UK Music Retailers Beg, Drop the DRM 219
thefickler notes that consumers aren't the only ones carrying "Death to DRM" placards. UK music retailers are telling the recording industry enough is enough — that the industry's obsession with copy protection is hurting, not helping, profit. Kim Bayley, director-general of the UK Entertainment Retailers Association, said that the anti-piracy technologies are not protecting industry revenue but instead "stifling growth and working against the consumer interest." The ERA hopes the industry will drop DRM in time for the holiday season. Good luck with that.
Don't know about the UK... (Score:5, Interesting)
...but in the states, this is very apparent. Not only do we have big outlets like the Virgin Megastore [google.com] closing down in big cities, but long-standing "mom-and-pop", independent record stores are not making it. I see this with a lot of my old favorite record stores in the midwest, but also some of my favorite stores from when I lived on the left coast, like Aron's Records [blogging.la], an veritable institution I never thought would close down.
Now, it may be easy to blame "downloading," but ask anyone who supported these record stores for years and there's two main reasons: 1) Lack of compelling content these days; and 2) general lack of trust for the record industry. When the old hippie burnout down the street is afraid to buy a CD because it might "have a virus on it," you know the MAFIAA have shot themselves in the foot. Unfortunately, they continue to find ways to make money, while the artists and record-shop owners are the ones being put out of business.
Re:Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now we have several more battles to fight; F/OSS software over propietary, breaking Microsoft's monopoly, net neutrality, copyright law reform, etc...
Let's get back to work.
Re:As a record store owner... (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought this should be obvious: people like music, so they buy music. But they don't like CDs, so they don't by them. Most people I know have a CD player somewhere, but it is collecting a layer of dust. They listen to music on the iPod, the mobile phone and the computer.
The problem with stores is that they are not very good in selling virtual goods. I think that web stores do a much better job for this.
> So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose?
The record industry already went the way of the Dodo, and the CD industry will follow soon. As usual, content survives, media don't.
As to the rest of your post: time to chill out, dude!
Re:Don't know about the UK... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:To be honest... (Score:2, Interesting)
I, and many of my friends, haven't purchased a CD in a long time now because there is an increasing chance that it will not work on our equipment. They still stamp CD on discs that do not follow the standard, and their label of "Contains copy protection blahblahblah not work with all blahblah" is a cop out. I was burned a few times with this, on both older and new players.
That's your effect - we don't trust the media enough to purchase it, whether from the risk of a non-functional product or some piece of auto-run crap that will attempt to install on my Windows box when I try to play it there. Yes yes, "Run linux", and I do - but not on all of my machines, and I shouldn't have to disable autorun just because the *AA wants to maintain draconian control over a dieing business model.
DRM breaks stuff -> People don't buy it -> Stores go out of business.
Alternatives to buying CDs (Score:5, Interesting)
A thief came by and stole:
1. A cup of change (for the meter)
2. A fresh pack of Kamel Red Lights
3. My entire wallet of CDs -- a ratio of 90% store-bought CDs and 10% assorted collections of mixes from parties, birthdays, longs nights of ecstasy, and the kind of presents girls with too much time on their hands make for you.
I went to ye olde Wal-Mart, bought a satellite radio, and I haven't bought a single CD since. I can record off the radio legally, the songs save on my radio for ~90 days (XM just imposed some time limits on the songs), and I can also put MP3s on the unit with a USB cord (the little trapezoid type). I haven't downloaded any music in ages, as I can get all the popular crap on the radio and I feel justified in re-acquiring the CDs that I had previously purchased on the Internet. Whether due to my own incompetence or not, I'm not going to spend another $1000 dollars replenishing my lifetime collection of CDs.
I can only imagine how some of the older folks feel. Who the hell wants to replace their collection of records, tapes, 8-tracks, et cetera everytime a new medium is embraced by a bloated industry in order to SELL more copies. It's not about the music!
Viva la revolution!
