New Head of EMI Says 'Embrace Digital Music or Die' 176
no0b writes "Guy Hands is the new head of EMI, Britain's largest music publisher. Hands has come out publicly with a statement warning the industry against something music listeners have probably understood for some time. In the words of the Telegraph article, 'the industry will not survive if it continues to rely on CD sales alone.' More from the piece: 'With both new and established acts now capable of making money without the backing of a big company, McGee says record labels are being left out of the loop. He scoffs at their efforts to make up lost ground by developing into "multimedia entertainment companies that can manage bands and share in live income". But try they must. Revenues from record sales in Britain have dropped by more than £130m since 2004. The true cost to the industry could be far greater. TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.'"
he needs to (Score:1)
"Embrace digital music...or DIIIIIIIIEEE"
Re: (Score:2)
I'd love to see a list of all 24 or a torrent file for them
The industry will not survive? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re: (Score:2)
They put up capital at their own risk to invest in artists. They create the infrastructure needed to create all kinds of music. They have the connections to bring together creative minds to patch up holes in individual artists' skills. They market the music nationally and sometimes internationally, to make the most of it's capitalist potential, with the side effect of giving many, many people the opportunity of listening to it. They have the tools and cap
Re:The industry will not survive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Radiohead provided the inspiration (Score:5, Interesting)
Didn't Batman play a key role? (Score:2)
I'm old enough to remember the 1980s quite well. I remember that even though my family had a VHS machine, prices for buying movies on VHS started at $80, and most were in
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, there could have been something earlier - but that's the first one I remember.
Re:Poor title choice.. (Score:2)
Lucas vowed to never release to the video market. He changed his mind about 6 years later when the pirate copies were everywhere. Raises hand.. I had my copy about 4 years before the official release. The companies did what they always do, throw out a few test crumbs to see if the model will work. Having been in the middle of those days, I remember wonderful titles such a Barbare
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Today nobody wants to wait 36+ hours for their movie selection to download through clogged P2P nodes. NetFlix is far more practical. It also is helping a significant percentage of their customer base to build up huge video libraries just waiting for the Internet speeds to make redistr
Re: (Score:2)
If it was practical, you would be downloading movies for free just like you are downloading music for free today.
It is practical today. I have a 4Mbit connection. Using various peer to peer systems I could download movies from the Internet at a reasonable quality in an hour or two, while a rental takes a day or two to arrive. I don't, however. Instead, I subscribe to postal rental service, because I don't mind paying a reasonable amount. Anything I rent legally is used to gather statistics on the most popular videos, which encourages the studios to make more things I like.
NetFlix has at most five years left to run. Maybe just 2-3 if broadband penetration of higher speeds gets going in the US.
I'd pick a system that rewards the crea
Re: (Score:2)
If you look back at the history of pirate movie downloads, you'll notice that movie file sizes crept up from single CDR to double CDR to single-layer DVD-R to dual-layer DVD-R. With the switch to HD, there is still a lot of growth potential.
Re: (Score:2)
Huh!? Maybe if you're on dialup. I remember back in the dialup days I'd get like 200 or 300mb cams (obviously not the best quality). It'd take 20 hours or so but it'd be much quicker than waiting for it to be released here.
Nowadays, I'm on 8mbit (in Australia). I can get 700 MB in roughly 20 minutes, assuming little congestion. And I have, in the past. It's hardly 36+ hours, these days.
Re: (Score:2)
You get the "weird formats" issue with "legitimate channels" too. It's also known as "DRM"... Some forms of which have involved putting malware on "CDs", requiring you to use special (and platform specific) software to access content, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
pfftt... (Score:2)
The alarm went off more than ten years ago when Apple and Tower Records courted each other to sell music online. Apple wanted to supply the hardware/software and Tower planned to run the online store. Tower had the credit card backend and access to the MUSE database.
Re: (Score:2)
Too Little Too Late (Score:5, Insightful)
Have fun with those lawsuits, they're your swan song, record companies.
Re:Too Little Too Late (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Too Little Too Late (Score:4, Insightful)
They need a marketing firm, or hell, someone willing to put a link to their MP3s from a popular site. I could see a guy like David Bowie popping a link to a band he thinks is great on a site where he's putting out his own MP3s.
Re:Too Little Too Late (Score:5, Interesting)
Then the new band either takes off or not. If they do, a few years down the line, they hear someone know and the cycle repeats.
