Would Free Music Sell Cars? 377
rhfrommn writes "An opinion piece on news.com says the old method of selling music CDs is doomed and suggests the best new method is to give away the content. No more 'piracy' or 'rights management' to worry about! The author discusses ad based models, giving music away as a promotion (buy a car, get 1000 hours of music free type stuff) and other methods. All based on cheap hardware like MP3 players as the new medium to replace CD."
Too late (Score:5, Insightful)
But would it be good? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember getting free music with a McDonald's meal once. One of those cardboard punch-out disposable phonograph records with the catchy menu jingle recorded on it. And if the class sings it successfully through to the end, you win like a lot of money or something.
Catchy, but not exactly chart-topping stuff.
why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then why am I going to have to buy a $30k car to get my music..
This is nothing new... your still "selling" the music
I'm still paying or going through more hoops then kazaa or friends to get it.. then its not worth it.
I don't understand..
Same model works great for banks and toasters (Score:3, Insightful)
The analogy to the coal story is very interesting, but its just like radio: the discs go to radio stations, who are paid to play certain songs. And while there may have been a cost savings for the central heating model, you know darn well that when the landlord controls the thermostat, you go cold. Its happened in countless apartments where we get a cold spell before "the heat is turned on" and all I could do was bundle up and shiver.
The same thing is happening with music. I get free music all the time in elevators and shopping malls and on radios. But it sucks, and leaves me cold.
Article text (Score:2, Insightful)
Music fans, seeking to justify this casual act of larceny, claim they're really supporting an economic boycott of a usurious and uncreative music industry. "Cybershoplifting," reply the record companies, seizing the opportunity to impose their opaque and onerous copyright schemes on the listening public.
While the battle rages on, piling up legal fees and taking the joy out of music, a simpler solution is on the horizon. The best way to stem this tidal wave of thievery is to give the music away.
Free content, by itself, is not at all that unusual. Broadcast television is "free"--at least to the viewer--courtesy of ad-supported subsidies, as are radio, many concerts and sporting events. But even those services commanding a fee today should become free tomorrow as the economics of music distribution take radical new shape.
To understand how, we would do well to look at a very different industry, but one with surprising parallels to music: 19th-century fuel delivery. In the late 1800s, when a tenant sought to warm a cold apartment, she had to buy her own coal from passing coal wagons and then haul it in coal buckets up to her fourth-floor kitchen. This apparently straightforward transaction brought with it considerable challenges for wagon drivers.
Theft was endemic. Stories abound of coal wagons stripped of half their load by street urchins before a first delivery could be made. Various solutions to improve security were proposed, including various patented coal locks. The ultimate solution, however, proved to be something quite different: a new distribution model that made coal theft irrelevant. It was called central heating.
Coal distributors sold their product efficiently in one large delivery to apartment landlords, at the same time removing the incentive for individual tenants to steal. Landlords could pass a significant part of the savings on to tenants in their bill for monthly rent. Everyone benefited, even the families of the coal-stealing urchins.
Similarly, it is the power of low-cost distribution, combined with subsidized free services, that will save and transform the music business. Stealing will become equally irrelevant.
It is the power of low-cost distribution, combined with subsidized free services, that will save and transform the music business.
To understand how, consider these statistics: The U.S. music industry collects $12 billion per year from CD sales to about 50 million active fans. That means each person spends an average of $250 per year to purchase around 15 albums a year.
Now, $250 per year is a very interesting number. By next year $250 will buy an MP3 player with a 100GB disk. That disk will hold over 2,000 CDs. Even strapping on headphones 15 hours a day, a listener would still need over four months to cruise through every track. For many people, 2,000 CDs is all the classical, jazz or rock music they will ever care to collect. For others, it's just about enough to fill a summer vacation with tunes. But it's a lot more than 15 CDs.
With these economics, distributing music on flashy plastic disks one album at a time seems, well, like heating your kitchen with coal. And $250 is not too high a price for a marketer--even those outside the music business--to spend acquiring customers, especially those dedicated fans holding an ad-supported player in their hand 15 hours a day.
