 DragasoniWe're All Mad Here
Premium Member
join:2001-12-14
Palm Bay, FL |
Great!This is excellent news. I for one DID support the RIAA until I saw the tactics they were using to "stop" this P2P madness. Taking 60 people in the country to court doesn't solve anything. What is $100,000 to the RIAA? It's about 25 cents to us, that's what it is.
I understand that this material we trade is copyrighted by them, and they own this content. But I honestly think the biggest cause for the RIAA's lose of money is the economy. We are still is a recession, and until we come completely out of it, sales are going to be lower across the board...this includes CD sales.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem buying CD's. But I only buy CD's that are worth it, like Better Than Ezra. You see, I can listen to the entire CD and enjoy every song on it.
However, just from listening to the radio in my car 2 hours each day, I hear the same 5 songs over and over again. What makes you think I'm going to buy that crap, when I'm sick of it...let alone download it!
The stunts the RIAA is pulling are wrong, and they need to focus their attention on the economy...not the few heavy file traders out there.
How about lowering the prices of CD's???? Now there's an idea, make CD's more affordable to people suffering from this recession rather than attacking file traders.
My 2 cents...
-Dragasoni- |
medici
join:2001-02-22
Shohola, PA |
to SRFireside
Or, how about this tactic:
Issue press releases about new, lower prices. Advertise and hype the hell out of cutting 20% or even 30%. Even open your own eCommerce site to sell at the advertised price, (plus tax, shipping and handling, of course). But don't change your wholesale price.
Instead, you force your distributors and retailers to lower their margin to make up the discount. Maybe there used to be 30-40% margin in music, and stores flourished. Then it when down to 20%, now even less. Of course, then the distributors and retailers have to cut costs or go out of business. How do you cut costs?
- Reduce the number of employees. Instead of five staff working at all times, now there's only two. One sits at the register all day, and the other stocks shelves. RESULT: long lines and lack of help drives customers out of store and to Internet resellers.
- Reduce the hourly wage and benefits. Lower pay means lower quality workers. Lower quality means the few employees left aren't as knowledgeable and can't offer alternative suggestions, recommend new bands, do cross selling. RESULT: Lower per-customer sales, customers looking for new artists are driven to P2P.
- Reduce inventory. Instead of ordering and paying up-front for 200 of the new CD from a top band, only get 100. You can't afford to pay for CD's or the display space for stuff that will sit around for weeks or months. Eliminate or significantly reduce stock of unknown or less-popular artists. Eliminate low-volume genres. RESULT: chases the specialty buyer to higher-priced specialty dealers, the Internet (where margin can be recouped on shipping, handling and advertising) and, of course, P2P.
- Reduce service. No more queuing albums up so you can hear new artists. No more stack of demo discs by the player to sample new music. Sure, there's still music playing in the store -- of the same top-20 crap you hear on the radio 1,000 times a day, all piped-in courtesy of the big record labels. And, of course, the slime-encrusted preview stations loaded with more top-100 songs from major labels.
I remember as a teenager and early adult going on regular trips to the local record stores. I'd go with a few friends and we'd spend hours listening to new music. The stores were owned and managed hands-on by people who loved music and could recommend new, unknown artists that were compatible with your tastes, and would take the time to play you some cuts. Even the staff who worked at the store made more than minimum wage, becuse they all loved music and would make the store extra money by sharing their knowledge with customers, resulting in additional sales. All this in the day when albums sold for about half what CD's cost now, but cost more to manufacture than current production costs. We would walk out of the store with four to six new albums each. When we got home, the first thing we did was start dubbing cassettes to keep in the car and share with each other. But the funny thing is that, eventually, we all wound up buying the same albums sooner or later, because we all wanted the original covers, the first-generation quality, and the ability to make more copies ourselves whenever we wanted.
Today I use P2P to find new music, but it's a pain in the ass. P2P doesn't recommend songs from artists similar to what I'm downloading, and even if it could, I'd be too afraid that my preferences were being data-mined and sold by unscrupulous corporate entities. When I do find an album I like, trying to download a clean, complete copy of all 10 songs, create a directory and playlist, edit ID strings, burn a CD and print a label and jewel-case cover is a 3-hour process. I make about $50, and with 3 kids and a house in the sticks, even my free time is precious. There's no way it's worth $150 of my time to save $20 on a CD. But these economics don't apply to the music industry's target consumer: 13 to 25 year olds.
The 13-25yo makes up at least 60% of the music industry's consumer base. Probably closer to 80%. And the basic problem is that these people are still earning 1989 wages, but have to pay inflated 2004 prices for their essentials. And their essentials are: car, car stereo, car repairs, car insurance and gas; food for when they take out their girlfriends, alcohol and condoms (hopefully only for those old/responsible enough); and clothes (since they never wear what their parents buy for them). The price for all these things has gone up considerably since 1989. But minimum wage, which is where they all hover in terms of earnings, hasn't kept pace. The continuous flood of immigrants and off-shoring of low-end jobs has acted to keep earnings at a very low rate of improvement – nowhere near the increases in price on their essentials. The result is that these consumers, who have lots of free time and don't place a high value on their time, don't have the disposable income for music. Ironically, a kid working in a music store today has to work four hours to buy an album, whereas in 1989 he only had to work about two hours.
Reducing the price of a CD will help boost per-unit sales, but won't significantly increase music industry revenues. Scaring people with lawsuits may slow-down P2P sharing, but I can tell you it hasn't stopped sharing through other means, including private P2P, underground P2P, and just hand-to-hand sharing. Copy protected CD's may eliminate digital reproductions, but won't stop high-quality analog recordings. Besides, time and time again, teenagers and college-age adults have demonstrated the ability to overcome whatever copy protection is introduced. After all, they have plenty of free time.
So I agree that the decline in music industry sales has less to do with P2P sharing and much to do with economics. It's too bad the RIAA doesn't expend some effort into fixing THAT problem. |
