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krj
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The Twentieth "Napsterization" Item
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Mar 24 01:35 UTC 2005 |
I let this topic have a rest over the last two quarterly Agoras.
But with the US Supreme Court taking oral arguments in the Grokster
case on Tuesday March 29, interest in the subject should heat up again.
The usual canned introduction:
The original Napster corporation has been destroyed, its trademarks
now owned by an authorized music retailer which does not use peer-to-peer
technology. But the Napster paradigm, in which computers and networks
give ordinary people unprecedented control over content, continues.
This is another quarterly installment in a series of weblog and
discussion about the deconstruction of the music industry and other
copyright industries, with side forays into "intellectual property,
freedom of expression, electronic media, corporate control, and evolving
technology," as polygon once phrased it.
Several years of back items are easily found in the music2 and music3
conferences, covering discussions all the way back to the initial
popularity of the MP3 format.
This item is linked between Spring 2005 Agora and Music conferences.
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| 80 responses total. |
krj
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response 1 of 80:
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Mar 24 01:36 UTC 2005 |
The state of CD sales in 2004 & 2005:
(I'm just going to dump this in off the top of my head, rather than
try to scrape up the primary sources from three months back.)
Soundscan is the point-of-sale system which measures sales to consumers.
The Soundscan figures for CD sales in 2004 were reported in January 2005.
They showed a slight increase in CD sales for the year, offering hope
that the decline of the last several years had been stopped. There
were some confusing ways of tallying the sales, based on whether one
counted 2004 as having 52 or 53 sales periods, and so the increase was
variously reported as between 1.5% - 2.5%. Let's split the difference
and call it 2%, good enough for folk music as they say in arabella's
family.
Looking at how the sales progressed through the years, though, the
data didn't look so optimistic. Sales were strong early in 2004,
relative to year before, but in the last three months of 2004 sales
fell behind same-week 2003 sales -- this got the industry back on
the same treadmill of decline which had characterized the preceding
four years. Sales had sagged enought that 2004 looked to heading
for another year of losses -- but there was a surge in the last
weeks of Christmas shopping to salvage the year.
A last-minute Christmas surge says to me that CDs were just easy
last-minute presents, not things that people really coveted for
themselves.
CD sales resumed a fairly rapid decline in early 2005; a new Billboard
story puts the decline at 9%, relative to 2004 year-to-date.
So sales have been back on the skids for six months.
I've seen a news story reporting that Best Buy -- the only big box
retailer with anything approximating a broad selection -- is planning
to convert unspecified amounts of CD space into DVD space.
I've also seen the Liberty St. Borders sweeping out the CDs from the
lowest tier of the new 5-tier display case, which would seem to
indicate another stock cut of up to 20%, on top of cuts already
made.
------
Another story on 2004 CD sales broke the sales figures down by
types of retailers:
big box discounters -- up 10%
retail chains (Borders & Tower & Sam Goody?) -- down 4%
independent retailers -- down 10%
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juicy
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response 2 of 80:
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Mar 24 06:29 UTC 2005 |
Do Tower and Sam Goody even still exist, or was it just their local stores
that closed?
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krj
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response 3 of 80:
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Mar 24 06:47 UTC 2005 |
Both Tower and Sam Goody still exist. Tower's existence is likely
quite precarious; last year, I think it was, the creditors took
a majority ownership when no other buyers could be found.
The idea is that the new ownership would
straighten out the business problems and then there could be a
profitable sale to a new owner. I'm skeptical this is working;
I had a couple of trips to one of the main Tower branches in Manhattan
and the stores did not have a lot of customers in them.
I would have to look up the exact number, but something like
1/3 of all the Tower stores have closed. The Detroit
area store, the last one in Michigan, closed around the time the
new owners took control.
Sam Goody is part of the Musicland corporation, which also owned
MediaPlay and some other brands. Best Buy had bought
Musicland around 2000 for something like $700 million, hoping to
create a greater synergy of entertainment content and electronic.
In 2003, Best Buy "sold" Musicland for, essentially, zero dollars,
just to get that dog of a business off its books. The buyer was
Sun Capital Partners, who are reported to be specialists in
turning around distressed companies.
Best Buy stock rose on the news that Musicland -- an asset worth
almost 3/4 of a billion dollars a short while earlier -- had been
given away to another, um, sucker.
(Musicland's presence in downtown Ann Arbor was the long-running
Discount Records store at State & Liberty, in the location which
is now Potbelly Sandwiches.) I have no further news or personal
experiences about Musicland's operation.
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gull
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response 4 of 80:
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Mar 24 14:30 UTC 2005 |
This is a bit late, but I didn't think to comment on it until I saw this
item.