P.S. XM is 12.99 a month, so it's not like I found the free solution, but it has the wonderful ratio of entertainment hours per monthly fee as those crack-like MMORPG games (UO, WoW, EQ...)
Re:As a record store owner... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a pretty good observation. In my case, I do buy the CDs, after hearing stuff on digitalgunfire.com and rantradio.com that I didn't know about and want. Usually, it's an artist on Metropolis Records [www.metropolis-records] like And One, Funker Vogt, etc. that has never received a single minute of airplay in our top 50 population market. Even having switched to XM Radio since I can't stand the pathetically poor programming on our local stations, XM's variety doesn't cover this genre as much as I'd like.
But before you shell out $20 on a CD, you really want to hear at least two or three more tracks by the artist to make sure what you heard is representative of their sound. Jump onto P2P and pull down a few tracks and verify.
I've probably bought no less than 100 CDs from Metropolis Records this year alone, and thank them every time for supporting streaming shoutcast stations of their music. They recognize nobody would ever hear their artists outside of Europe, NYC and LA if they didn't support these efforts, and have numerous artists who are benefiting from streaming audio and P2P fileshare music promotion. Clearly, there are labels and artists who embrace modern promotion and distribution approaches.
So who rejects this approach? Only labels with large portfolios of tired artists and an unviable financial model that doesn't compete without regulatory force. If you really want to put an end to DRM, completely stop purchasing music from artists on RIAA labels. Vote with your wallet - it seriously works, as SCO found out (it's hard to continue senseless litigation when your revenues disappear). Otherwise, quit complaining about it as your purchase continues to signal them that you support their efforts.
Re:Good. Better. Best. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also worth remembering that more ISPs are throttling our bandwidth based upon the type of traffic. We may win a battle and still get creamed in the war.
It's important that we codify Net Neutrality right away. We have to press the issue now because although the Democrats are talking a good game at the moment (at least some of them), as soon as they take back the White House and increase their margins in Congress, they're gonna suddenly remember who paid for all their expensive election campaigns. Then, we're gonna see 'em go right back to giving Big Telco a backrub while the Internet becomes little more than a delivery system for our wealth to the corporations.
Honestly, if you're reading this, you've got a pretty fair understanding of how this thing works. You also know how to communicate and probably have a little money in your pocket, (even though you've been played by the best and have a hefty balance on that MasterCard from all those things you "need"). Chances are you're also younger than the US median. That all means you're prime candidates for exercising a little political power. Remember, politics is just social engineering, so your mad skillz are probably quite useful. Figure out who's really on your side and go to work, bitches. And don't sell yourselves cheap.
And bless you all you iconoclasts and free-thinkers this Thanksgiving Day. And tomorrow, instead of spending 20 bucks in gas to save 18 bucks on some geegaw (running up your MasterCard even further and increasing your Serfdom), spend some time learning how be become an insurgent in what may be our last battle for independence from total corporate control of our lives. And be good to one another - the best investment you can make is the one you make in family and friends.
Anybody suprised... (Score:2, Interesting)
Usually I listen to internet radio, particularly last.fm. Then I record/rip it, which is luckily perfectly legal in my country (Denmark).
Once in a while when there's this track that I've just got to have I'll try to see if I can buy without DRM, that fails I spend 10 min. adding it to my last.fm playlist and then I'll rip that afterwards
I don't want to buy all my music, but once I a while there's this track that I've just got to have, and then the music industry would actually be able to sell me digital music... I'm pretty sure I'd buy DRM-free albums at a fair prize if I could. But the DRM-free selection in Denmark is rather small, Amazon haven't yet opened their music store to Europeans..
By the way, I did actally buy a CD a few months ago, listened to it for a few days. Then I tried to rip, which of course failed, now I haven't heard that cd since...
!copyprotection (Score:5, Interesting)
We should call it what it is, which is Playback Prevention. That's what the technology does, it prevents playback. Both the consumers and the producers can agree that's what it does, although we will disagree about whether or not that's a good thing for technology to do.