Imagine the possibilities. Buy a new Kia? Get 1,000 albums with every car. Purchase a lifetime subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra? Receive an MP3 player with a library of the world's 2,000 most important classical music selections. Sign up for a new cellular contract? Get unlimited access to music from over 30,000 indie bands.
The economics are such that it would take only one leading company to break the music distribution mold. Among MP3 player makers, Apple Computer, with its p
Maybe the dumbest thing I've ever heard (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The opposite is much better (Score:5, Insightful)
1000 hours * $15 is $15,000. Amazingly, it probably is actually better the original way
Free music won't sell cars. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have gigs and gigsof MP3s but don't own a car.
Re:But would it be good? (Score:3, Insightful)
As my Mother always said... (Score:2, Insightful)
The payment plan (Score:4, Insightful)
But how will artists and their agents and lawyers get paid? This time we can turn for answers not to coal distribution, but to an industry much closer to musicians' homes: the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP licenses, collects and redistributes music royalties from music performance venues (like radio stations, concert halls and so on) to the artists. It determines who gets paid what by polling these venues to see whose music gets played and how often.
To determine reimbursement in an MP3 player world, a small sample of users could be invited periodically to voluntarily, and anonymously share their listening history stored in the player. Then, just as in the ASCAP model, payments collected from the music player distributors (Kia, the BSO and the like) would be split among the copyright owners. No fuss, no complexity and no secret CD police.
Makes a lot of sense to me. To get this off the ground, it only takes one company to tie up with some mp3 player makers. If it succeeds, others will be quick to jump on the bandwagon and the RIAA will be left wondering what hit them.
For big acts only. (Score:4, Insightful)
This wouldn't work at all for bands on smaller independent labels, other non-pop genres (jazz, blues, etc). Reads like another big step toward musical homogenization to me.
Sell convenience, not content (Score:5, Insightful)
The other day I found myself at CompUSA paying $40 for Red Hat. Why on earth would I pay money for that when I can get an ISO and burn it for free?
In my case, it was because I was at a datacenter and needed to reinstall the system (the vendor forgot to install it). I could've either taken a trip back home (30 minutes), downloaded and burned a CD (an hour), and taken a trip back (30 minutes), or I could drop by CompUSA and pay for a copy (20 minutes). Savings to my client by paying for software? 1.75 billable hours.
If there's any hope in selling data as a retail product, it'll be in models that completely ignore the actual data on it.
There's my case (needed it quickly), but there are many others.
Some people just want to rummage through piles of stuff, find a gem, claim a prize. That whole Hunter/Scavenger instinct is still with us, you know.
Shopping at a record store is a social activity for many people -- something that's harder to do with a real person by a computer.
There have been many times that we browsed Blockbuster Video (yes, they suck, but that's a different story) in search of a movie and ended up there an entire hour because we became so engrossed in searching (and ended up with 3 or 4 movies by the end of it). A web site can offer the content, but seldom can it recreate that experience.
The content cartel should capitalize on this, because their current business model's days are numbered.
that's what I want (Score:3, Insightful)
i like choosing my own music.
the future looks no better than the present (Score:2, Insightful)
Furthermore, his payment model is pretty much based on ratings. In a system like that, good content won't win out any more (maybe less) than it does now. (Which does bring up the question: is the stuff on TV crappier than the music being sold in stores? On the one hand we have Joe Millionaire. On the other we have Christina Aquilera. But you can still find some pretty good CDs if you look for them.) Lots of promotion will still make artists more money than good songs.
So... I don't think I like the "future of music" any better than the present.
Boggle (Score:3, Insightful)
When I buy a car, I care about the features of the car. Adding in stupid junk like 1000 hours of music is an annoyance, not something I would be happy about.
The key to selling music is selling it at a low enough price that people prefer the reliability and quality of purcahsed music to the hassle, unreliability, etc. of pirated music. It is truly as simple as that.
