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.
Good luck indeed (Score:3, Informative)
Not in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they're mostly talking about DRM for downloads. This is more of a problem. People expect their music to be portable, and don't want any complexity or compatibility problems transferring music to their mp3 players.
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This is just as bad, and in fact worse, because now DVDs DON'T play in every DVD player.
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Few people really care about DRM on DVDs. All DVD players will play the things. It's easily circumvented. It's more or less invisible to most people. DVD recorders are still quite rare amongst non-techies.
True.. although quite a few have heard about the extra helpings of DRM on HD disks. They haven't caught on yet, and I suspect that the DRM requirements and licensing deals have some bearing on the price.
I think they're mostly talking about DRM for downloads. This is more of a problem. People expect their music to be portable, and don't want any complexity or compatibility problems transferring music to their mp3 players.
Very true. Even the iTunes users seem to be coming to the realization that a light DRM is still DRM. EMI was the first one to blink, and now the others stand a good chance of looking for a face saving route to DRM free sales.
Surprisingly enough, its not just us techies that notice this and dislike it. Ordi
Re:Not in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've bought a few discs that I've had trouble playing. A couple of them I just took straight back to the shop for a refund, but the others I was able to get working after some irritating fiddling around. Playback from the discs either failed or had impossibly juddering sound. My copy program (K9copy) wouldn't rip either disc properly from one DVD drive but succeeded with my older drive so I was able to watch my DVD's directly from an iso file. All of the DVDs were from Optimum Releasing, so they lost out o
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Few people really care about DRM on DVDs.
It depends what you count under the "DRM" umbrella. Does unskippable content at the start of a DVD count? Because I know plenty of people who now outright avoid buying any DVDs from brands who have taken this too far. Seriously, why do I need to sit through 30 seconds of US-based copyright warning that doesn't even apply to me here, and a load of disclaimers about interview content when there are no interviews on the DVD?
I even know people who have taken DVDs back to the shop in extreme cases and demand
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The Sony root kit disaster, and the like are what I thought this was about and again it had to do with the ability to rip it to an MP3 player.
Re:Not in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd heartily support a ban on all Xmas activity until December, if it wasn't such a nanny state thing to do.
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We weren't going to tell you, but I feel I have to let you in on the secret. We allow you to thing that you're having a "Thanksgiving" early just so you don't see our true reasons.
You're actually just our food tasters checking for poison. Never can be too safe.
Re:Good luck indeed (Score:5, Funny)
The clue was in the repeated use of the letters "UK" in the summary.
Re:Good luck indeed (Score:5, Funny)
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What's July 4th?
Why should the UK have reason to give thanks because of it?
As a UKer, sounds like a good idea to me...
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Christmas is a neverending chore as soon as you're perceived to be have enough disposable income to buy presents.
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Which is why, as I get older, I feel more and more sorry for Scrooge at the beginning of A Christmas Carol. If everybody around me thought the entire month of December was a time where I should give them money and forgive their debts, despite the fact that they tease me both behind my back and to my face... I think I'd be a bit grumpy too.
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Even the title of the article refers to the UK - this story is about a UK industry body calling on the UK recording industry to drop DRM.
I think I can be forgiven for pointing out that the holiday season referred to in TFA is Christmas, as over here in the country the story is about that's the next holiday in the calendar.
OK? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OK? (Score:5, Funny)
Something like that is just crying out for an acronym.
FEABTDDA (pronounced FeabTaDa perhaps?)
Tim.
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I'm not laughing any more.
The time to prepare the next trap is ending. (Score:5, Insightful)
After a while everybody knows about your trap and starts crying foul.
That's the time you have to prepare your next unfair system.
I fear the time when record labels say "We hear our customers and are removing the DRM system." followed by "Piracy is rampant! The only solution is...".
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:Don't know about the UK... (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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. The music industry is alone in wanting to sell you a Trabant with the marketing budget of a BMW. This business model is based on the idea that the public is, in effect, too stupid to tell a Trabant from a BMW. It can't be guaranteed that this will remain the case.
