The RIAA and MPAA Have Failed To Understand A Cultural Shift | Hacker News Reader

The RIAA and MPAA Have Failed To Understand A Cultural Shift

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31 pointselblanco15 comments

I used to do some social media consulting for Time Inc. and some of their subsidiaries (HBO etc.) and across the board what I found is quite simply the companies are not setup to be able to handle these shifts, it's not really that they don't have the ability to understand. This is the natural order: they are too big, and too established to be able to respond to this market with agility.

Time itself has moved away from the strategy of distribution and is going full on into content creation because they feel there is still a market for high quality content. I think they are totally correct about that, but wrong about what is considered "high quality" at this point. There will increasingly be a place for "premium information" such as Bloomberg terminals and other professional related information, but entertainment content has no expertise to sell. It's either good or it's not, I don't really care who made it.

So I'm not sure it's that they "just don't get it" it's more just the natural order of things: they are too big to respond quickly.

But I think we also have to think less about convincing people "these companies are going to die" and more about what we do when an industry goes out of business. Even if these companies survive, the only way to do it will be downsizing like crazy (and outsourcing to international stringers), and that wont really be good for anyone.

All they are trying to do is slow down the shift and preserve jobs. So we can sit here and criticize the MPAA etc (I know I do), but is what we really want a sudden collapse of these industries? I'm not convinced.

"entertainment content has no expertise to sell. It's either good or it's not, I don't really care who made it."

Entertainment is either good or it's not. But I can pretty well count on stuff coming out of Pixar as being good. So if I have limited dollars and/or attention to spend on entertainment and there's a Pixar film and something generic that I don't know if it's good or not, I'm going with Pixar. Clearly they have expertise to sell. There's also music I'll buy (or at least consider) just because of the label.

The challenge for Time or any other entertainment-content providers is cultivating the appropriate quality and expertise, fitting it into an appropriate business model, and cutting away the cruft. This might mean downsizing like crazy and outsourcing, or it might not. Some companies will find a new model that works and survive, while others will struggle and eventually fail. IMO, one big problem for the MPAA and RIAA is that they've made some actively-bad choices in that transition, inconveniencing and alienating consumers while not really protecting what they're trying to protect.

The key here is less limited $ and more limited attention span. We simply don't have enough time to consume both our user created content (facebook etc) AND still support pay content as well. Pixar absolutely has expertise over movie making, and I'm not saying they particularly are going anywhere, but the competition they have is NOT with other movie companies, it's with ALL media for attention span.

When you bring the long tail into this, and as it gets easier and easier to create what we would call "quality" media for a smaller, fragmented audience, it's going to be very difficult for consumers to see the value of a Time magazine-like broad, high level view of the world. This IS going to be competition for companies like Pixar because the choice isn't "I have 10 movies to see pick one," it's "how should I spend my day," and it's going to be rarer and rarer that the answer to that is go see the new mass market movie.

Now of course we are years ahead of the curve here. HNers tend to be pushing boundaries on stuff like this. So there are still a few years before places outside of metro America catch up.

I DON'T agree with you about the MPAA and RIAA. Their goal is not to protect long term, it's simply to slow this transition down so they lose fewer jobs and have more time to think about it. They NEED to because they represent the mega companies that need to move this slow. Think of it like a two lane highway, MPAA and RIAA are side to side trucks driving at 5mph. We'll just keep hitting detours and exits and eventually there will simply be no one behind them. So I think their goal is wrong, but I think they've succeeded in carrying out their mission relatively well.

One interesting phenomenon is when big players "panic" and try and shift their entire companies instead of feeling out the market for the best path forward. The AOL/Time Warner debacle was a great example.

On the radio in the UK recently there was an interview with artists in Manchester about how budget cuts might affect the city. What came out in the interview is there are more music artists than ever in the city and many are making albums in their bedroom. I've a few CDs now that artists have persuaded me to buy after the gig.

Not a record label or a pirate in sight. Record companies have more than piracy to contend with. No longer is expensive equipment needed even to produce a physical album.

Labels bring to the table the ability to work with experienced audio engineers,etc, but IMO it's debatable how much of that makes its way into the final product since most CDs have no dynamic range.

most CDs have no dynamic range

I thought that music normalized to -13dBFS was as bad as it could get, but I discovered a new low: some recently-released dance music I examined had an RMS of -7dBFS over the entire song, including silent parts. Highlighting just the active parts of the song showed an RMS of -5 to -6dBFS. ReplayGain scanning says it needed almost 20dB of gain reduction to match reference volume levels.

The sad reality is that music with no dynamic range sounds pretty good on audio systems with no dynamic range and no headroom, which basically describes most car, retail bookshelf, and personal playback (i.e. MP3 player with cheap earbuds) systems. To get a similar volume level but while preserving full dynamic range would require 20dBV (i.e. ten times) more amplifier power, not to mention better speakers, quieter listening environments, etc.

I have a friend who's a professional engineer at a local studio and after working on some filler for some vocalists (simple drum/guitar parts quickly banged out so they had something to listen to while recording), I got to hang around and see famous musician X's sibling attempt to record vocal tracks. They were so awful that musician X had to sing along so the vocalist could hear it in the monitor to get close enough to the pitch so the auto tuner could make something that didn't sound like a robot. After seeing that, I am no longer surprised at the state of any recent music recordings or compositions. I first noticed the massive over-use of compression in the mid-90's, and it's only gotten worse since then.

There is one area where I don't have a problem with massive compression, duckers, limiting, and so on, and that's in concerts and dance clubs. Using duckers and limiters to "pulse" parts of the audio track between beats simulates the ear's own gain control, and makes music feel a lot louder than it is, so more dancing can be done at safer volume levels.

That's a temporary problem, and one that the market will solve. As independently produced music becomes the norm, a new model will emerge for high-end post-production work. I would imagine that contract-for-service work will become the norm, or perhaps engineers connected with studios for hire. That sort of thing.

And open-source software that's easy to use as the "pro" tools that are used.

An exec from Sony who spoke at our uni said the labels know and accept music is destined to be free very soon. They just keep charging because there is a portion of population still willing to pay(aka iTunes).

Those fools. How could they not embrace the cultural shift towards just giving their stuff away!

Both sides of the piracy argument have equally retarded expectations and fantasies for the future.

It's not so much a cultural shift towards "just giving stuff away" as it is a shift toward easy access, ease of use, and portability.

The image comparing pirates vs. paying customers is critical. The technology exists to distribute music and video directly to consumers, with a minimum of hassle. Consider examples like Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, streaming sports packages like NBA League Pass and ESPN360, justin.tv, and atdhe.net. These have various monetization models, but they all share one thing in common: for me as a consumer, they just plain work. Some of them have short ads, but none of them make me sit through long previews or make it difficult for me to watch from my wife's computer.

Load up any one of those things and start watching or listening. Then start watching something on a DVD, and notice how much more hassle you have to go through in order to skip previews and such. Or put a DRM-free mp3 file you ripped from CD three computers ago onto your wife's ipod, and compare the experience to fighting with DRM-laden files when you replace your device with a new one.

It's not that the industry needs to "just give stuff away". But they need to come up with distribution models that give consumers what they want with a minimum of hassle. Subscription-based streaming services work. Ad-supported streaming works. Paying for non-DRM digital copies works. Trying to install spyware on every PC in the US, sue ISPs, and throttle or filter internet traffic does NOT work, it just further alienates consumers.

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