Dear Record Labels: Focus on Buyers, Not Thieves
blog.earbits.com
blog.earbits.com
See this 2009 article for their thinking: http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-bu...
It's actually quite logical, if you agree with their assumptions:
1) The increased availability of digital music will lead to an increase in piracy, and
2) An increase in piracy will lead to less money being spent on recorded music.
(Both those assumptions can be argued, but the music industry believes them to be true).
Given that, the following argument is logical:
1) At some point in the future the money being spent on recorded music will decrease to a point where it is not a significant source of income.
2) The longer that point can be delayed, the more money can be made from recorded music in aggregate.
3) Anything that makes digital music inconvenient for the consumer will delay the collapse of buying recorded music because it will reduce uptake (!!)
4) Therefor, fight anything that makes digital music better/easier to use.
5) Meanwhile, try and develop new sources of income (360 deals, streaming licencing, game licences etc)
From their point of view it's not bad business at all - it's the safest course of action.
I look at the behavior of the music industry, and all of the seemingly short-sighted moves they make, and I can't help but think they are all operating or beginning to shift into survival mode, trying simple not to die.
I don't think it's that they want digital goods to die out, or are threatened by them, since iTunes, with foresight and good design, was able to turn digital sales into a success, I think it's more that they are experiencing the institutional equivalent of tunnel vision and depth-first thinking. They aren't implementing these solutions because they are too focused on the short term problem of their survival.
A small percentage of people actually steal music (I believe it's like 9%)
Where did you get that number? Most studies I've seen estimate between 25 and 50% of music consumer pirate at least some. Here's a random article:
Recently Entertainment Media Research conducted a survey with 1,500 UK residents and discovered that the number of music fans downloading music illegally actually dropped to 39 percent, a whopping 4 percent difference from last year’s statistics.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Music-Illegal-Download-MP3,news-...
The RIAA says:
NPD reports that only 37 percent of music acquired by U.S. consumers in 2009 was paid for.
(Yes, it's the RIAA... but that's the music industry.. the people you need to convince)
The % of people who steal isn't likely to go up just because storing files online through Amazon's PAID service (keep in mind these people are stealing because they don't like paying for things) makes it easier to access your music.
That's where you and the music industry disagree very strongly - and in their defense I think they have a case. They look at the precedent of people paying for blank CDs to copy their friends CDs to, and say "well, why won't one person just go to their friends place and let them download their entire collection from Amazon".
The point is, these people are stealing already, and the difference in the ease of stealing using what's already available and the ease of using Amazon is not that big of a difference, and the current stealing techniques don't cost a monthly fee. I don't see people switching to Amazon for all of their theft. As someone pointed out, Amazon could easily monitor this behavior and turn these people in. At least with the current theft you aren't being watched by a big company with a vested interest in you paying for your music.
(not a criticism, I agree it's arguable)
I would suggest that the availability of pirated music is approaching a fairly good level of saturation. It also keeps pace with new releases and in most cases offers a much greater variety of older/niche music.
I always try to buy what I can, but sometime it's not an option.
Example: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/riaa-jury-finds/
Why would they seek such large damages? According to your source, they believe on some level that these lawsuits won't deter piracy, and I find it difficult to believe that she will be capable of paying the damages in full, or that the win will offset the legal costs of Capitol records.
In fact, fast forward to the present, and we see that this has gone through several retrials (meaning she probably hasn't payed a cent to capitol records), and the damages have been upped to $1.5million.
So, what are the short term gains from these sorts of lawsuits, are the precedents they set enough to get damages from other suits?
In fact, I buy more and more Indie games for this reason, even though I don't play them that much. I just like the fact that some still have the balls to offer their work DRM free to ensure a good experience for the paying customer.
It's not without its issues, but at least Steam offers added value with its DRM; more than you can say for EA or Ubisoft.
20 years ago games came on floppies and ran on DOS. If I want to play one today, the legality of my copy is really the least of the hurdles.
The reason I can still play these games is because I have a copy of them. That's the point in question here. Do I really have a copy of Portal 2? It's on my computer now, sure. But will I be able to fire it up and reminisce in 2031?
To me it's a bit like suggesting that you should just photocopy a book rather than buying it because if you buy it the pages may wear out one day.