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Gresham's law: "Bad money drives out good" (colloquial version)
(And the "Given enough time, someone inappropriately shouts Nazi" rule is Godwin's, not Goodwin's.)
Re:Don't know about the UK... (Score:5, Insightful)
But $1 / song is simply too expensive for most people that I know. When a CD collection was *the* collection that someone chose to have then sure. But those were simpler times. We didn't have mass storage devices and DVDs (some people collected VHS tapes but most people chose to have a large CD collection or a large VHS collection
* I'm not sure what that would be, heck it could be as simple as an instruction leaflet inside the jewel case, which wouldn't be useful for most people who already know what they're doing but it would be kind of like a stamp of approval from the record companies saying "We're with the times. We know you want this on your digital players so we're trying to help you with that". It could also maybe be in the form of a separate Joliet disk that has all the songs pre-ripped to mp3 with complete ID3 tags etc.
exactly-it is price gouging (Score:2, Interesting)
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As the number of sales increase, the probability of buying a Nazi or Hitler influenced track approaches one?
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Isn't it more reasonable to suppose all those music stores are closing because they can't compete with the kind of pricing practices implemented by places like Walmart ? (Do they sell CD/DVDs ?)
I mean, if you can enter a store that has all the music you want (for most people that is the 20 newest releases), for a small price, why would you go to mom-and-pop store ?
Don't we see that happening is almost all other kinds of business ? At least were I live, all mom-and-p
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For the benefit of readers who are not old enough to remember the Cold War the Trabant [wikipedia.org] aka "die Traubi" was a low quality automobile with a fiber glass body and a two cylinder two stroke engine produced by the former East Germany (GDR) [wikipedia.org] before the Berlin Wall [wikipedia.org] came down. It had a reputation for being noisy, dirty, and low performance, the car took 21 seconds from 0 to 100 km/h (62.5 mph) and the top speed was 1
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They're remarkably reliable if you service them correctly, and incredibly easy to fix if they do break.
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The CD may be superior quality (same argument was made for the vinyl record before 8-tracks/tapes/CDs surpassed it) but the goal and how it is provided (entertainment, music, whatever) is
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Radiohead have shown everybody the way with In Rainbows.
Die, Die, Die My Darling ....... Death to the record industry, Long live the music industry.
Re:Don't know about the UK... (Score:5, Insightful)
and they'll say "WHAT? SPEAK UP, WHIPPERSNAPPER. DOWN-LORDIE EMM PEE WHAT? Y'ALL FROM THE FUTURE?"
Buying hard copies at retail is a geezer's activity. Once you can store your entire collection on a fingernail-sized iPod clone, and get new tracks within seconds using weekend-daddy's credit card, why on earth would you want to go out and buy a huge bit of plastic to store a copy of the two tracks you want plus eight that you don't in a medium that you'll never listen to?
Physical distribution of CDs is dead in the water. It's an inefficient, unnecessary and expensive holdover from the ancient past. You might as well give away a free buggy whip with each 'album' (another dying concept) to try and boost sales.
Lest you retort with the stale old "There will always be a market for uncompressed music", fie on that. CDs are effectively compressed [georgegraham.com]. Audiophiles already need to get their fix elsewhere, and their sad devotion to their ancient religion demonstrably isn't enough to keep disks-and-mortar stores open.
CDs are dead as a retail proposition. It's time to put down the buggy whip, and move on.
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And in what way is never using 3 bits out of 16 not "effectively" compressing? If you can find a CD made in the last six months (you know, one that might actually be on sale in a disks-and-mortar shop) that uses the full dynamic range, then we can talk. Until then, it'll just be you and your gold plated unidirectional cables arguing over theory.
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Uhhh I could kind of agree with the statement that CDs are dead but the concept of "Album" meaning a couple of songs all centered around a specific theme is quite fine(some of them even following a story, see for example Legendary Tales or Symphony of Enchanted Lands fr
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Are you Amish allowed to listen to music now? I guess maybe a free buggy whip with every album might actually be an incentive.
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Branson sold off his UK stores [bbc.co.uk] a couple of months back. I guess he's getting out of the business globally.