Tag this story !copyprotection !drm playbackprevention.
exactly-it is price gouging (Score:2, Interesting)
Music CDs should be a dollar, DVD movies 2 or 3 dollars, and that's about it. They'd still make all their upfront production costs back quickly (that's for the trolls who always say it costs money to produce, well ya, it does, but follow this please) and still make more over-all net profit, just not "per unit". They need to drop per unit profit margins and increase total sales of units. That's it, it is that easy.. Gouging people for thousands of percent profit (whatever, some big number) over costs is just lame. If you look at the hardcopy pirates, you can see the actual business costs of replication plus profit. If the music majors went just a little cash over that level for their legit copies, to cover production costs of course, that would be the proper pricing point. Like 10% over, not 1000%. Heck, they could just double it, 100% over bare bones duplication, and still come out ahead and the consumers would get a much better deal.
Too late now though, they made their bed, the public responded with download for free instead. Now I don't do either, no downloads nor do I give the entertainment bozos a single penny for any new produced content, I boycott them. I buy used only or severely marked down closer to a realistic pricing model, but full price, first asking? Nope, that's being price gouged, like paying 10 bucks for a cup- of coffee, just not worth it unless you just like throwing your money away for fun to look cool or something..
I started buying music in the 50s and they lost me as a customer because of their incredibly stupid pricing models, I simply cannot countenance getting gouged like that.
Computers have dropped in price and gotten steadily better, pre recorded "entertainment" goes up in price counter intuitively to major tech advances we all see, and gets crappier quality wise for the most part, plus they added in DRM and bribed off the legislative arena to the point that you won't see anything produced today go out of copyright in a normal lifetime, which is completely against the original intent of having a "limited" copyright so the stuff could get into the public domain.
Re:Not in the UK (Score:3, Interesting)
Surprisingly enough, its not just us techies that notice this and dislike it. Ordinary consumers are getting fed up with CDs that will not play in some CD players, downloaded legal music that will only play in the player they are registered to etc. And I don't think the dream of music rental is quite as well received as some would like to think. Especially once the customer realises that they can loose their music collection the minute they cancel their subscription...
Re:Don't know about the UK... (Score:1, Interesting)
It might be disliked by serious music listeners, but it's very definitely not the same thing as compressing file size by lossy methods.
CDs are uncompressed in the sense being discussed here; that is, after being digitised at a given frequency/resolution, you have the raw numbers, with no loss.
Now, you can't directly compare the amount of "space" taken up by analogue versus digital signals in terms of bits (for obvious reasons), only bandwidth. And even then you're not comparing like with like. However, it can be argued that since all digitisations are approximations of the original signal, then choosing to digitise at an unreasonably low rate- saving space, but losing quality- is "sort of" compression. And some argue that the frequencies CDs are recorded at are not high enough to be indistinguishable from an analogue LP. So you could argue that this is a form of compression- in a way.
Don't know about Slashland. (Score:1, Interesting)
Well except for one small flaw (I know slashdot has a short attention span). This forum is always going on about the "new and improved" business model's triumph over the "old and busted" model. However I'm not seeing a corresponding rise in the uptake of this "new and improved" model, but simply more consumption of what the "old and busted" model has already produced regardless of the source.
"If the music industry is a volume box shifting business, it has to rely on high volume low margin. It cannot expect the buyers to pay a premium price for singers and musicians who will be forgotten after they've had their Warhol (that's 15 minutes of fame)."
Except for the reality check that quite a few musicians last longer than fifteen minutes. Some even last for decades (how many dead-heads are here?).
"It's like the car industry. The margins on a BMW are high because it costs a lot to persuade you to buy it. The margins on a European supermini are minimal because it costs almost nothing to get people to buy one, but people won't pay a high price for it."
And lets pretend when discussing a physical product that a BMW doesn't cost more to build than a supermini.
MP3 Compatible??? (Score:3, Interesting)