Can I definitively say that this will hold for all my current Steam purchases? No, of course not. I can, however, say that Valve has demonstrated the ability to keep giving me access to my games over a period of more than a decade.
In contrast, I have many games on CD that I can't play any more, because they don't work on modern operating systems. Some of these I've repurchased through gog.com, just to get working versions. Some I've repurchased even though they still work, just to get versions that don't require five CDs to install.
Buying a game from Steam is a calculated risk. It comes with advantages: No need to fiddle with discs, automatic patch updates, and access to all my games from any networked computer. It comes with one big disadvantage: The potential of losing access to my games at some unspecified point in the future.
That's a pretty good tradeoff for me. Maybe it isn't for you, and that's okay. When I consider Valve's established track record, however, I believe that the odds of Steam providing my games for long enough are very good--where "long enough" is "until the game ceases to work on newer operating systems and/or becomes available for repurchase for trivial amounts of money".
And if they fail me, there's always piracy. After all, I'm hardly going to feel guilty or morally culpable for resorting to piracy to reacquire access to something that I already own.
That alone means Steam games are worth perhaps only 30% of retail price to me; but they are not priced like that in the UK. They're usually 10-30% more expensive than e.g. Amazon.
These are the biggest kinds of problems I have with DRM, when it's not something like Securom complaining that I'm running Process Explorer.
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You also realize that not all license agreements are the same; and first sale doctrine normally gives right to resell copyrighted works. I would in effect be gifting the game to my girlfriend, rather than lending it, as I wouldn't be playing it again.
And thanks for accusing me of breaking the law. I appreciate it.
(The thing that tipped me into buying the game on Steam was that I'd also be supporting independent developers with the Potato Sack etc.)
The US has until recently had strong case law support for lending and reselling goods. Look up the first sale doctrine, which states that copyright holders can only impose restrictions on the first sale of a copyrighted project, and thereafter the property can be used, sold, abused, denigrated, etc., as desired by the possessor. This is actually a really important part of copyright law, because without it a copyright holder could say "You can't give my CD to charity, I don't make money for poor people" (manifest practically as "you must not charge less than x price"), and otherwise impose ridiculous restrictions on private property, thereby diminishing the real property of the possessor in favor of the theorized intellectual property assigned to the copyright holder in order to promote useful progress in the arts. To the extent that copyright powers do not promote useful progress in the arts, they should be entirely demolished!!!
Seriously: what kind of uptime reliability do you demand from a game? The fact that it has an offline mode already puts it far ahead of most cloud-based services. If you don't like Steam for political reasons, that's fine, but this is a very weak line of argumentation.
I'll often head off to a remote 3rd world beach for months at a time. I bring a laptop along, and usually stock up on a few games to pass the odd rainy afternoon in the hammock.
For this use case, something like Steam is just crippling. Even if you remember to put your games into "offline" mode before leaving home, it still insists on connecting to the server every month or so just to be sure. I'm in a place with generator power a couple hours a day and no internet. That's an edge case they didn't plan for, and it only hurts people who paid for the game.
And yes, Steam does give new features in return (online backup of your games, unified chat, etc), but there is no technical reason to have to trade the old features for new.
edit: removed possibly inflammatory comment
Really? Maybe it's my age showing, but most of my "games past" are on 5-14" floppies for DOS, or cassette tapes aimed at the Commodore 6502 architecture.
Portability over time has thus far proven to be largely a myth. If you think that the CD/DVDs you've purchased so far are "buy once, play forever", just you wait...
I think that I can't install new games but I certainly can play the ones I already have.
I will say some games are utter shite though with requiring internet - like C&C4 where the game is deliberately married to it and doesn't run without it.
1.) Amazon cloud drive does not offer music pirates any significant advantage over what they are currently using.
2.) People are already using alternatives for decades, it's hard to get people to switch.
3.) It would be easier for record labels to track down and take down infringers on Amazon cloud drive as oppose to other services.
4.) We've seen this before, it's called lala.com, and it did not become a hub for music pirates.
The music industry is excellent at providing 100 objections or hoops to jump through for licensing while they're really just delaying your offering until a favored son's (AAPL) service launches. Many of the rest of the objections will come down to dollar figures. Oh, yeah, we can forget about that concern as long as you lose a little on the back end.