Finally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because (Score:4, Funny)
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No, silly. It's the government who listen in to everyone using the surveillance kit, not the megacorps! However, thanks to the latest communications channels, the government can now quickly provide data on up to 25 million people at once to those megacorps with very low overheads...
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To be honest... (Score:2)
Still, it's nice to see the music industries oversimplified logic and ignorance of reality working against it for once of course so I'll keep my mouth shut and pretend they're right and it's all DRMs fault because in a strange twist of fate it can only be a good thing having the distributors a
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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 so
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Most people I know buy CDs to play in their car if anywhere and not their PC so it's simply not an issue if it has computer based DRM - the amount of CDs that have DRM that effects playing in a standard car based CD player still seems to b
Nothing to see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing to see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing to see here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Last month I authorized my 5th computer to work with iTunes, so me and mine can keep playing music I've bought. Now I can't listen to it at the office. That doesn't really make any sense to me, because I could if I'd bought a CD instead, I'd just have to carry around a binder of music the size of a desk.
The convenience of digital music is that it can be moved around and taken with you easily. DRM stops that and we'll just keep running into it.
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(eg, Sony's Casino Royal not working on Sony's own current off the shelf players)
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For example:
"Remember how you could copy tapes/CDs without restriction? Wouldn't it be nice to copy your downloaded music the same way? Well, you can, except for the fact that the record companies are using DRM to stop you, and are still charging as if you
Starting to change (Score:2)
She likes shiny things and the other day she asked me to put her "Shakira" CD on to her MP3 player.
The DRM on it prevented me from doing so, not by any program (I know to hold down shift!) but by the method of the tracks being dodgy and extra data in place to throw off CDROM drives. Well anyway, long story short CDEX wasn't having it and I had to go and say to her that it couldn't be done because the record company have put some protection on there th
In Singapore (Score:2)
Also, I'd rather she be the one to decide to make the leap to the dark side, or be pissed off with the record companies. I don't want to be a dodgy abstraction layer!
national holiday required (Score:2)
I think a small holiday would be in order no matter how long it takes to defeat DRM.
What they're really saying is... (Score:2)
Just now started buying music again (Score:2)
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...)
There's no DRM on CD's... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know about you guys but when I go to a record store, be it a small independent store or a chain like HMV, Virgin, Sanity etc, and buy an album I can do whatever I want with it. I can copy it, I can rip it into .mp3, FLAC, .aac etc etc for any music player I might have. I buy quite alot of music varied from old school jazz to new rock, indie, hip-hop, metal and I'm yet to encounter any forms of Digital Rights Management ie. I've never been restricted from doing what I like to music on a legitimately
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Re:There's no DRM on CD's... (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD#Copy_protection [wikipedia.org]
Parent article (Score:3, Informative)
here's a working link to the actual article (not blog) from the nominally subscription-only financial times:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6ed6dd08-970a-11dc-b2da-0000779fd2ac.html
- js.
The year 324 AD called (Score:2)
The press misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
"believing instead that the near-ubiquitous practice of file-sharing can be abolished with more draconian copy protection mechanisms"
No no no. The people running record companies are not stupid. They're smarter than most people. They know they can't stop file sharing; it's impossible. But like all businesses, they invest money to protect revenue. DRM is not an attempt to stop copying, it's an attempt to shore up revenue.
To put it more simply, the record companies must believe they are better off revenue-wise putting on copy protection. If they spend $Z to get DRM on every CD, they'll stop X% piracy leading to $Y more revenue. If Y is greater than Z, then it makes sense to put on DRM. If Y is less than Z, then the DRM won't be put on.
It's really that simple.
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I'm sure they believe this. This doesn't mean that they've actually given the evidence an honest look. All too often, the people who make the decisions see what they want to see and ignore everything else.
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Your calculation ignores 3 important factors:
1. You ignore the number of sales that will be lost _because_ of the fact you're using DRM.
2. Much of the "piracy" (actually, copyright infringement
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It's really that simple.
"For every complex problem, there is an answer which is clear, simple, and wrong."
