Originally posted by: Nitemare
Originally posted by: Red Dawn
CD sales are down not due to Piracy as much as the RIAA's business model of producing Quantity over Quality. The Records (CD's) by Artists that have multiple good tracks on them sell well (Ex. Eminems last CD)where as the CD's with only one or two good tracks don't (ex. the RHCP's last album) I am not going to buy a CD for only one or two good tracks on it (Well I'm not going to buy a CD period until the RIAA pulls it's head out of it's ass)
Good article on what the Music Industry needs to do!
Text for the non-subscribers?
Here you go!
Considering that the lifestyle of most people I know in the entertainment business involves at least some excess, it's no surprise that the industry's scheme for bringing CD sales back to life is one of excess. The plan, simply, is to beat consumers into submission by delivering more, more, more. Maybe that'll get us all off Kazaa.
The idea that more content increases the value of a CD makes sense on the surface, particularly if the additional material cannot easily be pirated (at least not yet), as is the case with the "bonus" enhanced CDs and DVDs Eminem and other popular performers have shrink-wrapped with recent releases.
But the quantity-over-quality ethos is a collector's mentality, focused at the top of the market. It doesn't work for the mainstream. A collector might buy an album with bonus tracks in order to build his or her music library (one record-company owner and music buff I know admits to an "almost fetishistic relationship with 78s"). For the general consumer, however, a 70-minute CD isn't much of an attraction. When a great half-hour rock 'n' roll album appears, like the latest efforts from the Strokes and the Hives, it becomes a hit in part because it's so concise. Who but a collector wouldn't rather have a lean, one-great-cut-after-another CD than a flabby one with an extra 30 minutes of subpar material or pointless alternate mixes that should have been excised?
The collector's market has room for everything-ever-recorded box sets, and this approach has proven even more lucrative in generating DVD sales. Of course, this only works if the core artistic effort is any good: A longer version of the latest piece of crap from Martin Lawrence isn't likely to be any funnier than the original.
So, if appealing to the collector impulse won't help record companies reclaim the mainstream market, what can they do to save themselves from Kazaa? Here are three steps the music industry can take right now to regain what it's tossed away. They're all dramatic, and they all go against everything the labels have tried lately, but a quick look at a graph of CD sales quarter-by-quarter (think Grand Canyon) suggests that only bold moves will save the industry from an otherwise inexorable slide. What to do?
Reduce CD prices. The new CD by [insert your favorite performer here] may be wonderful, but it's hard to convince people that it's worth $19.98 at the local mall, especially during a downturn or a recession or an invisible recovery or whatever we're in. The labels could maintain their margins by adopting new distribution schemes, digital and real, that sidestep the current bloated structure. And maybe record companies would then think twice before spending $2 million or $3 million on a promotional video.
Abandon copy protection and invest in consumer-friendly technologies. Copy protection efforts, if continued, will become a tremendous legal expense for the major labels as consumers rebel. Also, it's been demonstrated that such technologies don't work. Why cut into margins by developing dead-end technologies that alienate customers and inevitably fail? Consumer-friendly innovations, such as those that place multiple formats like SACD and DVDA on single CDs, are more likely to generate interest, especially for older titles.
Abandon current online efforts and buy Kazaa. Give up. The Recording Industry Association of America should have learned from its dealings with Napster, Aimster, Scour, etc. that legal recourses, even if they work, take months or years to have an effect, by which time users have already moved to a new platform. Buy Kazaa -- its software is more reliable and scalable than Pressplay's or MusicNet's -- and charge subscribers a low monthly fee. Roughly 190 million copies of Kazaa have been downloaded. Registering just 10 percent of those copies (a conservative estimate) at a $10-per-month all-you-can-download rate would net the major labels at least $2.28 billion a year. Only hubris is preventing the music industry from adopting such a speedy, lucrative solution. And the labels would get extra points for using Kazaa Lite, which has no ads and doesn't include spyware.
These three moves have to happen in conjunction. Lower CD prices will work only if there's another legitimate and large revenue stream. Abandoning copy protection will have a positive revenue effect only if CDs are no longer overpriced. To survive, the major labels will have to do something more courageous than simply adding outtakes to otherwise finished albums. The longer they wait to start, the more likely it'll be that a generation of kids will grow up having learned to acquire music without paying for it.