DRM and Greed
Bruce Munro has been listening – and my videos on DRM and the future of the RIAA really set him off:
Before the RIAA can get back the business, they might want to look at what got them here. In the 60’s and 70’s, a 50 cent 45 RPM record was a promotional item, meant to entice the public to buy the LP. It was relatively successful but even if the LP was a dog, they made a small profit on the millions of 45’s sold.
Within a few years that same 45 was $2.49 and the record companies had already started to market new artists with little quality material, poor preparation and lots of filler to pad out $10 LP’s. People started to get smarter and just bought the 45’s but at least they were still buying. CD technologies were introduced and the price of an LP (CD) shot up to $25 with assurances from the music industry that prices would fall back to LP levels as soon as the majority of the public adopted the new technologies.
They lied. They kept prices high, drove vinyl off the shelves and created a brand new problem. They manufactured a perfect digital copy of the program and were helpless to prevent the duplication and eventual distribution through the internet. Smarter teens can simply fire up the family digital TV, go to the “radio” stations they all contain, hook up their media recorder and go away for a few days. Digital music, no DRM and easy to edit MP3 format for the computer. Reminds me of the reel to reel recorders and FM radio stations when I was a lad.
Lets see now, they stopped fair cost promotional distribution (45’s). Tripled the cost of the LP and rushed product to market with poor content. Did little in the way of promotion deciding instead to spend that money on litigation suing teenagers hundreds of thousands of dollars (by the way, teenagers don’t have any money) and generally making a pain in the ass of themselves to legislators and law enforcement around the world. I have a great idea, STOP everything you are doing now and lose the lawyers (nobody likes lawyers, really). Get back into the studio and create something worthwhile, stuff those CD’s full of entertainment and sell it for $10.
Lets see. 100 million CD’s at $10 as opposed to 1 million at $20. Do the math and for god sakes get that music executive a calculator because odds are he still doesn’t get it. One last thing, get your house in order, the artists are starting to promote themselves on the internet, many successfully. RIAA are you listening.
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