Last year, the RIAA forced Apple to raise prices on some tracks on
iTunes, as well as on complete albums, by as much as 70%:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/07/apple_itunes_price_rises/
To me this is more evidence of the RIAA's short-sightedness. Just when
people are finally getting accustomed to the idea of buying legal music
online, the record labels decide they aren't making enough money and
hike the prices. I think there's a real danger of driving people back
to the file-sharing services, although the RIAA is probably assuming the
threat of lawsuits will prevent that.
I wonder how long it will take the record industry to realize that they
just can't sustain huge markups like they used to be able to? They seem
to assume that their industry is somehow immune to the laws of supply
and demand that govern every other market.
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gregb
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response 5 of 80:
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Mar 24 17:41 UTC 2005 |
Re. 3: I went into the Tower Records in Birmingham and jeez, were their
prices high. It's no wonder they're going out of business. CD's were
around $20 and DVD's approx. $25, even on older titles.
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remmers
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response 6 of 80:
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Mar 27 18:37 UTC 2005 |
As a public service, the various briefs in the upcoming MGM vs. Grokster
case are posted on my website: http://jremmers.org/mgm-grokster.zip
The briefs are in PDF format in a big (approx 20mb) ZIP file. Because
of it's size, I'll delete it after a few days. Grab it while you can.
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dbratman
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response 7 of 80:
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Mar 28 10:11 UTC 2005 |
The huge Tower in Berkeley just -- vanished -- last year. At least four
others in the Bay Area are still around. Last I checked, at any rate.
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krj
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response 8 of 80:
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Mar 29 15:53 UTC 2005 |
The case of MGM vs. Grokster will be argued before the US Supreme
Court today, so those who are passionately interested should keep an
eye on their favorite news media for early reports. My guess
is there won't be any solid analysis of the arguments until the
evening.
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juicy
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response 9 of 80:
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Mar 29 19:40 UTC 2005 |
Mark Cuban, founder of Broadcast.com, producer of film and tv programs, and
owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, announced in a blog entry this
week that he will be financing Grokster's defence against MGM.
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000230037801/
(via slashdot)
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tod
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response 10 of 80:
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Mar 29 19:44 UTC 2005 |
I saw him on 60 Minutes. He seems like a jerk.
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bru
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response 11 of 80:
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Mar 29 20:45 UTC 2005 |
But a very rich jerk! Actually, I think he is a bit self centered, but also
very ...different. Did you see his TV show this last season. He tried to
doa TRump type show where he gave away a million dollars, but they did
thinkgs like play JENGA to eliminate one of the people.
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tod
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response 12 of 80:
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Mar 29 20:49 UTC 2005 |
I must have missed that blockbuster.
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naftee
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response 13 of 80:
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Mar 29 20:49 UTC 2005 |
That's because you're unlucky.
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bru
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response 14 of 80:
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Mar 29 22:52 UTC 2005 |
It was originally scheduled for 12 shows but they cut it to 6. I think it
was called the benefactor.
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anderyn
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response 15 of 80:
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Mar 30 14:35 UTC 2005 |
It was. He came off as very ... arrogant, but then, if I made that much
money, I bet I could get away with that, too.
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remmers
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response 16 of 80:
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Mar 30 15:27 UTC 2005 |
Arrogant money has exactly the same purchasing power as humble money. :)
And this is a good cause.
I've been reading Mark Cuban's blog (http://www.blogmaverick.com) for a
while (except for the sports postings, in which I have no interest). He
has strong views, and writes passionately about them, but he backs them
up with data, and he seems generally reasonable. Never seen him on TV -
maybe his in-person persona comes off differently from his in-print
persona. Computer conferencing veterans know how that can work.
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tod
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response 17 of 80:
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Mar 30 16:25 UTC 2005 |
Arrogance will get you good customer service but can still get you punched
in the mouth.
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krj
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response 18 of 80:
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Apr 1 18:48 UTC 2005 |
Here's the best combination of information and entertainment I have
found on the arguments before the Supreme Court in the Grokster case.
http://www.wetmachine.com/index.php/item/255
Some quick comments:
1) Not from this article, but from another source, one of the Justices
(Scalia, I think) said this case would not be decided on the basis
of "stare decisis," which more-or-less translates as "we're going
to follow precedent." So the Betamax precedent is open for
tweaking.
2) Questions from the Justices indicated that they were very sensitive
to the issue of allowing new technologies to be choked off by lawsuits
from the content industries. To paraphrase the EFF, at least the
Justices were asking the right questions.
3) The Justices don't like the point that Grokster "was making money from
wholesale violation of the copyright laws." (But the VCR business
was similarly built!!) Plaintiff MGM wants to get towards some sort
of a standard where the business model of a company is examined in
determining the company's liability for contributing to infringement:
but all that's going to do is make sure that the next iteration of
file sharing does not involve a business.
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