I thought I'd write this to the industry leaders, but then I realized that it'd never get read, because they're too busy digging their own graves to realize the genius behind it. The three steps are quite simple: tone down the lawsuits, quit using DRM, and embrace internet radio. Let's run through them one-by-one:
1. Tone down the lawsuits. You're only generating negative press for yourselves, and your fear tactics clearly aren't working. Even worse, it's costing you millions of dollars to fight this unwinnable battle. All of the millions spent lobbying to legislators and judges of this and other countries could just as easily flushed down the drain, and the crack team of lawyers you have is just bleeding you dry. Remember the war on drugs that started ages ago? Yeah, in case you haven't noticed, it still hasn't been won, and it probably never will be won. Quit now before the independent labels who have spotless records take the jam out of your donut.
(continued)2. Quit using DRM. Take a hint from
AllOfMp3.com and get rid of your DRM schemes. Quite honestly, DRM might be the only reason I don't download more music/video from
iTunes. I want the ability to play my music on whatever player and/or computer that crosses my path-- no questions asked. If iTunes, for example, simply offered the same drm-free encoding options that AllOfMp3 did, yet still charged $0.99, they would have me sold. The
only reason why file sharing still exists is that people do not want to pay an entire dollar to get a shitty rip of a CD and/or song that they can only play on one platform. Consumers have always been too lazy to go and wait in line at an IRL retailer to get a CD, but give people the option to get
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) rips, among other things, and you will eventually be able to eliminate CD distribution all together.
And don't worry about file sharing. It's a pain in the ass and takes forever to get entire CDs, plus the rips can be corrupt anyway. People who want CDs and certain songs want them impulsively, so if you give people the option to instantly have whatever they want in 100% full quality, you'll have some very happy consumers. Give them the option to get the song in any common format (mp3, ogg, wma, ac4, mpeg, wav, flac, mpc, and others) and add automatic id3v1/v2 tagging as well. If you did that, then you would have successfully done exactly what Dell did-- mass customization. Will people still steal your music? Absolutely, but who really wants to if you've got the option to get whatever music you want in whatever format you want at perfect quality? People nowadays can copy VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, and all sorts of other media, so get with the times and combat it by one-upping the competition: give more choice and guaranteed quality.
If you're the movie industry, you have an excellent opportunity as well. Instead of DVD-only releases, allow people to download DIVX, XVID, and other-format releases. That way, people using linux will be very happy with you, and people like me won't want to kill you for the bullshit copyright schemes you integrate into your DVDs that prevent me from skipping past the commercials at the beginning of the disc or the annoying title/toc menus that have repetitive music that wakes me up if I fall asleep to your movie.
Speaking of, you wanna know why piracy is on the rise? It's because you've pissed tech-savvy people like me off so much to the point where some people
will spend 2 hours re-encoding the DVD
just so that they can remove the bullshit commercials and copyright notices. On top of that, they'll spend every waking moment to crack your god damned encryption schemes just so that they can do the exact same thing to HD-DVDs and BluRay format discs. Then, in spite of your greedy asses, they'll bittorrent it to other people just to save others the trouble of doing it themselves. God damn it-- now you got
me pissed off just thinking about it. Literally, just typing the above paragraph makes me wanna go CAM a new-release movie just to avoid even having to buy the DVD to do all of the above. Fuckin' shit.
Lemme take a deep breath...
... exhale ...
... ahhhh, much better. So yeah, moral of the story: every action as an equal and opposite reaction. Don't fuck with
our ownership rights, and we won't fuck with yours.
3. Leave internet radio alone. I can't tell you how many new bands/artists I've discovered through net radio. In fact, the smaller the artist, the harder it is overall to find their work shared elsewhere, because so few people know of them. This is a good thing for you, since it increases the chances ten-fold that a consumer will go out and buy the actual CD. Of course, if you combat net radio like you've been doing, what will happen is that you'll lose this valuable opportunity to make lots of money on relatively small purchases (see also: McDonald's entire business platform), and the bands themselves will keep all the profits by advertising directly to the small but popular internet radio stations. You see, these small radio stations are desperate to get the artists on for interviews in order to boost novelty and popularity, and the artists are desperate to keep all of their earnings off their songs from the listeners. If you want a way to get yourselves more on top,
promote net radio instead of enacting royalties that are so outrageous that even Yahoo won't be able to pay up.
If that's not enough reason to leave net radio alone, then consider this: what will happen to you when AT&T's and other providers' roadway wifi rollouts are complete? You'll have power over FM radio, but it'll be about as useful as power over AM radio nowadays. Traditional radio will become obsolete in favor of high-speed, high-quality internet radio stations, which deliver sound in quadruple the quality of FM, actually listen to their listeners, and actually play good music-- all for free, without limit to geographic location, and out of the reach of the FCC. It will be like satellite radio on crack, since there are no line-of-sight requirements, and even the most basic of users will be able to set up own their own radio stations (see also:
Shoutcast and
Icecast). If you want to be on the wave of the future,
embrace internet radio, or else you will be destroyed by it.
Well there you have it. Now just go find a way of selling the idea to your board/shareholders and you'll be golden. I promise it'll work, because if you ask my friends, I'm always right on these kinds of things. You just have to convince your fellow businessmen that they'll be better off in the long run. Actually, as long as you can convince them to funnel you a couple million dollars to pay for research in test environments that follow the above protocols, you'll be able to prove it to them experimentally.
Too bad I don't have enough money to do it myself, because I could make
billions myself, so long as I had enough start-up capital to build recording studios that allow artists to come in, record their songs, and distribute them to their target audience for a small set-up fee and a sizeable percentage of the profits. For example:
You create sound studios in all the major populated metroplexes in the US. You rent out use of the studios for a relatively small fee plus security deposit on equipment so that you are able to weed out non-serious artists while staying extremely competitive with current studios that are expensive and overcrowded. You then subsequently offer all bands/artists a contract that lets you host/sell their music on your internet portal. You provide lower quality samples of the songs for anyone to listen to for free, but provide completely DRM-free copies to those who purchase the song. You also contract the band a profit share of 50/50, regardless of how popular they become, with the option of CD manufacturing if they become popular enough or if they simply want to pay you the cost of printing the CDs up-front. Optionally, you can provision a clause for your parent label to enter the realm and offer a competitive amount for complete rights to the songs and future publications for lump sum payment (as is done today with record deals) in the event that a particular artist becomes popular.
No screening is required, because serious artists will screen themselves into starting the process in the first place. Even if only 1 in 100 artists is good, you'll still make money off the
dream of people thinking they'll make it big. On the distro side, internet radio stations will screen songs they play so as to maintain image with their listeners. Because of this, no bottlenecking will occur at the distribution level, since there are many more suppliers in the internet radio market than in the FM/AM radio markets, which means much more room for genre specialization. A larger-scale version of this can be seen in cable television through networks such as The Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and TechTV. All of these networks have programming that would flounder on national outlets like NBC and ABC but flourish on subject-specific channels.
Long story short, I'm right. If you wanna make money, take my advice. If you don't, you'd better have a better idea than continuing down your current path, because the end just might be closer than it seems.
