but why can't the industry see that it's the used CD market injuring sales. At $15 a CD I won't buy new but I will dig through used bins to find that same CD for $5. I remember when a consumer elctronics giant based out of MN was selling CD's below cost to get people into the store. And with $9 CD prices the CD's would fly off the shelves and even though napster existed back then I would still buy aleast 5 new CD's a week. Being a musician I like the idea of supporting artists but being they don't make money (with very few exceptions) off of CD's who cares about buying a new CD it only supports those industry kahunas. I find it better to get the music how I can for a reasonable price and then go to the concerts which actually make the bands money. And for itunes, well thats even worse pricing than buying a CD and I don't even get media or the choice of where I want to play it. DRM should go away just like Microsofts notion of Intellectual Property.

And hasn't this stupid conversation gone on long enough...the record companies are protecting other peoples intellectual property because they can't come up with there own. Now if you can't come up with good ideas because your MBA degree didn't teach you to create maybe you shouldn't be in business. Adapt or fail but don't make the rest of the world adapt to your failures.

My forecast: Around 2020 Intellectual Property laws will be remove from all ideas, things like medical research wil finally fast forward, technology will not only be available to all but expand life and creativity but in the 13 years proceeding people (possibly even you the reader) will die because humans can't adapt and are to petty to want to advance as a species instead of the individual. Music is just one brick in this wall.

[vex]

same old thing

I was at the store the other night buying some allergy medication to aid in sleeping when I wandered into the magazine section, and picked up a few music related magazines I use to read back in middle school into high school (8th, 9th years). Nothing is new, still the same artists being interviewed, and for the most part it seems that music is at a total stand still as far as creativity. The new artists I do see seem to have a "How To Write Music" book which they all read, and all implement the same techniques into what they write. Why am I going to pay money to hear the same thing emulated over and over again? I'll pay the local band down the street more money to play than I'd pay most new artists that are signed... they guy down the street has talent. Now I'm not saying a talented guy doesn't slip into the scene now, and again and hit it big, but for the rest of them I've heard it all before.

[kryan88]

Give 'em worth something to pay for

In addition to bringing some really good rock artists back in the game, high quality sound wouldn't hurt either. We are used to paying for CDs and you can count on great quality audio. Now, with the mass marketing of MP3s, the industry expects us to pay for a product that is seven times less the quality??? MusicGiants has the right idea - sound quality IS worth paying for.

[amfx22000]

I'm with you 100% on this one, but it's worth noting that Xerox didn't dead the book industry because 1. books are portable and a convenient size, whereas Xeroxes are not, and 2. Xerox copies of books are far more expensive to produce than conventional books, so bootleg books only thrive in places of the world where real books are not available.