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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 183 responses total. |
aaron
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response 117 of 183:
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May 24 21:18 UTC 2000 |
re #115: I think kids in college communities are also more likely to
use Internet discounters.
I think that Napster will have the biggest effect on recordings aimed
at the market with the least money -- that is to say, high school and
college kids. Adults are much less likely to obsess over spending $14
for a CD, as opposed to spending hours downloading music and building
their own. The net effect may well be that the record industry starts
aiming toward a slightly older market.
Cassette tapes were supposed to kill the recording industry, and then
DAT was supposed to be the end. While MP3's have caught on in a way
that DAT did not, and are becoming a viable mainstream recording
format, I don't think it's the end of the road for commercially
produced tapes and CD's.
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orinoco
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response 118 of 183:
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May 24 21:33 UTC 2000 |
High school and college kids may be the market with the least money, but they
prop up a good-sized chunk of the music industry as it now stands.
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krj
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response 119 of 183:
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May 25 02:34 UTC 2000 |
Cnet has coverage of the study, which was done by SoundScan division
VNU Marketing, at a URL which is too ugly to consider typing in.
Cnet's story pretty much shreds the claims about Napster:
"The drop in college music store sales was more pronounded in 1998
than in 1999 -- a year before Napster was written..."
They interview a number of record store managers who say that
the bigger competition is Internet stores and the big chain megastores.
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aaron
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response 120 of 183:
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May 25 17:19 UTC 2000 |
re #118: Right. But you have to pitch your products at the market that
will *pay* for them.
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aaron
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response 121 of 183:
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May 25 19:38 UTC 2000 |
Those of you who have cable can tune into MTV at 10:00 this evening, for
a half-hour special presentation, "Napster: Grand Theft Audio?"
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krj
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response 122 of 183:
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Jun 1 01:44 UTC 2000 |
I meant to put this in a while ago. The Village Voice carried a story
on a report by an investment research group:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0021/howe.shtml
I suspect this represents real research for investors, as compared with
the Soundscan study of college CD shop sales, which was pushing the
music business point of view. This study can't be pushing a music
industry point of view, because its conclusion is that all parts of the
industry are screwed. Paraphrasing from the report:
The study's worst case scenario estimates that 16% of US music sales
will be lost to Internet piracy by 2002. Even if the record industry
wins its current battles against Napster and MP3.com, more applications
will come along to replace them.
Some sort of encryption system might help, but the SDMI process to
develop secure downloadable music has broken down. They were supposed
to have a standard a year ago, so products could be on the shelves
for Christmas 1999; now it looks like product deliveries in 2003.
Too much squabbling between the involved parties in the SDMI group.
The big record labels will have to push into selling Internet downloads
directly to consumers; when they do that, they will piss off the
brick-n-mortar CD stores, who currently generate 80% of sales.
The study says the stores will "retaliate" against the labels, but I
don't see how -- they're CD stores!! What else are they going to sell?
So look for two or three years of bitter fighting between the labels
and the record stores, with the record stores being "on the ropes" by
2003.
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krj
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response 123 of 183:
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Jun 9 16:36 UTC 2000 |
John Hockenberry, one of my fave guys, writes an essay for MSNBC.com today.
"Give Me Napster, or Give Me Death" is the title.
The URL is unmanageable, you can find it from mp3.com. Nothing earthshaking
really, except Hockenberry's comparison of mp3-swapping technologies with
the new communication technologies which were involved with the fall of
the Soviet empire and the Palestinian uprising. Hockenberry's conclusion
is that saving the music business would require "a Stalinist-style licensing
system for the transfer of information."
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mcnally
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response 124 of 183:
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Jun 9 19:58 UTC 2000 |
I haven't read the article yet, but I basically agree with his premise
as phrased above. The technological cat's out of the bag at this point
and I can conceive of no way for the copyright interests to put it back.
At this point the main option remaining to them is the one they seem to
be committed to -- push for greater criminalization and prosecution of
intellectual property offenses as a deterrant. Unfortunately, there's
plenty of evidence to suggest that that approach will never work..
