Monday, August 29, 2005
Killing the Golden Goose
Record Companies Seek to Boost Download Price
First they conspired to fix prices on CD's, then they opposed the creation of a digital marketplace to sell music (leading the rise of Napster, Gokster and such), which led the music companies to sue their customers. When the visionary Steve Jobs introduced i-Tunes and the i-Pod (which boosting the record industry's slumping sales), the music industry shrugged and now they're pushing to make the price of a music download be based on a songs popularity. They just don't get it.
Music is no longer a product, but rather it is a commodity. Ubiquitous downloading, legal and otherwise, have eliminated many of the traditional costs of distribution for the industry. No longer do they have to produce millions of CDs, rather they need to make a master track, and then an infinite number of perfect copies can be make for nothing and sold over digital networks. Of course adapting to a world were they can't control distribution or force us to buy a DC with 11 crappy songs to get one or two we may like, would just be to hard for them. On the flip side, products like Apple's garage band make it possible for nearly any group to put out professional sounding music, thus side stepping the major record labels. Rather than adapt to the changing market place, the big recording companies seem to be set on continuing to use their waning influence to retard the full development of a digital marketplace. Morons. They will fail, and soon we'll be free of such pre-fab trash as Ashley Simpson, etc....
I've been pretty conscientious about only downloading music legally. But if the record companies push this new cost model, that fits them rather than the market, I think that I and many others may dust off our icons for file sharing services...
First they conspired to fix prices on CD's, then they opposed the creation of a digital marketplace to sell music (leading the rise of Napster, Gokster and such), which led the music companies to sue their customers. When the visionary Steve Jobs introduced i-Tunes and the i-Pod (which boosting the record industry's slumping sales), the music industry shrugged and now they're pushing to make the price of a music download be based on a songs popularity. They just don't get it.
Music is no longer a product, but rather it is a commodity. Ubiquitous downloading, legal and otherwise, have eliminated many of the traditional costs of distribution for the industry. No longer do they have to produce millions of CDs, rather they need to make a master track, and then an infinite number of perfect copies can be make for nothing and sold over digital networks. Of course adapting to a world were they can't control distribution or force us to buy a DC with 11 crappy songs to get one or two we may like, would just be to hard for them. On the flip side, products like Apple's garage band make it possible for nearly any group to put out professional sounding music, thus side stepping the major record labels. Rather than adapt to the changing market place, the big recording companies seem to be set on continuing to use their waning influence to retard the full development of a digital marketplace. Morons. They will fail, and soon we'll be free of such pre-fab trash as Ashley Simpson, etc....
I've been pretty conscientious about only downloading music legally. But if the record companies push this new cost model, that fits them rather than the market, I think that I and many others may dust off our icons for file sharing services...
