If only tracks had cost a nickel, or a dime.\u00c2\u00a0 Do you really think everybody would have jumped through hoops to steal them?<\/p>\n
Pretty soon, music’s gonna be free.\u00c2\u00a0 Call that Spotify.\u00c2\u00a0 As for labels pulling Spotify licenses, isn’t that like the government enacting Prohibition?\u00c2\u00a0 It would be one thing if no one had ever gotten drunk, if the effects of alcohol were not known.\u00c2\u00a0 But once they were, people needed to get high, damn the law.<\/p>\n
So I just don’t understand this ten year period.\u00c2\u00a0 What did the rights holders prove?<\/p>\n
That the public doesn’t care about internal bickering?\u00c2\u00a0 That licenses require publishers and labels to agree on terms, and they can’t?<\/p>\n
That ten years of revenue not only went uncollected, but never will be?<\/p>\n
That’s why the rights holders are fucked.\u00c2\u00a0 They continue to live in a world they want to see, not the one that actually exists.\u00c2\u00a0 Eric Garland proffered at NARM that the rights holders were not prepared for terabyte transfers offline.\u00c2\u00a0 I.e. hard drive swapping.\u00c2\u00a0 As for three strikes laws, intimidating both ISPs and traders, oops, there’s a question of legality.\u00c2\u00a0 As the French court said, you can’t mess with someone’s basic rights without a full legal proceeding.<\/p>\n
When are the rights holders going to get off their high horses and realize they’re in the pit with their customers.\u00c2\u00a0 That the day of dictation is over.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, are they going to be like their brethren in the newspaper business, crying it’s just not fair until the very end.\u00c2\u00a0 And even Letterman took a cut when he re-upped with CBS.\u00c2\u00a0 Network ratings aren’t what they used to be, and ad revenues certainly are not.<\/p>\n
Rights holders could have reaped revenue for a decade, and then sold consumers the same damn tracks all over again.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, they fought downloading until it became streaming.\u00c2\u00a0 This is like losing out on the revenue of cassettes waiting for the CD.<\/p>\n
End result?\u00c2\u00a0 Labels will have less power and less income.\u00c2\u00a0 Why go with the major label who will restrict you, yet want to take all the revenue?<\/p>\n
Today it’s not about being married to the past, but fighting for your place in the present.\u00c2\u00a0 iPhone has to adapt, even lower prices, to compete with not only the Palm Pre, but Android and RIM.\u00c2\u00a0 As for Nokia…\u00c2\u00a0 Remember when everybody had one in the U.S?\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know anybody who’s got a Nokia phone today.\u00c2\u00a0 And Motorola is going down the tubes.\u00c2\u00a0 Their RAZR was a one hit wonder.\u00c2\u00a0 They booked tons of revenue for a short period of time, now what?<\/p>\n
Point is, Apple tells app writers to price their iPhone programs extremely cheaply, to make them impulse buys.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Let me explain this to you…\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
If you’re overpriced like the Pre, and no one wants to utilize the declining Sprint, you’re dragged down the drain.<\/p>\n
Most people can’t figure out how to steal.\u00c2\u00a0 Napster was easy, even KaZaA, but BitTorrent is too daunting for them and the RIAA anti-piracy campaign has got them afraid to steal.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, the RIAA campaign worked!\u00c2\u00a0 It took millions and millions of people who were consuming mass quantities of music via Napster completely out of the game.\u00c2\u00a0 Left them with their money and time to watch TV, buy DVDs and play video games.<\/p>\n
The way you deal with shrinking margins is to cut costs, not to raise prices.\u00c2\u00a0 Raising prices when your product can be obtained for free is like charging $100,000 for a Hummer.\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?<\/p>\n
Utterly ridiculous.<\/p>\n
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