Right now, the section of the industry that has this working best is the rap industry. For all their other faults, they are really good at bringing in new talent(?). You can see it if you look at most rap artists on Wikipedia. Their history goes "was discovered by.." who in turn "was discovered by..." and so on.
I think you can judge the health of any section of the music business based on the percentage of the artists who got their starts playing small gigs until someone bigger gave them a shot.
Re: (Score:2)
Not unlike a tour having one or more "support bands".
Mod parent up... maybe? (Score:2)
But I'm in no position to verify its accuracy or validity or non-Swiss cheese-ness.
I am wondering whether most of musicians' money now, in the old business model, comes from recording sales or ticket sales. Because it seems feasible to me that your average, non-blockbuster band might see hardly any of recording sales, but that the recordings are actually just promotional material for the
Re: (Score:2)
The bottom line is if a piece of music kicks ass enough it'll rise through all the shit and become a shining star, but unfortunately a lot of this awesome music never even
Re: (Score:2)
In a perfect world that ought to be how it works, but in reality the record companies seem to prefer creating artists rather than finding and nurturing them. In a perfect world, Britney Spears would be working in a women's clothing store, but in the world of the record company, someone whose vocal performances
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe sharing a prison cell with Paris Hilton.
Re: (Score:2)
You know, people keep saying this like ti was a given. I've been haunting the download sites looking for good music from unknowns for some time now, and I've not found any. I always start by looking for people of Satriani's genre - guitar pyrotechnics interest me, as do most music genres other than rap, country and bluegrass.
I have, however, found literally thousands of crappy to really crappy recordings. Very disappo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The same could be said about any other fledgling business. The steps to national or global success are gonna be the same. Start locally and deliver a good product. Get a loyal fan base going and then grow into a regional band. Keep making good music. When you've been making good music for a decade or three, then you will be able to stadiums the way the Rolling Stones or U2
Re: (Score:2)
Thats the thing, there needs to arise a true competitor to the labels. The labels themselves are basically functioning as a illegal cart
Re: (Score:2)
This is definitly not an exclusive or either...
see: Phish (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a fan of above, don't mind early Dead, but I'm just sayin
Th
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of teens now just surf around MySpace and the like for new music. I really don't see why the label is of a benefit, definitely not one where the label takes an 80% cut.
130 million is nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
If the music companies were feeling the pinch they wouldn't be making expensive music videos.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I would be overjoyed if they would (Score:1, Redundant)
Re: (Score:2)
Not that that is much better, but it does mean that artists are getting closer to the point where they can entirely dispense with record companies at all stages of their career
That's a 1bn GAIN to the country. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.
No, that's a £1bn loss to the music industry. If I download an album, and allowing for the sake of argument that I would otherwise have bought it rather than just doing without, I'm not going to put that money under the bed. I'll spend it on something else. The country loses no retail spend at all, it just shifts to a sector tha
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:That's a 1bn GAIN to the country. (Score:5, Interesting)
Please name a few.
I will counter that those "artists" are "out of business" because THEY SUCK.
At your job, do you work for free?
No one is saying the artists shouldn't be paid. We're talking about the middleman here. There is no more room for the middleman, he has been made obsolete. Nice switch of the argument. EMI is not an "artist" as far as I know.
Now how hard would it be for a band to set up their own "store" on the internet and sell their tracks directly? Not very. I think the technological advances of the past 10 years have gone right over your head. Wake up, the world has changed.
The old model had the record industry going out to "scout" new bands to find a sound that they thought hopefully would sell. Now the bands just have to make themselves available electronically, and the people will decide what sells.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I see an opportunity here. Set up a "label" that does nothing but contract for the label's music to be available over iTunes. Sign up such bands on the basis of taking a very small fee for the small amount of work done. The contracts with the bands could be non-exclusive. Now iTunes does n
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Apple Inc. now owns all the trademarks to the Apple name. Probably cost them a penny or two.
See http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/02/05apple.html [apple.com]
EMI gets it... (Score:3, Insightful)
At least in my opinion. I stopped buying iTunes songs that were protected after that EMI and Apple introduced the Plus songs. If it isn't plus, I won't buy it. That simple. I have a playlist called "To Buy" in iTunes. It contains links to songs I'd like to buy but that aren't Plus. I review them from time to time if anything has changed. Never happened, tough shit for them. If I find a Plus song that I like, I buy the whole album, just to support the idea.