Let's not forget that Michael has historically been no real friend of the industry, and entertainment lawyers don't quickly forget things like that. Ten+ years ago the the two industries were more or less at war, and music was loosing. Around the time that napster got huge and got sued like crazy, and industry players like AOL music had staff dropping decentralized p2p code written on company time, my.mp3.com was born. It let anyone that stuck the physical cd into their computer claim ownership of it and have access to it in the cloud, or whatever nonsense we were calling it then. The very easy to read nod and a wink involved there was that you could borrow your friends cd's at work, wherever and in just a few minutes "rip" them all and have access without all the muss of actually ripping and copying them.
The labels shut it down then, and they're unlikely to have forgotten who he is.
Why did it fail? MR made the decision to allow people to ship the CDs to nowhere. You owned the CD, but it was (in essence) thrown away. Warner explicitly did not want digital-only sales, and that was the only reason they signed on in the first place. He could've launched a service that made everyone happy, but instead he launched with that option, and Warner shut the service down on day one.
MR is far too clever for his own damn good.
While I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, he really has trouble picking which of the 16 days of music to take off? My iTunes is set up to automatically load the most played couple thousand songs (4-5 days of music or so), the most recently added songs, the most recently played couple hundred songs, and then more or less randomly pick from the rest. There are songs I haven't listened to in literally years, and I find it hard to imagine that I will, while driving or elsewhere away from my computer, suddenly want to start listening to them right this instant. Talk about first-world problems...
Corporations snooping on all your internet traffic? Talk about a first world problem. Internet passwords being stolen? That's a first-world problem if I every heard of one. Health insurance backrupting you if you actually need to use it? Puh-lease, just having health insurance means you've got it better than most other people in the world!
Dismissing something as a "first-world problem" to imply that it shouldn't be worried about is intellectually dishonest.
It is not meant to be dismissive of arguments as much as self deprecating satire. Cheer up mate.
Here we've got someone who has a magical device not much bigger than a wristwatch that holds 16 days worth of music, and he's complaining that it's not enough. For comparison, I was in college when Sony released the first Walkman, and we thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread-- a device the size of a paperback book that allowed you to listen to 90 minutes worth of music while walking around.
So, yeah: 30GB capacity on an iPod is a first-world problem, in my book.
I have heard a few owners of small labels say that they actually welcome the emerging distribution models, and if some of the music is downloaded or whatever (within reason) then that's cool too. That means that they are reaching an audience that is increasingly hard to reach, and so have the potential to find revenue by less traditional means. So while the days of super-bands are probably over, small labels and bands can actually make a decent living now doing what they love to do - producing good music that people like.
Consider this: most bands make their money through live performances and licensing. When you look at the total record sale for a band like the Rolling Stones versus their overall net worth, it becomes pretty apparent that, considering their percentage of the sales, they could not have made all their money by moving boxes full of vinyl, CDs or whatever. The same is true for just about every artist you've ever heard of.
To the irritation of the big labels, though, these new models are quickly cutting out the guys in the middle who don't really care about the quality of the music. They don't seem to get the idea that if they made an effort to produce a product that people want, then (surprise) people will but it. Instead of putting a pile of money into five "artists" that suck, spread it out to smaller projects that collectively do well - like the small labels do it.
I actually heard one of these boring suits discussing the downloading problem on a business program, and he said that if illegal downloading continued on its present course then they would no longer be able to finance all the mega-expensive music videos. All I can say to that is that we should all fire up BitTorrent and make it happen.
What's played on radio and music-tv stations nowadays is just bad and bad music is pushed by the music execs to them.
Lady Gaga, Kesha, all the hip hop bullshit, all the alternative crap, most rap, the black eyes peas (!!!) do I need to say more? That's not music, it's a show to make money, and nothing more. No way I, or anyone else interested in music would buy that.
I am a musician, I even studied music, and I cannot find a radio station with proper music, I find some streams, the same way I cannot find a record label to produce my music, they say it would be "too unpopular", I find some live concerts though, which keeps me alive.
There is no room for just good songs anymore, so there is no room for the record industry, who caused that.