7 ms·

The "music industry" got screwed on like 4 fronts at once. Actual piracy hurt, but the move from $20 CDs to $1 singles killed the "2-4 singles and 6-10 fillers

The "music industry" got screwed on like 4 fronts at once. Actual piracy hurt, but the move from $20 CDs to $1 singles killed the "2-4 singles and 6-10 fillers" album model (now you're getting $2 for something you could have gotten $20 for, and sales didn't quintuple), falling production costs made Label Loan Sharking less attractive, and a rise of new distribution venues (MySpace and YouTube, where recorded music is a loss-leader for merch and concert sales) weakened their distribution monopoly. They could probably survive or solve any one of those problems, but there's no way to survive all four. The film industry has to wrangle with piracy, but there's still a large entry barrier to make something that looks like it has high production values. Similarly, there are fewer new distribution options, because there's no real "films as a loss leader" business model. They are picking up the pace of innovation with stuff like HD and 3D and 2K/4K precisely so that they can move the goal-posts on production/distribution upstarts. You can throw together a simple romantic comedy with few locations and no special effects for a few hundred thousand, but a HighDef 3-D adventure with city-bending CGI and special effects is gonna set you back piles of money.

Be_Silly 16y ago
Question is whether 2K/4K digital cinema will prove critical quality markers or barriers. Avatar was shot in 1080p and cropped from that to 2.35:1 letterbox for release. Now Avatar doesn't look exactly bad does it? Now there's inexpensive cloud re-encoding, first i've noticed is http://zencoder.com/ http://zencoder.com/ apart from upload speeds, resampling even ridiculously high bitrate video will not be something you need a local cluster or multi socket multi core even to accomplish. I'm not convinced that the industry buying Napster would have done much but incentivised someone to start over with another illegal sharer. But, to a certain extent, if i was dealing with a naturall declining business, i'd prefer whack-a-mole to decade long lawsuits which (exp post show) so poor effect for the music biz execs. This isn't so far distant from what pharmas do when a big product runs to off - patent. Lots of R&D in reformulations, lots of trying to stem the generics tide, but it's a fading game, you're just being rational about extending revenues as long as possible. I think your point about the move to "all singles" is maybe the most powerful. That's the one musicians i know get confused about the most, including one who had a proper "one hit wonder" in the eealy MTV years. I see concern about this as far as the question of audience and composition, i.e. what are you writing and for whom. Though my sample is statistically useless of course. We're only just one generation past the concept album, depnding how you count. Meanwhile the long established artists are simply charging was way way too much for live tickets, so you have a problem as to the context in which your music is presented which i think is more confidence destroying for some than revenue declines. (my artist sample are already comfortable financially) I'm unconvinced wholly as to the value of 2K and above home distribution. I suppose that living in a expensive crowded city, i simply don't have the room size to view any benefits. Oft cited is the 8 line pair per mm limit of human visual acuity, which - i ought to check - may be optimum, or a kind of 20:20 average. (i'd sure buy well above 2K projectors of control room use though, if i could afford, but you can always just get more of what's affordable in that scenario) As or surviving, as far as i recall, in total volume terms, i though that CDs and DVDs were actually growing a some 10% a year. This was a article in the FT a couple years back. Anyone got recent figures? There was also the leaked MPAA slide deck of the amazing margin improvement DVDs provided which accreted steadily after the VHS phase-out. Those recalled bits of info (recollection to vague to asert them as data) ought to be very attractive aspects. If you want to see a group of musicians dying financially, try UK based classical performers / composers. The collection agency in the UK decreed that they'd not bother any more with <500 seat venues, meaning no collections from the vast majority of such performances. That was same time they stopped a tiny percentage riser that used to be a subsidy to their arena of music to protect it, or at leass cushion it. Think it was a 3% bonus of collected receipts, so in actual bare numbers a small amount. But that was certainly a double-whammy for a complete group of artists, decided upon by a SONY et.al. board of the PRS, and in my mind wholly gratuitous. The big industry arguments were they were loosing so much to piracy and to inefficiencies in collection they had to do this to save themselves, and why should they subsidise folk and classical performers anyhow? This, from an agency with legal monopoly, where the only usual alternative musical broadcaster is the BBC who are legally permitted to broadcast works and negotiate after, and which agency are not only amazingly slow to collect but i think disinclined to collect for small guys. I think had a similar stunt been pulled in the US, you'd have had a lot of prominent artists campaigning very loudly. I don't recally any such protest or even argument about the events i just noted. I also found the article title misleading. They didn't "partner" with pirates, they changed their software features. If you could really partner, then agree such a distribution network wouldn't just be good, but it's be freaking awesome, you'd have all the inbound tracking, revenue splits from off - game landing pages, a lot of insight into cultural regional forms of discovery of your product. But they don't say they did that. Such a partnering network would be very valuable indeed.
fragmede 16y ago
The film industry's high entry barrier is getting much, much lower. An Avid editing workstation now costs < $10k, they used to be more like $50k. At this years NAB, DaVinci (high-end color correcting software), went from being a $200k Linux system, to a $1k software package to be run on a Mac Pro you already own. 2K DPX is now doable on a (high end) NAS system where previously you needed a high end SAN with Fibre Channel, and Nvidia's Cuda makes a system that can do do "city-bending CGI and special effects" positively affordable.

