My inbox is filling up with this inane story.<\/p>\n
What blows my mind is that the "New York Times" can write this tripe with no analysis and Websites like Rollingstone.com can repeat it.\u00c2\u00a0 This wouldn’t have happened when Jeff Leeds was on the beat.\u00c2\u00a0 But he’s gone.\u00c2\u00a0 Cut off your nose to spite your face.\u00c2\u00a0 The newspapers are good at this…<\/p>\n
To say that Atlantic is making more money from digital than from CDs is like saying Harley-Davidson makes more money off tchotchkes than motorcycles.\u00c2\u00a0 Like HP trumpeting its printers are selling like hotcakes but its computer sales are down.\u00c2\u00a0 Like HBO saying that they sold a ton of "Sopranos" DVDs but ten million people canceled the service.<\/p>\n
The point is, Atlantic Records is in the recorded music business.\u00c2\u00a0 And sales at the iTunes Store are not making up for the fall-off in CDs, they’re factoring in ringtones, satellite radio, all kinds of revenue.\u00c2\u00a0 The question is, when are they going to come up with a reasonable way to monetize music?<\/p>\n
They didn’t license P2P.\u00c2\u00a0 They sued their customers…<\/p>\n
The labels destroyed their business, and now they’re asking us to forget that as they move into a new business.\u00c2\u00a0 It would be like GM saying car sales are down, but more people visited our Website and our advertising revenue is up!\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?<\/p>\n
iTunes is a shitty replacement for CDs because you get to pick a song instead of the whole album.\u00c2\u00a0 The key here is not to try and get Apple to only sell albums, that would be like getting Trojan to stop selling condoms to prevent teenage pregnancy.\u00c2\u00a0 The key is to come up with a better solution!<\/p>\n
And that’s very clear.\u00c2\u00a0 Make everybody a music customer for a very low price.\u00c2\u00a0 Worked for the mobile phone companies, why can’t it work for the record labels?<\/p>\n
Cell phones used to be a grand and calls cost a buck a minute.\u00c2\u00a0 Now phones are free and so are nights and weekends, and what talk time you are paying for is cheap.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re never going back to $13.99 for ten songs.\u00c2\u00a0 Not even $9.99.\u00c2\u00a0 When are the labels going to give up this fiction?\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like the oil companies lobbying for the return of land yachts like the Cadillac Eldorado!<\/p>\n
MySpace Music certainly ain’t getting traction.\u00c2\u00a0 Not because they didn’t have a CEO, but because of the lack of usability. Can you figure the site out?\u00c2\u00a0 What’s there, what’s not?\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no uniformity on the pages.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a fucking mess.\u00c2\u00a0 It looks exactly like what it is, a site designed by committee.<\/p>\n
If you make music accessible enough, all of it for a very low price, easily played, people will pay for it.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s immutable. Work from that point backward, not from the premise of getting the public to have collective amnesia and go back to the pre-Napster days.<\/p>\n
Anybody who believes music should be free is an imbecile.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that we need innovative marketers who can figure out how to package it so people will pay for it.\u00c2\u00a0 At more than a buck a throw.<\/p>\n
You can’t buy heated windshield wipers on your car without also getting heated seats.\u00c2\u00a0 They call this a package.\u00c2\u00a0 Great marketers figured this out long ago.\u00c2\u00a0 Fewer choices at a higher price point.\u00c2\u00a0 The opposite of iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s unclear here?<\/p>\n
As for HP…\u00c2\u00a0 They bought Compaq and still didn’t win the market share war.\u00c2\u00a0 They fired Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd came in and brought the company back to health.\u00c2\u00a0 Printers kept it alive, but computers are now contributing significantly to the bottom line.\u00c2\u00a0 Along with networking.<\/p>\n
Instead of competing with Dell, HP realized that there was a market shift.\u00c2\u00a0 Computers were commodities that people wanted to buy in big box retail stores as opposed to customizing over the Net or phone.\u00c2\u00a0 HP realized this and now it’s the big kahuna and Dell is in trouble.\u00c2\u00a0 Furthermore, Carly didn’t want to emphasize HP’s networking for fear of pissing off Cisco.\u00c2\u00a0 This is like record labels being afraid of digital initiatives because they might piss off Wal-Mart.\u00c2\u00a0 A company that is constantly shrinking SKUs and floor space.<\/p>\n
If those digital guys Guy Hands hired were truly smart they wouldn’t be figuring out how to sign and market the acts that they have trouble signing and have no money to promote, but how to get people to pay for music.<\/p>\n
Start there.\u00c2\u00a0 Innovate.\u00c2\u00a0 Try selling a bucket of tunes for a low cost.\u00c2\u00a0 Emphasize eMusic more than MySpace.\u00c2\u00a0 Take a fucking risk, so we don’t have to be exposed to any more double-talk like this moronic Atlantic announcement.<\/p>\n
\nDigital Sales Surpass CDs at Atlantic<\/a>
Atlantic Records Says Digital Sales Trump Physical CD Revenues<\/a>
H.P. Unit Sheds Stepchild Status to Take on Cisco<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My inbox is filling up with this inane story. What blows my mind is that the "New York Times" can write this tripe with no analysis and Websites like Rollingstone.com can repeat it.\u00c2\u00a0 This wouldn’t have happened when Jeff Leeds was on the beat.\u00c2\u00a0 But he’s gone.\u00c2\u00a0 Cut off your nose to spite your face.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-nS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1480"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1483,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480\/revisions\/1483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}