All songs before I started boycotting non-Plus songs, have been cracked with Hymn.
I don't want to do illegal downloading, besides it's a pain in the neck. Give me an easy way to download and honest prices, and I'll be happy. I can't be alone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But it'll never happen, so hey, TPB will thrive in its place
Re: (Score:2)
I wrote this in December of 2003...it still rings (Score:2)
by Hangtime (19526) on Friday December 12, @01:21PM (#7702447)
(http://slashdot.org/)
(AP) Paris - 12/12/2003 10:53 AM
Vivendi Universal today was among the host of media companies with record company subsidiaries reporting record profits for the third quarter. Jean-Marie Messier, CEO of Vivendi, attributed the stellar quarter to the company's partnership with the Napster Inc. Napster, a software program used to share and download music, started out as a way to pira
Well, what did they expect? (Score:3, Insightful)
It took the recording industry an amazingly long time to figure this out.
On top of their distribution problem, the recording industry has other problems. The rock music part of the industry is endlessly recycling decades-old music. The hip-hop/rap/urban component has bands with a very short commercial lifespan. (Rap band members tend to get shot, too, but that's a separate problem.) Folk is dead. Classical is tiny. Country really isn't that big; the Dixie Chicks are more successful since they quit country.
The top two stories on Billboard this week are about litigation, not music.
Fundamental problem: the industry spends far more on promotion than on making the stuff. Any business in that position can be undercut on price.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
FINALLY! (Score:3, Funny)
If EMI does this well, i might buy a song from them.
Re: (Score:2)
Here's how they can survive. (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Tell the customer exactly where their money goes: "Out of every download, $.30 goes to the band, $.10 goes to the people who operated the recording equipment..." People will buy music from bands they like if they know they're actually supporting the band.
3. Save money by cutting marketing bullshit. Market music by selling *good* music, not by convincing 16-year-olds that they'll be cool if they listen to XYZ.
4. Diversify. Rather than trying to "produce" some canned pop "product" that they can sell to everyone, recognize that people's music tastes are often pretty eclectic, and their catalog needs to match that.
5. Stop trying to make obscene profits by underhanded dealings, and be happy with a sustainable business. Recognize that you're a middleman, and that you succeed by being as transparent as possible.
6. Cut the compression bullshit. If I want my music to sound louder I'll turn up my speakers, thanks.
7. Operate anonymous tip jars with a known cut (65% to the artist/35% to us, or whatever), and encourage people to download music via bittorrent or whatever and then donate to the artist. People will use them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Here's how they can survive. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
If any label does this, they will be sued by their shareholders for not generating profit.
The labels are caught in a bind as much as bands are, PROFIT.
The pathological pursuit of profit alone is a company's role.
If the label offers bittottent, and has cookie jars they become a not-for-profit trust like Salvation Army.
Shareholders will sue and make sure either the board is replaced or the board is behind bars.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's going to happen. Do you want to fight a battle you can't win, or realize that people are going to copy files over the internet no matter *what* you do?
Re: (Score:2)
4: EMI already *do* diversify. They release everything between and including Pink Floyd and Kylie Minogue.
Really [wikipedia.org]? When EMI regulary sells drone metal, shoegaze, dark ambient or simply bands that play in 700-1000 people venues, then yes, EMI will be diversified. Right now most of their acts are regurgitated pop crap or bands who no longer play or make albums. And no, Pink Floyd doesn't count. If Floyd were a new band today, there is no way in hell they'll be signed to EMI. Case in point: Agalloch. Floyd make complex music, music you have to think about, savour, something the targeted audience of EMI doesn't wa
Re: (Score:2)
I went into Best Buy to buy a printer cartridge and saw giant posters advertising some new rap CD. This is excessive. Telling people about your product is one thing; selling a product based solely on advertising is, in the long run, a recipe for failure. Ultimately there has to be something behind the marketing.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Loss in retail spending? (Score:2, Insightful)
Cant survive on CD sales alone? (Score:2)
Music is free now (Score:5, Interesting)
This means any commercial enterprise which revolves around selling music is doomed. People will redistribute it and remove any possible value from your product.
This means the end of recorded music as a commercial enterprise. Period. I don't see a choice. I understand this is now how it is in China today - they gave up against piracy. I is going to be that way elsewhere shortly.