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mcnally
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response 125 of 183:
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Jun 9 19:59 UTC 2000 |
(I suppose they do have one other option available to them: produce music
so uninteresting that nobody will be motivated to copy it. Sometimes it
seems like they're pursuing that plan as well..)
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krj
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response 126 of 183:
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Jun 9 20:12 UTC 2000 |
The Lords of Music are coming out with big speeches on how Copyright Must
Be Defended or The Economy Will Collapse. Edgar Bronfman of Seagram's
was the first. (Did you know Seagram's owns the world's largest
music company? They own Universal Music Group.) Michael Eisner weighed
in with a similar speech; come to think of it, Eisner is only a bit player
in music, as Disney's Hollywood Music label has mostly been a business
boondoggle.
It occurred to me that one of the premises of the copyright system was
that "reproducing machines," in the most general sense, were expensive
things owned by businesses. Businesses were few enough, and sensitive
enough to economic deterrents such as legal judgements, that the
legal system -- mostly tort lawsuits -- could police the use of these
machines.
But now ordinary consumers have reproducing machines. This breaks the
copyright enforcement system through an overload of violations.
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aaron
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response 127 of 183:
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Jun 14 15:10 UTC 2000 |
Disney knows that today's audio bootlegging will eventually become tomorrow's
video bootlegging.
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krj
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response 128 of 183:
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Jun 14 16:13 UTC 2000 |
I've lost the reference to the speech by Michael Eisner of Disney, but he
wants Congress to mandate that computers and ISPs be made incapable of
making or transmitting illegal copies. Maybe we'll see people busted
for Illegal Possession of an Unrestricted Computer. (only 1/2 :) )
The record industry, in its suit against Napster, is asking for a
preliminary injunction to shut Napster down immediately. It's startling
that they are submitting the discredited Soundscan study to support their
claim that Napster damages sales at CD stores near colleges. This is the
study, remember, that shows that Napster damaged college-area store
sales a year before it was created. (You can find this story on most
music and tech web news sites.)
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mcnally
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response 129 of 183:
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Jun 14 18:46 UTC 2000 |
Unless I am mistaken, their serious overreaching on this issue is likely
to bite them, hard. They've got the money on their side, but I don't think
they can really win this one.
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polygon
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response 130 of 183:
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Jun 14 19:03 UTC 2000 |
I don't have any MP3s or even any sound files on my computer. I have never
been to Napster's web site.
I think of myself as being as much into music as anybody. But it has been
years since I have bought a new music CD for myself.
It's not that I'm impoverished, but the sticker shock is pretty intense.
A CD costs maybe a buck to create, maybe another dollar to package and
ship to retailers. I just plain can't swallow paying $12 or $14 or $20
for it.
These prices are so breathtakingly high not because of the value of the
CD, but because of the power of the incredibly concentrated music industry.
The last time formats were changed -- from LPs to CDs -- they benefited in
two ways: (1) CDs are much cheaper to make than LPs, and (2) their
monopoly power gave them the ability to price the CDs considerably higher
than LPs. And outside the U.S., for example in Europe, CD prices are
double what they are here.
The music cartel and its handful of chosen stars have grown incredibly fat
on the system they have created. They have been able to induce Congress
to write steadily more unreasonable and draconian copyright laws. And
they're not satisfied yet, witness Eisner's desire for computers which are
incapable of copying sound files.
I have no sympathy for the RIAA and the corrupt system it is trying to
defend.
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mcnally
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response 131 of 183:
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Jun 14 21:28 UTC 2000 |
I think that puts you in the solid majority. The RIAA has very few
defenders outside of the music industry.
If Eisner is really calling for the law to mandate the restriction of
computers such that they cannot be used to copy audio and video content
then he's truly, deeply ignorant about computer technology. There's
simply no way you could produce a general purpose computing device that
couldn't somehow be made to do the sorts of things Eisner wishes computers
wouldn't do, and any steps taken to enforce such a scheme with technology
would be so intrusive that consumers wouldn't stand for them.
