Pricing
If only tracks had cost a nickel, or a dime. Do you really think everybody would have jumped through hoops to steal them?
Pretty soon, music’s gonna be free. Call that Spotify. As for labels pulling Spotify licenses, isn’t that like the government enacting Prohibition? It would be one thing if no one had ever gotten drunk, if the effects of alcohol were not known. But once they were, people needed to get high, damn the law.
So I just don’t understand this ten year period. What did the rights holders prove?
That the public doesn’t care about internal bickering? That licenses require publishers and labels to agree on terms, and they can’t?
That ten years of revenue not only went uncollected, but never will be?
That’s why the rights holders are fucked. They continue to live in a world they want to see, not the one that actually exists. Eric Garland proffered at NARM that the rights holders were not prepared for terabyte transfers offline. I.e. hard drive swapping. As for three strikes laws, intimidating both ISPs and traders, oops, there’s a question of legality. As the French court said, you can’t mess with someone’s basic rights without a full legal proceeding.
When are the rights holders going to get off their high horses and realize they’re in the pit with their customers. That the day of dictation is over. Or, are they going to be like their brethren in the newspaper business, crying it’s just not fair until the very end. And even Letterman took a cut when he re-upped with CBS. Network ratings aren’t what they used to be, and ad revenues certainly are not.
Rights holders could have reaped revenue for a decade, and then sold consumers the same damn tracks all over again. Instead, they fought downloading until it became streaming. This is like losing out on the revenue of cassettes waiting for the CD.
End result? Labels will have less power and less income. Why go with the major label who will restrict you, yet want to take all the revenue?
Today it’s not about being married to the past, but fighting for your place in the present. iPhone has to adapt, even lower prices, to compete with not only the Palm Pre, but Android and RIM. As for Nokia… Remember when everybody had one in the U.S? I don’t know anybody who’s got a Nokia phone today. And Motorola is going down the tubes. Their RAZR was a one hit wonder. They booked tons of revenue for a short period of time, now what?
Point is, Apple tells app writers to price their iPhone programs extremely cheaply, to make them impulse buys. As a result, a billion apps have been downloaded in a month, and irrelevant of the revenue generated, it’s these apps that have made the iPhone such a dominant platform.
Let me explain this to you… The more people who have your music on their hard drive, the more people who want to see you live and buy your merch and keep your career going.
If you’re overpriced like the Pre, and no one wants to utilize the declining Sprint, you’re dragged down the drain.
Most people can’t figure out how to steal. Napster was easy, even KaZaA, but BitTorrent is too daunting for them and the RIAA anti-piracy campaign has got them afraid to steal. Yes, the RIAA campaign worked! It took millions and millions of people who were consuming mass quantities of music via Napster completely out of the game. Left them with their money and time to watch TV, buy DVDs and play video games.
The way you deal with shrinking margins is to cut costs, not to raise prices. Raising prices when your product can be obtained for free is like charging $100,000 for a Hummer. Huh?
Utterly ridiculous.
