And giving Wall Street institutions billions will solve the credit crisis.<\/p>\n
Getting excited about multiple price points at the iTunes Store is like being thrilled there are three price points at the gas station.\u00c2\u00a0 Or losing\u00c2\u00a0 your cookies that Coke comes in multiple-sized cups at 7-11.<\/p>\n
As for being DRM-free…\u00c2\u00a0 Whoopee!\u00c2\u00a0 As I’ve stated countless times, the only people who care about DRM don’t pay for music, they just steal it.\u00c2\u00a0 Otherwise, Amazon would have eclipsed Apple and the Seattle company would own the online music market, not the one based in Cupertino.<\/p>\n
To focus on per track sales at this point, so deep into the music acquisition crisis, is like focusing on NASA to solve our nation’s economic crisis.\u00c2\u00a0 Shit, NASA came up with Tang, maybe they can figure out how to make Bernie Madoff’s creditors whole!<\/p>\n
Detroit may be stupid, but at least they know that you don’t let the customer pick and choose every last option.\u00c2\u00a0 Car companies sell them in PACKAGES!\u00c2\u00a0 You want the sunroof?\u00c2\u00a0 Then you’ve got to get leather seats and 19" rims. They’ve got the sport package.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t buy the stiff suspension without the bigger engine.\u00c2\u00a0 There are marketing rules.\u00c2\u00a0 Why does the music industry think it can break them?\u00c2\u00a0 To think you can make up for album sales by selling individual tracks is like thinking you can pick up a whole beach with your fingers, one grain of sand at a time, rather than using a Caterpillar earth mover.<\/p>\n
As for prices going up…\u00c2\u00a0 Been to a retail outlet lately?\u00c2\u00a0 Seen anybody with HIGHER prices?\u00c2\u00a0 Only the record industry can be so stupid as to want their product to cost MORE!\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to do it like the cable company, or the mobile company….\u00c2\u00a0 Get people to sign on at a tier, a bunch of stuff for not so much.\u00c2\u00a0 And then, after you get them hooked, you slowly raise the price.\u00c2\u00a0 Imagine if cell calls were still a buck a minute.\u00c2\u00a0 Whoo, that’d kill the mobile companies overnight.<\/p>\n
Why can’t the industry face reality…\u00c2\u00a0 That most people own a lot of music, most of which they haven’t paid for.\u00c2\u00a0 The key isn’t to get them to pay more for what they do buy, but to get them to pay for what they’ve stolen.\u00c2\u00a0 Otherwise, it’s like trying to save Detroit by jacking up the prices for the cars the company DOES manage to sell!<\/p>\n
As for prices going down…\u00c2\u00a0 That’s about catalog and worthless material.\u00c2\u00a0 If you think Katy Perry’s new track is going to go for 69 cents, you probably think you’re going to marry Rob Pattinson or Jennifer Aniston.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re completely delusional.<\/p>\n
There’s nothing wrong with today’s announcement.\u00c2\u00a0 A step in the right direction.\u00c2\u00a0 But one that should have been taken years ago and is so small as to be almost insignificant.<\/p>\n
The industry’s way out of its crisis is to halt restrictions, license more people who are coming up with solutions. Find a way to make music REALLY CHEAP!\u00c2\u00a0 But selling it to everybody, in volume, to come up with a grand total. Hell, this pussyfooting, this refusal to play ball, this I’m a master of the universe is working about as well as it did for Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.\u00c2\u00a0 They couldn’t possibly fail.\u00c2\u00a0 But they did!<\/p>\n
The record companies are laughable.\u00c2\u00a0 Thinking they’ve got all this power, running their operations like it’s 1999, like they’ve got a clue.\u00c2\u00a0 Thank god the government isn’t bailing THEM out.\u00c2\u00a0 They’d just spend the money on private jets and champagne, as they continued to ruin their business.<\/p>\n
The iTunes Store is a sideshow.\u00c2\u00a0 But, in this rinky-dink circus, that’s all we’ve got.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no big tent, never mind multiple rings.<\/p>\n
Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.\u00c2\u00a0 These guys have decimated their business and now they want acts to give up more rights and raise prices to consumers.\u00c2\u00a0 If labels were run by elected figures, they’d have been voted out a decade ago.\u00c2\u00a0 Thank god their numbers are horrible.\u00c2\u00a0 Only when they’re completely in the toilet will innovation be able to take place.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And giving Wall Street institutions billions will solve the credit crisis. Getting excited about multiple price points at the iTunes Store is like being thrilled there are three price points at the gas station.\u00c2\u00a0 Or losing\u00c2\u00a0 your cookies that Coke comes in multiple-sized cups at 7-11. As for being DRM-free…\u00c2\u00a0 Whoopee!\u00c2\u00a0 As I’ve stated countless […]<\/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":[4,2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-music-business","category-online"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-p2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552","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=1552"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1563,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552\/revisions\/1563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}