Be_Silly 16y ago

Question is whether 2K/4K digital cinema will prove critical quality markers or barriers. Avatar was shot in 1080p and cropped from that to 2.35:1 letterbox for release. Now Avatar doesn't look exactly bad does it? Now there's inexpensive cloud re-encoding, first i've noticed is http://zencoder.com/ http://zencoder.com/ apart from upload speeds, resampling even ridiculously high bitrate video will not be something you need a local cluster or multi socket multi core even to accomplish. I'm not convinced that the industry buying Napster would have done much but incentivised someone to start over with another illegal sharer. But, to a certain extent, if i was dealing with a naturall declining business, i'd prefer whack-a-mole to decade long lawsuits which (exp post show) so poor effect for the music biz execs. This isn't so far distant from what pharmas do when a big product runs to off - patent. Lots of R&D in reformulations, lots of trying to stem the generics tide, but it's a fading game, you're just being rational about extending revenues as long as possible. I think your point about the move to "all singles" is maybe the most powerful. That's the one musicians i know get confused about the most, including one who had a proper "one hit wonder" in the eealy MTV years. I see concern about this as far as the question of audience and composition, i.e. what are you writing and for whom. Though my sample is statistically useless of course. We're only just one generation past the concept album, depnding how you count. Meanwhile the long established artists are simply charging was way way too much for live tickets, so you have a problem as to the context in which your music is presented which i think is more confidence destroying for some than revenue declines. (my artist sample are already comfortable financially) I'm unconvinced wholly as to the value of 2K and above home distribution. I suppose that living in a expensive crowded city, i simply don't have the room size to view any benefits. Oft cited is the 8 line pair per mm limit of human visual acuity, which - i ought to check - may be optimum, or a kind of 20:20 average. (i'd sure buy well above 2K projectors of control room use though, if i could afford, but you can always just get more of what's affordable in that scenario) As or surviving, as far as i recall, in total volume terms, i though that CDs and DVDs were actually growing a some 10% a year. This was a article in the FT a couple years back. Anyone got recent figures? There was also the leaked MPAA slide deck of the amazing margin improvement DVDs provided which accreted steadily after the VHS phase-out. Those recalled bits of info (recollection to vague to asert them as data) ought to be very attractive aspects. If you want to see a group of musicians dying financially, try UK based classical performers / composers. The collection agency in the UK decreed that they'd not bother any more with <500 seat venues, meaning no collections from the vast majority of such performances. That was same time they stopped a tiny percentage riser that used to be a subsidy to their arena of music to protect it, or at leass cushion it. Think it was a 3% bonus of collected receipts, so in actual bare numbers a small amount. But that was certainly a double-whammy for a complete group of artists, decided upon by a SONY et.al. board of the PRS, and in my mind wholly gratuitous. The big industry arguments were they were loosing so much to piracy and to inefficiencies in collection they had to do this to save themselves, and why should they subsidise folk and classical performers anyhow? This, from an agency with legal monopoly, where the only usual alternative musical broadcaster is the BBC who are legally permitted to broadcast works and negotiate after, and which agency are not only amazingly slow to collect but i think disinclined to collect for small guys. I think had a similar stunt been pulled in the US, you'd have had a lot of prominent artists campaigning very loudly. I don't recally any such protest or even argument about the events i just noted. I also found the article title misleading. They didn't "partner" with pirates, they changed their software features. If you could really partner, then agree such a distribution network wouldn't just be good, but it's be freaking awesome, you'd have all the inbound tracking, revenue splits from off - game landing pages, a lot of insight into cultural regional forms of discovery of your product. But they don't say they did that. Such a partnering network would be very valuable indeed.

fragmede 16y ago

The film industry's high entry barrier is getting much, much lower. An Avid editing workstation now costs < $10k, they used to be more like $50k. At this years NAB, DaVinci (high-end color correcting software), went from being a $200k Linux system, to a $1k software package to be run on a Mac Pro you already own. 2K DPX is now doable on a (high end) NAS system where previously you needed a high end SAN with Fibre Channel, and Nvidia's Cuda makes a system that can do do "city-bending CGI and special effects" positively affordable.