Movies are probably next.
Re: (Score:2)
Spot on. And it's actually a good thing, because it means money will flow to more productive purposes.
On the other hand, the music store is not necessarily doomed. Music is free, and there'
Re: (Score:2)
The problem for the record industry is both finding that price, and recreating their image(should they choose to do so). Their profitability is dependent on finding a price point where people find that the product is convenient and valuable, and having something that people like. Their problem is that aside from general dislike of large corporations, they've proved themse
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the latter isn't the case, there are people who enjoy producing music. They would continue to do so regardless of financial reward.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
About the best product they sold was the LP. It felt good it looked good it was possible to instantly recognise an album you could grab a handful and flick through and find what you wanted in seconds they were easy to gather up..
CD's Improve only in the quality of the recording. The cases are terrible they break slide pop open and scratch the CD's they are fiddly to store. Even the Cabinets are ugly. An LP could be a beaut
Not true (Score:2)
This just simply is not true. Look at Magnatunes [magnatunes.com]: they let you choose how much you want to pay for an album, with a minimum of $5. If what you said was true one would expect almost everyone to pay $5. Instead, the average price people pay is $8! Apparently, people are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as they know (as is the case with
The LIE that few spot (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a person, I got an income of 1000 dollars which I spend completly every month, 600 of which goes to fixed expenses like housing, insurance, taxes and other mundane stuff that you have to pay. Two hundred I spent on essentials like food, clothing, phone, etc. That leaves 200 to spend on fun. Lets say that before filesharing I spend that 50 dolllars of that 200 on music, now with filesharing I don't.
How much money has been lost to the economy because of filesharing?
Not a single penny.
If you don't understand why, you are an idiot, stop reading, american idol is probably on, if it ain't watch the static.
To everyone else offcourse it is obvious, I spend ALL my money in the economy, it does not matter to the economy WHAT it is spend upon. If I don't spend it in shop A I spend it in shop B, shopowner A may not like it but the economy doesn't give a shit, as long as I spend.
Now if you were to present me with figures that show that people nowadays are saving more money then before, then you might have a point, if teenagers start putting their allowances into banks instead of CD's then the world might indeed come to an end (although I am sure an economists could explain how this too would just be another way of spending)
Simply put, although I haven't bought a CD or a DVD or even a game in ages, that doesn't mean I don't spend money, turbine has large faction of it with my lifelong LOTRO copy, Blizzard got maybe a half-dozen full games sales out of me with WoW. The record company doesn't sell me CD's but I pay several CD's worth each month to my ISP.
They talk about money flows sometimes and that is just what money does, it flows like a river and sometimes that river changes courses, leaving one area dry and flooding another. It is part of live. We spend less on coal and more on gas. Once we bought hay, today we buy petrol, tomorrow, who knows, but there always be a inn/service station beside the road selling fuel, not just for our mode of transport, but ourselves.
If you really want to talk about lost money to a countries economy, check where those CD's are made. I can bet you a lot of money it ain't the US of A or Great Britian or wherever. It is china. Now putting ALL that manufacturing in low wage countries, now THAT hurts the local economy, to the tune of far more then a handfull of billions. Why don't we hear the music industry about that eh?
Wanna see proof? Go into an archive and look at pictures of your local highstreet, see how one type of store just gets replaced with another over the years. I am willing to bet that your local music store is now housing a mobile phone store. That is what people spend money on nowadays.
Re: (Score:2)
Now if you were to present me with figures that show that people nowadays are saving more money then before, then you might have a point, if teenagers start putting their allowances into banks instead of CD's then the world might indeed c
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To everyone else offcourse it is obvious, I spend ALL my money in the economy, it does not matter to the economy WHAT it is spend upon. If I don't spend it in shop A I spend it in shop B, shopowner A may not like it but the economy doesn't give a shit, as long as I spend.
(Assuming for a moment that the economy doesn't mind us anthropomorphising it . . .) /in spite/ of you actually liking music (and obtaining it by other means), you are effectively feeding the economy erroneous information and this will, in principle, reduce the quality of t
The above isn't entirely correct. Capitalism builds on a premise that what people spend money on is a decent expression of what sort of things they want and what sort of things they think are "good". When you stop spending money on music
Re: (Score:2)
And why shouldn't it die? (Score:2)
So, the HUGE majority of musicians and bands never get on the air, never get any play, and never will and are far better than what you hear on the radio.