For one thing, you missed the fact that DRM will also stop V% of legitimate sales leading to $W less revenue, because people don't want to buy crippled products. Whether it's unskippable commercials and n
Puritanism? (Score:2)
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
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It's too late. (Score:2)
Once there is a way to buy all music without DRM, I'll use it because I want the artists to get paid for their work.
Unfortunately though, through their insistence on using DRM, particularly for inline sales, the industry has so far forced the customer to go elsewhere for DRM free music. Over time this has led to the esta
Vote with your wallet... (Score:2)
Buy the music without DRM that you can buy. If the options are DRM or nothing (or unauthorised copies) then you can always go with "nothing".
You can get legal DRM-free music from iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon.
!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.
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What is wrong with calling it Digital Restrictions Management??
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For me I have to side with the parent poster, playback prevention communicates the message so quickly and easily that when inevitably members of our family ask us why their music won't play we can just say "ah, you bought the stuff with playback prevention...". It's a little political but thats just the way these things go...
OK, put your DRM on the disk (Score:2, Informative)
Also, see http://www.riaaradar.com/ [riaaradar.com]
Carey
Pick one: DRM or lawsuits (Score:2)
TFA doesn't state... (Score:2)
I live in the UK, get through a fair amount of music and gave up on brick'n'mortars years ago - buying online is more conveneient in every conceivable way for me (no crowds, no cramped and sweaty ride on the tube, no having to hunt down a member of staff to find out where they keep their Classical Nu-Bhangra Trance, no queues to pay, no queues to listen to a possible impulse buy, reviews a few clicks away, no bein gharassed by
Music without the work (Score:2)
Long ago, people used to play their own music on musical instruments or just sing to entertain themselves at home (the rich could attend a concert). Then along came the record player and people could sit back and rest a few minutes before having to get up and change the record. Then along came the automatic changer that would lift the needle arm and move it aside so the next record could drop and be played automatically. When the CD came along, people had to change CDs manually, but very soon there were
MP3 Compatible??? (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
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.
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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.
I doubt that. If the ISP industry moves to general bandwidth throttling and not allowing their customers to use what they're paying for, they will keep profits up for a little while, and then ultimately lose for exactly the same reasons Big Media's DRM-based strategy is doomed.
There are trivial technical ways to circumvent bandwidth shaping, just as there are trivial ways to circumvent DRM. If most ISPs impose restrictions then those who continue to provide what customers actually want at a realistic pr
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Except we have other options for getting music. How many options do you really have for getting connected to the Internet?
At the current rate of consolidation, we're soon going to have maybe 2 or 3 choices of ISP. Then, it's just a matter of us
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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!
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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 muc
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> 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.
I heartily agree with this statement. I recently downloaded an album (a decent -preset fast standard VBR MP3 rip, located with mininova) and I like it a lot. I woul
Re:As a record store owner... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason for anyone under 40 to buy a CD now is so they can rip it and put it onto their portable music device... Since record companies are trying hard to stop this, it means that less people will buy CDs. Anyone who does rip a CD is made to feel like a music pirate anyway - so they may as well go the whole hog and download it off the Internet - if you're a pirate for buying a CD and ripping it, why not be a pirate by downloading it, and save yourself a fortune at the same time.
Most people do NOT want to pirate music, but if that's the easiest way to get hold of the music to use as they want, that's what they'll use. If it cost £0.50 to buy a music track and was easy to do, and they could use it as they wanted (eg on all their music players) that's what most people would do - especially if they knew that £0.40 went to the artist/composer, rather than £0.01 to them, and the rest to the record label.
The problem with any 'how much piracy is around' surveys today is that they are looking at the situation today, when it's really hard to get a useful downloaded music track legitimately, and it's even harder to find a decent CD. So, people almost HAVE to pirate music to get what they want. Fix that, and there'd be less piracy.
Re:As a record store owner... (Score:5, Insightful)
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And us old fogies are into vinyl, so CDs are really in trouble. My Grado Reference cartridge blows away any of your digital to analog con verters, sonny. Now get off my lawn so I can get back to listening to Zeppelin the way it was meant to be heard.
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