Of course the danger is that the mere fact that something isn't reasonable
or can't be enforced has never proven an effective bar to legislative
attempts to "fix" problems before, and a worrying number of our legislators
are shockingly clueless when it comes to technology issues.
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krj
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response 132 of 183:
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Jun 14 22:32 UTC 2000 |
inside.com reports that the RIAA brief requesting an injunction against
Napster also includes damning email exchanges from among the Napster
founders indicating that the founders knew they were building a
company based on piracy; their business plan called for destroying
the record company profits and forcing them into a deal with Napster.
http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770,5752,00.html
I have not seen this aspect of the story reported elsewhere.
---
Salon and other sites print a complete transcript of Courtney Love's
speech slamming the current music industry business model as
completely unfair to artists.
---
As for Michael Eisner: I thought that perhaps I had misrepresented
his views, but I found my source story:
"Walt Disney Co. chief executive Michael Eisner came to Washington
to lobby members of Congress for a new law that would require
Internet service providers and computer makers to create
technological barriers to block anyone from making an unauthorized
copy of copyrighted material."
Washington Post, June 13, "Record Firms Say Napster Hurt Sales"
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krj
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response 133 of 183:
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Jun 14 23:26 UTC 2000 |
Another report of a musician ditching record companies and going it
alone: the Usenet folk music groups carry a mention that Andy Irvine
has issued his second self-released album. The name won't mean much
to anyone except Twila; Irvine was in the tremendously influential
band Sweeney's Men in 1968 and is generally credited with introducing
the Greek bouzouki into Irish folk music.
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happyboy
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response 134 of 183:
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Jun 14 23:28 UTC 2000 |
http://www.dannybarnes.com
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mcnally
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response 135 of 183:
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Jun 14 23:44 UTC 2000 |
(generally credited with introducing the Greek bouzouki into Irish folk?
good grief!)
The "content production" industries have been so successful in lobbying
lawmakers for more sever penalties for copyright infringement that it
seems possible that Eisner, et al., haven't considered that there's a
difference between lobbying for laws that impose greater restrictions
or more penalties on folks who don't have the money or organization to
lobby back (e.g. students, random computer users) and passing legislation
which imposes heavy burdens on ISPs and computer manufacturers, who
definitely *will* be interested in making sure that responsibility for
protecting Eisner's profits isn't a burden that gets placed on their
shoulders.
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krj
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response 136 of 183:
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Jun 15 00:11 UTC 2000 |
(Are you opposed to the introduction of the Greek bouzouki into
Irish folk music?)
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krj
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response 137 of 183:
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Jun 16 23:05 UTC 2000 |
Many news sites have been reporting that mp3.com is settling licensing
deals with various labels in the wake of their court loss to the RIAA.
inside.com attempts to analyze the financial situation, and they conclude
that after mp3.com settles with the songwriters and all the labels,
that there is no way for them to come up with a profitable business
model for the my.mp3.com streaming service, even if they charge
an annual subscription fee of $10 to their users.
..
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sspan
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response 138 of 183:
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Jun 17 03:48 UTC 2000 |
Um... I don't get where the price of a CD is 'breathtakingly' high.. $12?
You can't afford $12?? I see 16 year old kids driving around in Lexus' and
BMW's with cellphones and pagers, $150 sneakers, designer clothes, and they
don't want to pay $12 for a CD... gimmme a break people.. geez, an LP was like
$8-$10 25 years ago.. figure in inflation and all and I don't see where CDs
are overpriced.. you pay over a buck nowdays for a bottle of sugerwater 'cause
it has the name Pepsi or Coke on it.. how much does that cost them to make?
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jor
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response 139 of 183:
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Jun 17 14:22 UTC 2000 |
(great music business item . . thanks)
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mcnally
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response 140 of 183:
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Jun 18 05:36 UTC 2000 |
re #138: $12? When was the last time you bought a CD?
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sspan
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response 141 of 183:
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Jun 18 16:13 UTC 2000 |
re #140: a couple of weeks ago. I used the $12 figure because that was what
someone else mentioned. Okay, let's change it to what I normally pay for a
new release. $12.99? You can't pay $12.99 for a CD?
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