Re:do it like the dead painters. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why? (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean realy, Pay for music... that's rediculous. Next thing you know we'll be expected to pay for food, gas, and books. Just because someone went through all the trouble to produce something, package it, and make it available to me, dosn't mean I should actually have to GIVE them something in exchange for it. That's not what America's about people...
Re:Too late (Score:2, Insightful)
the future is to sing about Pepsi and Ford.
-J
It's About The Cartels Profits, not the Artists (Score:5, Insightful)
What you are missing are a few very important points that the media cartels, in their extraordinarilly disingenuous rhetoric regarding non-commerical copyright infringement by individuals, would very much like you not to notice:
In short, if it were about the artists well being, free(dom) music and media would be a slam dunk. It benefits everyone
It is interesting that those with such entitlement mindsets feel they should be able to earn money indefinitely (at least life+70 years) for one bit of work performed sometime in the past, while the rest of us accept that, if we wish to earn money, we must continue to work each day of our lives (weekends and vacation sometimes excepted). Given the profitability of, and real value offered by, live shows one must truly wonder why an artist, much less a publisher. would think they are entitled to proceeds from anything other than their live work. Four centuries of monopoly entitlements will, alas, do that to an industry and even a culture, to the detriment of nearly everyone (a few moghuls and poster children excepted)
There's one problem - audiophiles (Score:3, Insightful)
Well you can, but not with a lossy encoding scheme such as MP3. There are plenty of people out there, myself included, who simply do not like( or cannot even abide )the warbly sound of lossy compression, and would resist phasing out of high-resolution audio formats.
If anything will replace the CD, it will be SACD or DVD-A, not mp3.
Important points (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps I should have been more clear in my initial post. I understand and agree with everything you've said. But my point was that from the perspective of view of the artist, why would you want to sign on with a label, since everyone knows that the labels screw artists?
Re:Too late Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? You mean they won't let us listen to the radio? Or maybe you mean they won't let us change the channel.. because you know if we don't listen to the commercials on the radio, that's stealing.
Re:But would it be good? (Score:2, Insightful)
It was basically a quarter-pounder with lettuce & tomato.
Re:why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too late Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
it's not 'giving away the content' (Score:3, Insightful)
The car dealer/builder who bundles a DVD chock full o' crap still has to pay something to the record company so that they can then distribute the scraps to the artist. They dealer prob gets a much reduced price, but not 'free'.
The dealer damn sure isn't going to eat that cost. It WILL be passed back to the consumer.
The $15,000 car now costs $16,5000. You just won't see it on the sticker.
The music industry won't die (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no doubt that on paper there will eventually be a point where the RIAA, or some other agency, will say that they've lost more money to piracy than they've taken in. Maybe they already say that, I don't really pay much attention to them. They will still be profitable though because losses due to piracy don't actually cost them any money from the balance sheet that matters.
There are some tangible costs associated with being the music industry, and the way they maximize their profits is by minimizing investments where they don't get a large return on their investment. This means that unless you happen to look and sound a lot like what's already selling in a given demographic you won't get signed. Bad for consumers who don't fit into whatever the music industry is currently pushing (and slowly evolving) but that's business.
So what do you do if you're an artist who can't get signed? Go independant. There's room for the independant music industry. There's probably a lot of money to be made for the first company that gets it: Give people what they want. So sell music on mp3 with optional CDs or vinyl. Don't worry about piracy, you don't lose money from that and maybe you'll make an additional sale. The artists won't get rich as the most popular RIAA artists but guess what? There's no gaurantee anywhere that you'll get rich regardless of your ambition, talent or luck.
Radio (Score:3, Insightful)
WAIT A MINUTE! (Score:1, Insightful)
So... won't there still be 'piracy' and 'rights of management' issues when the car buyer makes the 1000 hours avalible on gnutella?
I think having to buy a car for a few thousand dollars to pirate music is worse than having to by a cd for $10.
Umm, I don't think that will solve piracy issues at all. Or did I reeeeeeeealy miss something?!?!
Re:But would it be good? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Free content for all! (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess I'm just afraid of commitment...