The Starbucks Debacle
What I love about the music business are the pricks at the label who say they’re TRYING things, to just give them a chance, they’re ushering in the future, they just don’t want to make any mistakes, they’re on the case, we should TRUST THEM!
If I had a dime for every asshole who e-mailed me when the ludicrous CD burning bars went into Starbucks to tell me how fucking GREAT they were I could hire a hacker to penetrate the coffee emporium’s system and blow it up for good.
If you’re investing in CDs, you’re just showing how fucking ignorant you are. It’s a dying format. You just milk profits and then MOVE ON!!
But then you’ve got the ludicrous Sony BMG decision to market COPY-PROTECTED CDS! And, they’re going to justify their success by saying there are no COMPLAINTS! This is like saying there’s no problem with steroids in baseball because the testing system showed no violations. And this was the case, BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T TESTING FOR STEROIDS!
It’s not so bad if you buy a copy-protected CD that doesn’t allow you to transfer your songs to your hand-held device if you can just download the same tracks from the P2P service for FREE!!
And then there’s the limited CD burning, as if THIS will have an effect. Since you can download the same tracks from P2P unprotected and burn as many CDs as you WANT! Or, buy copy-protected tracks at the iTunes Music Store and burn them, REMOVING the copy protection!
And, in a brilliant move, Sony BMG is sending advance CDs that YOU CAN’T EVEN PLAY IN YOUR COMPUTER!
Oh, the company spent dollars to overnight me the new David Gray CD. But I HAVEN’T PLAYED IT!
God, what business are these guys IN??? The first thing I do when I get a CD is put it in my COMPUTER!!! And, I’m not ALONE! I listen, and then I rip it if I like it, so I can play it on my iPod. Sending this crippled CD is like shipping me a car that you can’t put gas in, it’s just about USELESS!
But why did they send me the fucking CD to BEGIN WITH? Did they do it to ENTICE ME to buy a finished copy??? No, to hopefully ENJOY and tell YOU about. But if I can’t listen to it, this ain’t gonna happen. And based on the sales of the previous David Gray album, they should be making it EASY for me to spread the word, since it was a relative STIFF!
But this is the kind of future Andy Lack and Michael Smellie envision. One where THEY own all the music and keep the public AT BAY! Delineate what people can do with products they OWN! Oh, THIS is going to sit well, in an America with a first sale doctrine, where you can do anything you want with something you purchased. I don’t want Andy Lack looking over my shoulder every time I use my David Gray CD, I want HIM out of my life, just like I want the GOVERNMENT out of my life.
But it’s all done in protection of the OLD MODEL! The release date is INVIOLATE! Even though seemingly everybody trading "Star Wars" P2P paid to see it in the theatre. But NO, record companies don’t want to deal in human nature, they just want to make up the laws of the universe as they go ALONG!
People don’t want to burn CD collections. ESPECIALLY not in the day of iPods, when you can carry THOUSANDS of tracks with you, hell, when you can listen to a Jack-formatted station and hear more different tracks than you can burn to a CD.
Yes, the Starbucks burning bars are a colossal failure. Anybody with a BRAIN could have predicted this. But, since CD compilations were big in 2000, the lame labels thought they’d be big in 2004/5. As if you’d even THINK of using that Wintel box you purchased with Windows ME today. Oh, there are SOME backward people still using old computers, but do you have to address THESE people instead of US, the main, thinking, technologically-savvy market?
Oh, I’m not talking about the sale of CDs at Starbucks. Like Ray Charles and now Antigone Rising. You see people WANT to invest in new acts, in ALBUMS! This, the STARBUCKS audience, is the one that still believes. It’s just the youngest generation, that never had legitimate mainstream album acts to believe in to begin with that wants only this track and that. And they’re not so dumb as to pay for a CD at Starbucks, they’re just going to download.
It’s time for the record business to comport with reality. To stop lying to us to protect their old model and their salaries. The music market has changed FOREVER! People want A LOT of music at a LOW price. You can’t achieve this with CDs. The costs are high, the discs only hold a few tracks.
If you don’t know ALL of the above, please QUIT!