The internet removed the industry from the mix, you can make money without them. This should
Hands is not the Head (Score:2)
I'm sure as the owner of the owner of the company he holds a fair amount of sway, but he's not in charge of running the company. The directors of EMI Music Publishing UK can be found at the bottom of this page:
http://www.emimusicpub.com/worldwide/around_the_world/united-kingdom_home.html [emimusicpub.com]
Embrace Digital AND Die (Score:2)
Can't they do both? A decade ago, there were too few record labels. Now there are only four, and that's four too many,
If I were a professional musician, I'd be releasing my recordings under a license that permitted (at least) verbatim redistribution, including commercial redistribution. That way I'd still be making little or nothing off the sale of the recordings, but many more people would be able to access and afford a copy, and I'd be able to make the music I wanted when I wanted.
While it's good to se
Welcome to 1999 fellas (Score:3, Interesting)
If the record companies had changed their business model when the business actually changed, they might have survived. As it is, they spent years alienating their consumers, crushing innocent people in extremely vindictive lawsuits, and generally establishing themselves in the minds of young people as the worst thing since the Third Reich.
Changing direction might have worked before you all made yourselves into the embodiment of corporate greed, contempt for humanity and disregard for civil liberties.
Lame psychoanalysis (Score:2)
How about "1 billion lost due to a record industry that alienated itself to the public"?
He IS right (Score:2)
All are emi's.
I duly ripped them off to my hd, and im listening them wherever, however i want. No holds barred, no restrictions.
I bought all these just over the course of a year. goddamn easy. Up to that point, for over 10 years, i havent bought a single music cd. im serious. then, when i got into classical music a
Janis Ian Articles (Score:2)
http://www.janisian.com/articles-perfsong/internetdebacle.pdf [janisian.com]
http://www.janisian.com/articles-perfsong/Fallout%20-%20rev%2011-23-05.pdf [janisian.com]
CD's *ARE* DIGITAL (Score:2)
CD's continue to have several advantages, at least to the purchases, that have been fairly scarce with 'Internet downloadable' music:
1. Its a full 44 Khz non-compressed. (Granted, egotistcal audiophiles will still prefer their vinyl, but we're are talking the average consumer here)
2. No built-in "Digital Restrictions" - you can copy the au
Re: (Score:2)
Well someone (P. T. Barnum?) said there's a sucker born every minute. Presumably some of them buy that thing.
Anyway, if you do have a scratched-up CD, there's CDParanoia - http://xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [xiph.org]
And again, what the RIAA-members want is to eliminate the CD and replace it with a new proprietary format that can't be copied and requires one to buy additional copies for each device you might want to listen on. And they'd love to give extra points for a system that let them count and charge for every ti
Now I have to replace all my analog CDs! (Score:2)
CDs are dead (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Do you also have the same freak-on when people say "I need to dial the phone"?
Audiophiles are strange and genie is free anyway (Score:2)
every audiophile will tell you that any digitisation utterly ruins the quality.
Which may or may not be true, but I wouldn't take an audiophile's word for it. Half of those guys are pseudo-scientific obsessives who'll buy any piece of overpriced snake-oil technology and dubious marketing claims but would run a mile from anything remotely resembling a reliable double-blind test.
This recent thread [slashdot.org] is interesting, this comment [slashdot.org] references a particularly pseudo-scientific sounding piece of equipment.
Oh, and by the way, they can go back to vinyl if they like. Someone will digitise that
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
From what I hear vinyl sales ARE up.
Yes, but that's as a tiny niche market which only makes up a tiny fraction of total music sales- and it will only *ever*. The suggestion that by going back to vinyl the masses will start buying it again and the music industry will be saved is horrendously implausible.
It relies on the assumption that people will buy it for quality (no they won't; they'd already be doing that if it were the case- and I'm talking about a *significant* percentage of the market), and that digitisation is somehow a barrier or
Re: (Score:2)
For a long time you could buy LPs and CDs in the store. First the CD section was small - a specialty section, then it grew. For a while both media were occupying equal shares of the store, then LP became the specialty section, and finally the LPs disappeared. You can come up with all sorts of conspiracy scenarios, I'm sure - but this seems just like normal market behaviour to me. The size of the LP